• Meta has set goals for some employees on how much they should use AI.
• They include targets for using AI code assistants, agents, and other tools.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants the company to be "AI-native."

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be "AI-native." An internal document shows one way the company's CEO plans to get there.

The company has set goals for how much some employees should use AI tools for tasks such as coding.

Meta employees created a document to collect information about these goals from across different organizations, according to a copy seen by Business Insider. It includes goals set late last year and for 2026.

Tech companies are using various methods to motivate staff to use AI, such as tying AI use to performance reviews and gamifying AI use with competitive leaderboards.

The document states that Meta's creation org, which is responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences, set a goal for the first half of 2026 that 65% of engineers are expected to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI. Committed code is code that has been saved and tracked in a project.

Meta's Scalable Machine Learning org, which focuses on AI models and infrastructure, had a goal for February 2026 to achieve 50% to 80% AI-assisted code, the document said. It cited a comment alongside this goal from a senior engineering manager that said: "We are not tracking this via metrics."

The document also listed several companywide goals for Q4 2025 for central products — a horizontal org spanning Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other major products. One target is for 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools such as DevMate, Metamate, and Google's Gemini, with a note that the focus is on "tool adoption" rather than the percentage of code written by AI.

It said that 55% of code changes from software engineers across the central product orgs should be "Agent-Assisted."

It is not clear whether the goals listed in the document are tied to performance reviews.

"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. They said that Meta's performance program is focused on rewarding impact from AI tools, not just usage.

Here's a breakdown of Meta's goals in the memo:

• Companywide Q4 2025 Goals (Central Products)

  • 55% of software engineers' code changes should be agent-assisted.
  • 80% of mid to senior-level engineers should adopt general AI tools.

• Scalable ML Team Goal (Feb 2026)

  • Target: 50% to 80% AI-assisted code.

• Creation Org H1 2026

  • 65% of engineers should write more than 75% of their committed code using AI.

(Note: Some technical terms have been rephrased for clarity)

Mark Zuckerberg's AI odyssey

Zuckerberg is aggressively trying to make Meta what he has called an "AI-native" company. Meta has started tying employee performance to their AI usage, Business Insider reported last year, and staff are using Meta's internal AI bot to write reviews for their peers.

More recently, the company rebranded some employees within a division of Reality Labs with one of three titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."

The change comes as Meta is adopting smaller teams and moving toward a flatter organizational structure.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," read a memo about the changes, which was reviewed by Business Insider. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told staff on Tuesday that he would take charge of Meta's "AI for Work" initiative, which is designed to boost the company's internal adoption of AI tools, according to a memo reviewed by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs and other orgs this week.

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• JPMorgan software developers say the bank is raising its expectations for AI use.
• Internal company communications reveal the bank's new AI targets.
• The updated objectives affect members of its global developer workforce.

JPMorgan Chase's message to its global armada of software developers is clear: embrace AI or risk falling behind.

Internal company documents seen by Business Insider and posted to JPMorgan's intranet for employees lay out a series of new expectations for the bank's software engineering workforce, who comprise the majority of its 65,000-person-strong Global Technology division. The newly listed objectives, published on the intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to "drive excellence" by adopting AI and "contributing to initiatives that improve productivity, speed, scalability, and impact."

One document authored by the bank's human resources leaders laid out two core objectives for software engineers: step up their coding game, and start harnessing AI to save time and get more done. The new language about objectives "will be added automatically and will appear by the end of March," an image of the document on the intranet showed — a reference to upcoming changes to employees' goals expected to take effect at the end of this month. The firm also instructed workers to develop clear goals with their managers that align with the bank's new objectives.

"Demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools, contributing to the team's overall efficiency targets," read one goal written by HR. "Engage in identifying, implementing and optimizing AI-driven automation opportunities within technology lifecycle management (TLM) processes to drive efficiency and support capacity unlock initiatives, ensuring all enhancements leverage current technology assets before considering new solutions."

A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment.

JPMorgan is among Wall Street's biggest spenders on technology and artificial intelligence, with projected tech investments reaching roughly $20 billion in 2026 — far exceeding peers like Goldman Sachs. Across corporate America, companies including Meta and Google have begun pushing employees to adopt AI tools and, in some cases, evaluating their use.

Business Insider spoke to five engineers across the bank who said the push to adopt AI has been felt far and wide — in managerial conversations, in intranet posts, and through dashboards that display who's using certain AI tools, and who's not. They added that discussions about productivity and AI adoption have become more frequent in recent weeks. It all comes as developers get ready for a pilot of Anthropic's Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, said a longtime IT developer in the Global Technology group. Claude Code would be made available alongside the four other large language models coders are already using: two from OpenAI's ChatGPT, and two from Anthropic's Claude.

'Anxiety' among developers

The developers Business Insider spoke to said they've been encouraged to use AI tools for a wide range of tasks, from writing code to preparing presentations. One dashboard that tracked adoption and usage of the bank's GitHub Copilot appeared to show details as granular as which employees had installed it and identified individuals as "light," "heavy," or "non" users.

For some, the message has added pressure inside a firm that has drawn scrutiny in recent years for its use of internal monitoring tools and performance tracking. Business Insider published a series of reports on the firm's Workforce Activity Data Utility in 2022, a program that collected data points about how employees were spending their day — from the length of video calls to how long they spent drafting emails to where they were sitting in the office.

"There's a lot of anxiety in the environment right now," the longtime IT developer said. Those who don't use AI risk being seen as underperforming, the developer said. Another developer said their manager said in a recent meeting that availability of the new AI tools comes with an "expectation" that velocity and output should show "a noticeable increase" quarter over quarter.

Three of the five developers Business Insider spoke to said the tools are helpful, despite discomfort over the tracking.

New performance dimensions

The updated guidance on AI use comes as the bank implements other adjustments to how it ranks workers' success on the job. Going forward, the bank said on the intranet portal, it's streamlining some of the primary "dimensions" it uses to grade employees, pivoting to using two categories: "what you achieve" — business outcomes — and "how you achieve it," including adherence to the firm's behavioral principles.

According to screenshots from the bank's intranet, JPMorgan will segment workers into three buckets: "stand out" for those who exceed job standards, "achiever" for the majority of employees, and "needs improvement" for those who require "additional support" and have struggled to perform consistently.

Another page Business Insider reviewed listed skills non-managers working in software engineering were expected to display across "all performance dimensions." One is "Data Fluency," noting that the skill is applied by those who develop and drive "adoption of new tools or methodologies to leverage data in the flow of work." "Rate of adoption" is cited as one measurement of the employee's impact toward exhibiting the skill in practice.

The documents from the JPMorgan intranet echo the firm's long-standing culture of internal monitoring and data collection, making clear that continuous performance tracking is vital for keeping workers on target throughout the year.

"You and your manager will use your objectives to track your progress during the year, recognize impact, and streamline your annual review," the firm wrote on an internal page tied to goals.

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• On Tuesday, Meta advised some employees to work from home. The next day, the company began layoffs.
• Getting laid off remotely offers privacy, but can feel isolating — for affected employees and survivors alike.
• Would you rather find out about layoffs in an office or while working remotely? Take our survey.

Getting laid off sucks, yet how it happens matters, too.

On Tuesday, Meta told some employees to work from home the next day, ahead of the company's latest round of layoffs. The move touches on an anxiety familiar to many: not only whether you'll get cut, but how — and where — you'll find out.

Six years on from the start of the pandemic, many desk workers remain in hybrid roles. That's shifted the mechanics of layoffs. What was once typically handled in a conference room or the boss's office might now unfold on a screen or by email.

As more companies trim their workforces, the question is carrying greater weight. It may not have an easy answer.

"You can have poor execution in person. You can have poor execution remotely," said Sarah Rodehorst, cofounder and CEO of Onwards HR, which helps companies manage severance and offboarding.

At home vs. IRL

Being at home can allow people to process the news on their own terms — without the risk of crying in front of colleagues. It can also pose fewer security concerns for companies worried about employees lashing out on their way out the actual door.

Making cuts from afar can also make it easier on managers, who don't have to directly face the person they're letting go, said Ben Hardy, a clinical professor of organizational behavior at London Business School.

"It's a bit like divorcing someone through text message," he said of cutting jobs where one person delivers bad news to many others. It's too impersonal, Hardy told Business Insider, for an intimate topic. One-on-one communication is better, he said.

Getting laid off in-person might mean trying to hold it together in front of colleagues, yet it can also give people a chance to say goodbye to coworkers and make plans to keep in touch — or gather afterward to commiserate.

Ultimately, what matters most is handling layoffs with empathy and preserving the human element, said Rodehorst.

Calling someone into an office only to lay them off might not always be the best decision, she told Business Insider.

"Remote can actually preserve some privacy," Rodehorst said.

Of course, layoffs generally feel awful in any case. Some workers have pushed back at cuts via video, saying that it feels impersonal.

What do you think?

How do you feel about where layoffs should take place? Take our poll.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urged all workers, from farmers to electricians, to embrace AI.
• He told podcaster Lex Fridman that the technology could elevate blue-collar jobs, such as carpentry.
• Blue-collar has generally been viewed as less likely to be affected by AI disruption than white-collar jobs.

Artificial intelligence isn't only coming for office jobs — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says blue-collar workers should be paying attention, too.

Huang leads one of the biggest chipmakers fueling the AI revolution. He joined Lex Fridman's podcast in an episode published Monday to discuss everything from AI in space to work.

While blue-collar jobs have been considered relatively safe from AI disruption compared to tech roles like engineering, Huang said workers in every profession, including farming and electrical work, should use artificial intelligence to help future-proof their jobs.

"If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI. If I were a pharmacist, I would use AI," Huang said. "I want to see what it could do to elevate my job so that I could be the innovator to revolutionize this industry myself."

For example, he said coding represents a big opportunity for carpenters, and he would go "completely berserk" using AI if he were in that line of work.

"A carpenter with AI is also an architect," he said. "They've just increased the value that they could deliver to the customer. Their artistry just elevated tremendously."

Huang has said before that he is "certain 100% of everybody's jobs will be changed" by artificial intelligence, and that while he expects some jobs to be lost, many will also be created.

Many tasks, for example, will be automated, and those jobs will be highly disrupted, he said on Fridman's podcast.

But, he said, "If your job's purpose includes you … then it's vital that you go learn how to use AI to automate those tasks."

Anxiety grows alongside AI

As AI advances, so has anxiety around job security. The fears aren't unfounded. Companies have slashed thousands of jobs in the name of prioritizing new technology and automation.

Huang's solution: Become an expert in AI, no matter what your job function is.

It could be the difference between landing a job and ending up unemployed. In almost every case, Huang said he'd rather hire the candidate who's an AI expert over one who isn't.

"Every college student should graduate and be an expert in AI," Huang said.

It could help them stay ahead of the curve as AI quickly advances.

The next phase of AI is already here

Artificial general intelligence is a form of AI that elicits anxiety or excitement among the field's most advanced minds. It's the idea that AI will one day meet or surpass human intelligence. Huang said that the age of AGI is already here.

Fridman asked if AI could do Huang's job of starting, growing, and running a successful tech company worth more than $1 billion.

It's possible, Huang said.

He also said, "It's not out of the question" that chatbots like Anthropic's Claude could design an app that billions of people would use for $0.50 apiece, and then go out of business shortly after, similar to websites that went bust in the dot-com era.

Even his job running one of the most successful tech companies today isn't immune to the effects of AI, he said, encouraging everyone to jump on the technology before they're left behind.

"Go see what it can do to transform your current job, elevate yourself," Huang said.

• Epic Games announced it would cut over 1,000 employees, or about 20% of its workforce.
• CEO Tim Sweeney says the layoffs aren't AI-driven and that the company still needs software developers.
• He cited a 'downturn in Fortnite engagement' and said rising costs forced cuts.

Epic Games announced that it was laying off more than 1,000 employees, but the "Fortnite" maker's CEO says it's not because of AI.

Tim Sweeney said in a memo to employees shared online Tuesday that the cuts, affecting about 20% of its workforce, reflect industry-wide challenges, including slower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost dynamics.

"Since it's a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren't related to AI," he wrote. "To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can."

A growing number of employers have recently cited AI as a reason for making deep cuts to their head counts. Recent examples include Block and Atlassian.

Tuesday's cuts, which come two years after Epic struck a $1.5 billion licensing deal with Disney, are significant, said Joost van Dreunen, CEO of the game-analytics firm Aldora Intelligence and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.

"It's an acknowledgement of the change in the industry that's taking place, particularly among American publishers, when one of the most popular game makers is finding itself having to let go of 1,000 people," he said. "It suggests that we're witnessing the decline of American cultural dominance in the video games industry."

Though the global games industry grew revenue — roughly 4.5% last year, according to Aldora — most of that growth came from outside the US, said Van Dreunen. "The consumer gravity point is moving eastward," he said.

The game industry's workforce has been contracting in recent years following a pandemic-era boom. An estimated 5,300 jobs were cut last year, and 14,600 were axed in 2024, according to an online tally of termination announcements and news reports by Farhan Noor, a technical artist in California.

Epic last had layoffs in 2023, affecting 16% of its workforce. Those layoffs were a first for the company, which was founded in the 1990s. In his memo, Sweeney indicated that the latest cuts are a painful necessity.

"The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he wrote. "This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place."

• BNY's CEO, Robin Vince, is all in on AI's role in steering the bank's future.
• Now, some managers oversee the bank's 140 digital employees, a form of agentic AI.
• We spoke to Vince and a BNY managing director about the program.

Despite its 240-year pedigree, BNY isn't showing its age.

Under CEO Robin Vince, who took the reins in 2022, the firm — founded by Alexander Hamilton — is aggressively embracing AI. Recently, it has begun entrusting some managers with oversight of a contingent of new workers who don't even require a chair: the digital employee.

"All digital employees report to a human manager," Vince said in an interview with Business Insider this month in Palm Beach.

These digital employees create a layered effect with the company's agentic products, in which a single entity coordinates the activities of multiple individual agents. The digital workforce is more than 140 agents strong, each one with roughly two dozen skills, give or take, comprising their suite of abilities.

And, just like humans, they're held accountable for their work — with performance reviews.

After executing a variety of tasks humans might find tedious, the digital employee presents it to "the human who's responsible for the process — 'I've just done three quarters of the work for you. And by the way, I did it in 10 minutes instead of what would have otherwise been two weeks," the CEO explained.

About 100 managers across the firm oversee digital employees, including Rachel Lewis, a managing director and a two-decade BNY veteran who now serves as head of AI enablement for operations. Appointed to the role this year, Lewis is now helping teams across the bank build and deploy digital employees within their day-to-day workflows.

"We're kind of transferring the mundane to the machines," she said, describing how the tools are taking over routine processes and shifting how work gets done.

Lewis told Business Insider she works closely with teams across BNY to help them develop their own digital employees — often starting with ideas that come directly from the people doing the work and turning them into tools over time.

"The person that came up with that idea actually gets the opportunity to build that digital employee," she said. As teams begin to incorporate them into their workflows, she added, the technology starts to feel less like software and more like part of the team. "It's just almost having a virtual teammate as part of your group."

170,000 hours of training

To prepare for the AI age, BNY implemented a massive 170,000-hour AI training program for its 48,000 staffers. "Everyone in the company has done two to three hours," he said. The goal was to turn employees into a new class of supervisors who managed, rather than competed with, the machine. "We're investing in our people, because I want them to be the unlockers and users of AI," Vince added.

Last week, he sent a memo to several thousand of the firm's senior leaders pointing to some of the firm's past efforts in AI and encouraging them to be proactive in continuing to incorporate it. "We have an obligation to our company to capture this opportunity," Vince wrote in the email, whose subject line was "Reimagining BNY."

"This is a fundamental leadership shift, not simply a capability shift," he added. "It will require each of us to lean in and role-model how to engage with AI and how to harness it to solve problems."

Speaking to Business Insider, Vince described his first personal deep dive into AI as a "summer project" that kicked off in 2023 and never ended.

It was sparked by a YouTube video he saw that broke down the functionality of Tesla's Autopilot 12. He watched as the car observed human behavior and applied what it saw to navigating a stop sign, rather than adhering to a few rigid lines of code. "It was very clear to me that the future of AI was going to be learning to make decisions," Vince said. He wanted to bring that same adaptive intelligence to the bank. "It was highly applicable to our businesses," he added, "and it would be able to be a very fundamental input to how we actually ran the company."

Expanding the digital workforce

While some of the earliest digital employees have applications focused on straightforward fixes like data repair and data capture, Lewis said the tools that have stood out most are those that make it easier for employees to build and refine their own digital employees.

Building a digital employee starts with observing how work is actually done. Teams record themselves completing tasks step by step, allowing the system to analyze different approaches and identify the most efficient way to perform the work. That output is then used to generate the instructions that guide a digital employee, which are refined over time as teams train the system on new variations of the task.

Lewis said that as digital employees become embedded in workflows, teams are also treating them more like members of the workforce. "There is a performance review," she said.

Managers evaluate how the systems perform by reviewing outputs, identifying where they skip tasks or "didn't perform as expected," and feeding that work back into the system to be retrained on new variations and edge cases.

"We're continuously monitoring them," she added. "Every week it gets a little bit better."

Even as it expands its digital workforce, Vince said there are no plans to cut back on human capital; these tools, he said, are meant to supercharge their workflow, but not take responsibilities out of their hands. "I speak to CEOs who say, 'We're going to downsize, massively, our campus program.'" Vince's reply? "Why would you do that?"

"We've got the opportunity to have young people who are pre-trained in AI, enthusiastic, and be able to add to our business in different ways," he said.

• Some of the most common career advice doesn't always hold up.
• You don't necessarily need to find your passion or ascend the corporate ladder to like what you do.
• Because finding a job can be tough, it's important to think about which pieces of advice to follow.

Your boss might prefer a version of you that isn't entirely authentic.

One of the many pieces of career advice that emerged years ago — when the market was far friendlier — is the idea that we should bring our whole selves to work.

That doesn't always work, and it's starting to look a bit threadbare with age, especially because in many industries, employers are being more selective in their hiring.

"If you love wearing tight little leather outfits that are strapped on, I don't want to see that," said Margie Warrell, a leadership consultant and author of the book "The Courage Gap."

"That's not appropriate," she told Business Insider.

The whole-self idea is just one example of bumper-sticker wisdom meant to guide us through our careers, but that often doesn't hold up.

Here are six bits of trite work advice — and what to think about instead:

Find your passion

The impulse to align your work with what you love makes sense. Yet, feeling like you have to "find your passion" can also set you up to fail.

"That's probably as vague as it gets," said Jochen Menges, a professor of human resource management and leadership at the University of Zurich. "It's not an actionable goal."

He told Business Insider that a better approach would be to set goals centered on the emotion you want to feel in your work, such as pride, even though you might not experience it every day.

"If I align my emotional needs more with what I do — with my career prospects — then I'm a lot better off," he said. That, in turn, will accelerate your career, Menges said.

Make it a numbers game

When you're looking for a job, it can be tempting to click apply as many times as possible to increase your chances.

It's an understandable impulse. It feels good to do something tangible when so much of the search process is out of your control.

In a recent survey by the hiring software maker Greenhouse, 53% of recruiters said they review fewer than half of the applications they receive. The survey involved more than 600 recruiters and hiring managers.

While the spray-and-pray approach is tempting, it's generally not the best move. Networking to make connections inside an employer can often be more effective, recruiters say.

If you have a list of places you're targeting, you should network before the job gets posted, career coach Laura Labovich told Business Insider. That's because once a job listing is live, recruiters and hiring managers aren't likely to do more than point you to it.

Climb the ladder

The idea of ascending a corporate hierarchy has become outdated for some workers, said Christian Tröster, an Academy of Management scholar and a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Germany's Kühne Logistics University.

Instead, he said, people might want to consider what he called a "protean" career — one that changes shape over time.

Tröster said that rather than ascending a ladder, a better aim for many workers would be to become "psychologically successful."

"The ultimate goal of your career is feeling proud and accomplished," he said.

One reason you might not want to scale the ladder is that a push by some leaders for "flatter" organizational structures — and the elimination of middle management — can mean there aren't as many rungs for ambitious workers to grab hold of.

"Careers today are no longer linear," Warrell said. Instead, workers might opt for a lateral move, a side gig, or a so-called portfolio career, where you take on multiple jobs to earn a living while maintaining flexibility.

Warrell said that workers who chart their own paths are often more fulfilled than those who try to grind their way up an org chart.

Don't jump around

Career advice once often included the suggestion that workers avoid changing jobs for at least a year to avoid appearing uncommitted to an organization.

While a string of frequent job changes can raise concerns among prospective employers, Warrell said prohibitions on job-hopping have often softened.

She said "smart" job changes — even in relatively quick succession — that indicate you're taking on extra responsibility and developing new skills can add polish, not tarnish, to a résumé.

"It can be seen as a sign of ambition, adaptability — not instability," Warrell said.

Focus on hard skills

Technical mastery — especially in hot areas like artificial intelligence — can take you far and leave you with your pick of jobs. Yet it's not the only route to career success.

AI is already taking on some of what software engineers do, for example. In surveys, employers often say they're after so-called soft skills, like communication and teamwork.

Menges said one reason soft skills are important is that humans will still be needed to evaluate what AI produces.

To help do that, he said, workers will need to rely in part on emotion for guidance. Menges said that in the 20th century, workers were often told to suppress their feelings at work.

"Now, you've got to bring those emotions back, because whatever AI does needs evaluation, and that evaluation comes down to how we feel about what appears on our screens," he said.

Bring your whole self to your job

While it might have been well-intentioned, critics have long found the idea of showing up at work as the unvarnished version of yourself to be problematic.

Ella F. Washington, a professor of practice at Georgetown University, previously told Business Insider that a better way to think about the idea is to bring your whole professional self to work.

That might mean working with people you might not like. Or, Warrell said, it could mean pushing through a bad mood.

"If one part of your whole self is that you're short-tempered and grumpy in the morning, don't bring that self to work," she said.

An earlier version of this story appeared on March 3, 2025.

After having her first child, Lindsay Thomas went back to her full-time, in-office job. When a second kid came in 2024, Thomas says she knew she didn't want to juggle everything again, so she negotiated a part-time, remote version of her communications role in medical research — working anywhere from 2 to 40 hours a month — and started picking up freelance work on the side.

Now, when a kid gets sick and Thomas is up all night — something that would have made her "spiral," when she worked in the office —she knows she'll be at home with flexibility to schedule her day. If Thomas hadn't had the option to freelance, she says, she would have chosen to stay home with the second kid — even though she hadn't envisioned herself as a stay-at-home mom. "There are costs to everything," she says of leaving her full-time gig. "The cost to our family, the cost to the stress levels, to mental health, to going back to doing that and knowing what it was gonna feel like for all of us, especially with an older child involved," she tells me, "that was just a cost we didn't want to absorb."

After making employment gains during the height of the pandemic, women have begun a downhill slide out of the workforce. The number of working mothers of young children between 25 to 44 fell nearly 3% from January and June of last year, hitting its lowest rate in more than three years, according to a Washington Post report. In December, 91,000 women older than 20 dropped out of the workforce. The number of men over 20 employed jumped by 10,000 that month, according to an analysis of federal jobs data from the National Women's Law Center.

AI is also affecting America's gender imbalance in the workforce. A March report from Anthropic found that those who work in roles with a high exposure to AI automation are 16% more likely to be female, putting women more at risk for layoffs.

An uptick in return to office mandates is also disproportionately pushing women to choose whether they'll be able to stay in a job that requires a commute as they also balance after school pickup and domestic responsibilities. And a wave of mass layoffs has upended employment security, workplace loyalty, and the job hunt.

Women make 85% of what men make at work on average and take on twice as much of the domestic labor and caregiving tasks at home. "The real friction is we just haven't built systems that allow people to integrate their work and their lives and and their desires and what do they want their life to look like," says Brea Starmer, CEO of staffing firm Lions and Tigers, which focuses on fractional workers. "For anyone that doesn't fit this very specific narrow look and feel and mold, there is just not a lot of options." In a bleak job market, freelancing is one way working parents can claw back power. And as AI adoption transforms company needs and could shift the number of workers and hours needed to work, employers are starting to see more value in hiring part-time and contract workers.

There's autonomy in ditching the full-time gig; but it often means making a choice between several imperfect paths.

The pandemic showed that flexible, remote work benefitted parents, particularly women. As of 2023, 74% of mothers worked, up from 72% in 2019, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. But many CEOs who are calling workers back to the office have metaphorically shrugged at the costs to women. A survey from the freelance platform Upwork found that more than half of executives reported losing a disproportionate number of women after implementing RTO policies. Turnover among female employees at these companies is 82%, higher than those that allow for remote work. Nearly a third of women freelancers said RTO was a direct factor in leaving their full-time jobs. Forty-two percent of women who voluntarily left the workforce in 2025 cited caregiving and childcare costs as the main reason their choice, and these women were more likely than those who stayed employed to work at companies that did not offer flexible schedules, according to a survey from Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on women's progress.

But as many employers don't adapt to the needs of families, they're seeing the benefits in hiring freelance workers. Another survey of about 350 business leaders conducted by Upwork last fall found that 77% said AI was increasing the need for them to hire fractional, freelance workers with specialized skills. "What we historically saw was that business leaders were maybe a little more hesitant to embrace these kinds of non-traditional work models," says Gabby Burlacu, senior manager at the Upwork Research Institute. Now, "business leaders are far more open to working with the most skilled talent that they can, especially the most AI-enabled talent, because they're all trying to figure out: How are we going to unlock the value of this technology?"

It's hard to say how many people, and particularly women, are working in freelance roles. Upwork doesn't track gender of the freelancers on its platform, but tells me that in a recent report, 44% of knowledge freelancer workers were women, compared to 41% of people working similar jobs in full-time roles, among those they surveyed. Freelance marketplace Fiverr tells me there's been growth in areas like voiceover, user-generated content creation, and spokesperson or modeling projects specifically seeking female talent. In 2022, 9.8 million people were self-employed, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Other analyses of the freelance workforce estimate that as many as 75 million people participate in some capacity.

Working freelance has given women more flexible schedules and eased childcare costs, but that can also mean taking on even more unpaid household and caregiving labor.

Jaime Hollander previously commuted three to four hours a day roundtrip into Manhattan. She freelanced on the side, and split the care of two kids with her husband equally. Her mindset shifted after her father died in 2019. "You have those moments of reckoning where you're like, this can't be all that there is,'" she tells me. So, she cut back on work and shortly after quit her job. She focused on freelance marketing and copyrighting. The challenge with being a full-time freelancer, she tells me, is that the shift threw her into becoming "the default parent," on call for all of her kids' needs throughout the day. "If something has to get done between 7 and 7, I will do it," she tells me. "Sometimes, it's really challenging."

Paid parental leave has become more common, but just 40% of companies in the US offered it as of 2023, according to a survey from Society for Human Resources Management. A short period of leave tied only to the birth of a child doesn't answer for the flexibility working parents need as their kids age — there are sick days, potential disability diagnoses, and more hands-on needs at schools. "It's not just about retaining women in those early years," Neha Ruch, author of "The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — and Come Back Stronger Than Ever." She says "there is recalibration happening" in the workforce, where more women may take fractional work, part-time roles, or freelance gigs. For companies, retaining women workers requires "thinking about parenting through the longitudinal experience of early parenthood," Ruch says, "going all the way up to college admissions and how and the demands that are made within the system on parents' time, and how we can make those work in the ecosystem of the professional space as well."

Many of the working parents I spoke to for this story chose the freelance or part-time route not upon having a kid, but as they grew up and demands of their families changed. When Erin Bartholomew's son was born, her husband stayed home to care for him. A few years later, she took her turn, wanting to have that hands-on time while her son was still young. She re-entered the workforce after a year into a remote job, logging on at 6 a.m. in Oregon to work in marketing for an East Coast company. But Bartholomew was laid off last year in 2024. Instead of searching for a similar role, she started her own marketing consultancy "It's so night and day," Bartholomew tells me. "It's allowed that balance that my husband and I really wanted."

As some women find flexibility in freelancing, others will be left out. Those who work in offices with 9-to-5 in-person mandates, or in education, retail, and healthcare roles, can't always make their own schedule. Parents who are the sole provider of income and health insurance for families often can't make ends meet working part-time. Others are pushed to stay at home with kids because the costs of childcare outpace their salaries. Leaving a full-time job can also disrupt a career trajectory toward leadership, and mean lost contributions to retirement accounts like 401(k)s. If companies don't adapt their schedules and remote work policies or future-proof roles for AI, many women will be forced to change how they think about their careers and priorities. They might not see going part-time or leaving a job as a choice they want to make, but something they have no choice in.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Kanav Bhatnagar's job title, forward deployed engineer, has been described as the "hottest role in AI."
• He said his job is to be a customer-facing engineer who tailors products for clients.
• Context-switching and communication are important skills for FDEs, he said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kanav Bhatnagar, 24, a forward-deployed engineer at Rippling, an HR tech company, who lives and works in New York City. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I got into software development because I wanted to build cool stuff.

Amazon hired me as a software engineer out of college, and it was a big learning opportunity, teaching me the fundamentals of engineering.

But it was a behemoth of a company, and I eventually wanted to work in a smaller environment where I could take more personal ownership over product decisions and learn more on the job.

After 2 ½ years at Amazon, I interviewed at a sales startup called Actively AI, where I landed a role in forward-deployed engineering.

The "FDE" role was popularized by Palantir, and it has been described as the "hottest role in AI." I liked that it combined software engineering with understanding business.

I spent roughly six months at Actively AI before I joined the AI-forward HR tech company Rippling as a senior FDE, in October 2025.

I've now been an FDE for roughly a year. Put simply, I'm a customer-facing engineer who tailors our product to each client. They describe their challenges and needs, and I build solutions and customizations.

Here's what my day-to-day is like, and the skills you need to break into this role.

My primary job is listening to customers. The results are very rewarding.

Software engineers can feel far removed from customers, because they often can't see their impact. In this job, I'm closer to the front lines.

A core software engineer can build something that serves the majority of use cases, but AI tools usually need more customization to work properly than regular software features. That's when an FDE steps in.

For example, a restaurant chain might have a labor-intensive process for tracking their payroll data that involves spreadsheets and manual data entry, which I'd help them to eliminate within Rippling's platform by using custom code and AI.

My primary job is listening to customers and understanding their problems, which was a learning curve for me, coming from a software engineering background. On a day-to-day basis, I'm in a lot of customer meetings, including visiting businesses who use our product to talk with employees about their experience with it. I probably spend an equal amount of time coding solutions and interacting with our core product teams.

Context-switching is an important skill to master in this job, where you could go from talking to a customer to debugging something to jumping onto another customer call shortly after.

I don't rely on an engineer to code something for me. I make a lot of decisions about the shape of the product and how to execute on it, which I really enjoy. It's very rewarding when a customer looks at what I've built after multiple iterations and says, "This is exactly what I wanted."

Technical and communication skills are equally important as an FDE

I think it would be pretty hard, although not impossible, to become an FDE without a technical background. With the dawn of vibe coding, it might become easier, though.

In my experience, FDE interviews feature technical rounds that test your coding skills, like in traditional software engineering interviews. You also have to show you can talk with any customer, including non-technical people, by asking the right questions to understand a customer's problem, and talk through how you'd design the solution.

To prepare for interviews, I have used consulting industry interview questions, which require you to explain how you'd meet client requests. I think both fields overlap, requiring rapid diagnosis, clarifying questions, and a clear plan of action.

There's probably more breadth than depth of technical knowledge required. In today's age of rapidly evolving technology, I try to spend time outside of work understanding what's new in the AI world and what new AI tools I can be using in my workflow by talking to colleagues and researching online.

I think my job is preparing me to be a founder one day

I'm interested in founding my own company one day, and I've previously heard someone describing the FDE role as a founder bootcamp. It provides a good foundational layer for entrepreneurship, helping you understand how a business functions from the sales process to how to build things.

The FDE role is evolving and no one really knows what direction it's heading in. Even if AI turns out to be unprofitable, I think FDEs will still have a place because of the demand for customer software. Products are becoming easier to build, and people in this role will be needed to handle large contracts with clients.

Palantir is an example of a company that's had FDEs since the 2010s, even before AI was mainstream.

• Companies are spending big on AI, but research shows most haven't seen measurable ROI.
• To offset those costs, employers can do layoffs — or trim line items like bonuses and stock awards.
• Workers can still make a case for a pay bump by emphasizing their value and AI chops.

AI may be putting more than just jobs on the line.

Companies are investing heavily in the technology and top-tier AI talent, and layoffs aren't the only option for offsetting those costs. At least one survey of US business leaders suggests that some are planning to cut workers' compensation.

"They have to pay for AI somehow," said Rocki-Lee DeWitt, a management professor at the University of Vermont's Grossman School of Business. "It ain't cheap."

Research firm IDC says companies with more than 1,000 employees are expected to spend an average of $13.7 million on AI hardware, cloud infrastructure, software, and services this year, a 78% increase from 2025, based on a global analysis.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on a recent episode of the "All-In Podcast" that he would be "deeply alarmed" if one of the chip giant's top engineers spent too little on AI tokens. In another episode of the same program, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya expressed concern about ballooning AI bills at his startup.

Yet despite all that outlay, 95% of organizations reported no measurable ROI from AI in the first half of 2025, according to an MIT study based on reviews of publicly disclosed AI initiatives and executive interviews.

Until companies see tangible gains from their AI investments, they may need to rein in other expenses, especially as tariffs, high inflation, and other factors also strain budgets.

Cost-cutting options

Several companies have announced layoffs tied to AI in recent months — including Block and Atlassian — and others may be tempted to follow suit, Business Insider previously reported. In November, HP said in an earnings report that it planned to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2028, saving the company roughly $1 billion.

Cuts to employee compensation may be next.

More than half of 866 executives and senior managers polled earlier this month by ResumeBuilder.com, 58%, said they plan to reduce employee compensation by the end of this year to help fund their AI investments. Bonuses and stock awards will be affected the most, followed by raises, benefits, and base salaries, the findings show.

Though such cuts could hurt morale, "employees don't have any leverage" due to the tight job market, said Jessica Kriegel, chief strategy officer at workplace consulting firm Culture Partners in Sacramento, California. "They will push back less, and they will accept smaller raises to avoid risk that feels real."

ResumeBuilder didn't cite the size of the companies where the respondents work, though small businesses are the most likely to take a hammer to employee pay or perks in lieu of making job cuts, said Kriegel.

"You can't just lay off 10% of your organization when you have, say 20 people, and everyone has got their hands in a million different pots," she said.

Another option for companies grappling with AI and other costs can be to hold compensation steady. The Conference Board, a nonprofit provider of data and insights for business leaders, expects average salary increases to stay at 3.4% this year, the same as in 2025.

Getting a raise anyway

Workers can still make a case for a pay bump amid the AI boom, said Kris Erickson, cofounder of consulting firm Workforce Science Associates in Lincoln, Nebraska.

"When budgets are tight, and the economy is uncertain, you have to get into sales mode" to successfully secure a raise, she said. "You have to make yourself invaluable."

Given how much money companies are spending on AI in search of productivity gains, highlight any you've realized from using it. Merely saying you know how to use AI is not enough, said David Gaspin, an HR professional and executive coach in New York.

"Asking for a raise because you're proficient in AI is not the strategy," he said. "That proficiency is table stakes at this point."

It's also important to show why AI can't fill your shoes.

"The key differentiator today is becoming: What can you do that can't be replaced with technology? Where is your experience, your judgment, your unique point of view adding tangible, quantifiable value to the business?" said Gaspin. "Because that's where companies are going to see risk in you leaving."

• Tejal Rives hoped adopting AI at work would help keep her safe from tech layoffs.
• However, she lost her job at Amazon during layoffs in October 2025.
• Rives was disheartened but was glad the experience taught her about AI.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tejal Rives, 35, who lives in Arizona. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In October 2025, I read a news article that Amazon was planning to cut jobs. I'd survived other layoffs, but this time my gut told me I'd be affected. Sure enough, not long after, I received an email that my position as a product marketer was being eliminated.

I was one of 14,000 people impacted, and even though I understood the decision wasn't personal, it was very disheartening. I thought up-skilling in AI would make me safer from layoffs, but even though it didn't, I still think professionals should focus on learning this one important AI skill: prompt engineering.

I thought working on AI could safeguard my job

At the time of the October layoffs, there was debate around whether AI was the reason.

The company was encouraging us to use AI at the time, but I don't think it took my job. I wrote descriptions for internal products at Amazon, and when I used AI to help, I'd need to ask it to rewrite its output without fluff words. It didn't sound like how people talk. Despite my ethical qualms, I used AI, but, in my opinion, it was nowhere close to replacing my role.

Before I was laid off, I helped build an internal site for Amazon using AI. I hadn't really coded before, but with a colleague's help, I learned how to vibe code with a lot of trial and error.

I thought using AI for this project and showcasing different skills would make me more valuable to the company, but in the end, it didn't keep me from being laid off.

Initially, I felt like I'd wasted time by learning something I likely wouldn't use again, but overall, I don't think my efforts were wasted. The most important thing the experience taught me was prompt engineering, the practice of asking AI the right questions. I want to be minimal with my use of AI for ethical reasons, including around the water resources needed to power data centers. Efficient prompt engineering helps me ask AI my question once, without needing to clarify three or more times.

I'd highly recommend that other professionals learn prompt engineering to up-skill themselves in the age of AI.

The workforce has shifted, and you're likely going to need to learn AI and use it at your job, regardless of your moral qualms. We need to up-skill to survive.

I have my own business, and use AI very rarely

My husband and I already agreed that if I were laid off, I'd focus on being the primary parent to our child as well as on my career coaching business, called Do My Resume LLC, which I was running on the side of my Amazon job. Before being laid off, I planned to eventually quit my job and focus on it full-time.

I didn't realize how burnt out I was after four years at Amazon, though, and it took me a while to pivot into working on my business. For roughly three weeks, I didn't touch my computer. I took up sewing and house-cleaning projects because I needed separation from my screen.

Now, my life is slower than it was at Amazon. I spend roughly four hours a day, six days a week, on the business, and spend the rest of my time taking care of the house and my family.

The business provides career coaching and résumé-writing services, but we don't use AI to write résumés, because it's humans who read them. Recently, I used AI to give me advice about starting a YouTube series for my business, so I will use this technology to help me flesh out ideas, but very rarely. I haven't vibe-coded since the project at Amazon.

My husband is the breadwinner, and we can survive on his income, but the business is bringing in some fun money for me.

I think people should prepare for layoffs in the age of AI

Being laid off helped me remember that, at the end of the day, your job and company shouldn't be your entire life. It shouldn't come before your well-being.

I wish I hadn't sacrificed time with my child to get projects done towards the end of my time at Amazon. I'm glad I'm no longer sacrificing that time.

I think there will be more layoffs that will be attributed to AI's efficiency, and professionals should always be prepared. Reskilling in the age of AI won't necessarily stop a company from laying you off, but it might help you land a role faster.

Amazon did not provide a statement in response to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Do you have a story to share about being laid off in 2026? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com

• A Cognizant study suggests 93% of jobs across the workforce are impacted by AI in some way.
• While AI could replace some jobs entirely, it will likely change the work that makes up many other roles.
• What tasks would you like to pass off to AI? What tasks do you enjoy? Take our survey below.

AI is coming for your job — or at least part of it.

A January study from IT services company Cognizant, which analyzed 18,000 workplace tasks, found that 93% of jobs are affected by AI to some degree. In the US, that could result in roughly $4.5 trillion of human labor shifting to AI — and it's happening at a faster rate than expected.

Cognizant projected in 2023 that 90% of jobs would be impacted by 2032. Now, a slightly elevated level of disruption is arriving about six years ahead of schedule. The pace of exposure has surged, too. Instead of rising 2% annually, it's now accelerating at closer to 9%, the report found, with AI's potential impact across occupations coming in 30% higher than earlier estimates.

While there are plenty of concerning predictions about AI replacing jobs entirely, there's also the possibility that the technology will allow many workers to spend more time on certain tasks and offload others to AI.

Given the assumption that AI is going to take at least some part of your job — if it hasn't already — we want to know what you would be happy to pass off, and what tasks you want to keep.

Take our survey below:

• Valerie Lockhart has struggled to find work since being laid off by Morgan Stanley in March 2025.
• Despite applying to more than 500 jobs and landing some interviews, she's still waiting for an offer.
• She said the search has taken a financial toll on her family, and she had to start a GoFundMe campaign.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Valerie Lockhart, a job seeker in her 40s based in Georgia. She was previously a vice president at Morgan Stanley until she was laid off last year. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

One day last March, I was working from the office when I was asked to have a meeting with my manager's boss.

It didn't feel out of the ordinary at first because I'd met with them before, and our last meeting had been canceled, so I assumed we were just making it up. But when I walked into the conference room and saw an HR representative sitting there, I realized something was wrong.

I learned I was being laid off, and later found out many others were, too — including several people I knew personally.

This set me on an ongoing search for a stable, full-time role — one that has been deeply discouraging and has significantly strained my finances.

I took some time to process the layoff before searching for jobs

The layoff came as a complete surprise, and I don't know exactly why I was selected. However, I think being based in Georgia may have worked against me. My manager at Morgan Stanley was in New York, along with many of my colleagues and the company's leadership, so there weren't many people who saw my contributions in person. I think the distance may have also created some communication challenges.

While I was laid off in March, I appreciated that I was kept on the payroll through May, which meant I still had healthcare coverage. I also received one month of severance. It wasn't much since it was based on my tenure with the company, and I had only started there in late 2023.

The extra months gave me a little time to process everything instead of immediately diving into a job search. By mid-April, though, I was actively looking for work — and I've been searching ever since.

I applied to over 500 jobs, but still struggled to land one

Before I started submitting applications, I updated my LinkedIn and analyzed my résumé to make sure the ATS systems that screen résumés these days would actually read it.

Then I started applying to roles online and reaching out to my network about opportunities, with a focus on governance, risk, and compliance roles at larger companies.

I consider myself fairly organized, so I created a spreadsheet to track every job I've applied to. By November, I had applied to more than 550 jobs. The hundreds of roles I applied for weren't random applications. They were positions I carefully selected.

Out of those, I heard back — beyond a basic "no thank you" email — from about 25 of them.

I made it to the final round multiple times, but none of those interviews led to an offer. At the last stage, something always seems to flip, and it doesn't work out.

My search has taken a financial toll

My job search has had a significant impact on my finances, as I'm the primary earner for my family — my spouse, my son, and me. We've relied on general savings, retirement accounts, and unemployment benefits. It's affected every aspect of our financial life.

Paying our mortgage has been the biggest challenge. We've tried to cut back wherever we can, including canceling some entertainment services. Every bit of savings helps, but it doesn't change the reality that housing is expensive.

Unexpected expenses have only made things harder. One day last September, we came home to find the right side of our garage — where we stored some valuable items — flooded. There were thousands of dollars' worth of damaged property.

We later learned that a pipe leak under the house was to blame. While our home insurance would help cover some of the damage, we were responsible for thousands of dollars in plumbing repairs. Paying that bill would've meant using money we needed to stay afloat and put food on the table.

So we delayed the repair, knowing that until it was fixed, we wouldn't have hot water. It felt like our own "Little House on the Prairie" moment.

To try to raise money for the repair, we started a GoFundMe campaign that, after some hesitation, I shared on LinkedIn. We raised a few hundred dollars, but it wasn't enough to cover the full cost.

Some companies seem to be looking for unicorn candidates

Eventually, I had a bit of luck. In January 2026 — about seven months after I began looking for work — I started a temporary, full-time contract role. I was finally able to save enough money to repair the hot water.

Because the position is temporary, I haven't stopped looking for work.

While my connections have helped me land some interviews, I've had to broaden my search beyond the companies where I have strong ties. At times, it feels like I'm either underqualified or overqualified for the roles I apply to. Some companies seem to be looking for unicorn candidates and would rather leave positions empty than hire someone.

I'm still applying and hoping something works out. At this point, I just need one opportunity.

Do you have a story to share about struggling to find work? Fill out this form, or contact this reporter via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com, or via Signal at jzinkula.29.

• Nancy Hagans is an intensive care unit nurse in NYC and union president.
• She told Business Insider about how health tech has changed during her 39-year career.
• Each shift is intense, but Hagans said nursing is the most rewarding job she's ever done.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nancy Hagans, a nurse in the intensive care unit at New York City's Maimonides Medical Center and president of the New York State Nurses Association. The union ended a 41-day strike in February, securing raises and layoff protections for staff. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I wake up 5:30 a.m. each morning, say my daily prayer, have a cup of coffee, and arrive at work at least half an hour early.

I've been a registered nurse for the past 39 years, and most of my work is in the surgical intensive care unit. I start my shift by greeting the night nurses and checking on my patients, but there's rarely a routine day at the ICU — it could be quiet one minute and the next minute, everything is happening. My hospital is a trauma center, so I could walk into an emergency before I even put my coat down.

I decided to become a nurse because I'm from Haiti, and my Haitian patients were discriminated against. Going to the hospital was very hard, and I wanted to be in a situation where I could make a difference for immigrant communities.

The profession is extremely rewarding. The nurse is the first person patients see when they walk in, and the last person they see when they leave. In stressful situations, the patient depends on their nurse. I may have to walk away, wipe my eyes, and take a deep breath, but then I go back to their room and think: What is it that I could do to make this person better? How can I alleviate their anxiety?

If you're nervous, odds are the patient is nervous, and the family is nervous. I have to be the advocate for my patients. It's my job to make sure they are receiving the proper medications and are seen quickly by the doctors. Every patient is a VIP, and I treat them with the highest quality of care — regardless of their religion, background, and immigration status.

Technology has changed throughout my career, and I welcome the help. When I first became a nurse, I had to do everything myself. I calculated medication doses and hand-wrote patient reports. Computers are much faster at organizing these treatment notes, doing math, and protecting sensitive information. It's not a replacement for the human touch, but it helps us document our care more effectively and spend more time with patients.

When it comes to care, we are not going to cut corners. We're not going to stop fighting for our patients, our colleagues, our pay, and safe staffing ratios at our workplaces — because more nurses means better care. I need people to know that nurses are the front line, they're the backbone of every hospital. The medical field can't operate without us. We keep our patients alive.

I would encourage students to think about nursing as a profession. About a year-and-a-half ago, I ran into a former patient in a supermarket. Standing in the aisle, this former patient told me, "You don't remember me, but I could never forget you."

It's the most rewarding job I've ever done.

Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the Executive Innovation Corps. The Pentagon has introduced many initiatives to deepen relationships with Silicon Valley. But making officers out of multimillionaire executives with no military experience served as a strong symbol of a new era in which venture capitalists and technologists see themselves as essential to the defense of the nation.

The tech industry, which once prided itself on its libertarian- and counterculture-inflected antiwar ideals, has emphatically re-enlisted in the American military project. Drawn by patriotism and lucrative government contracts, numerous tech companies — from established giants like Google and SpaceX to military-minded startups in Southern California — have started working for the defense establishment, from supplying the Department of Homeland Security to building AI-powered drones and autonomous weapons to be used in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Anduril, a leading munitions startup, just announced a Pentagon contract that may be worth up to $20 billion.

No company has driven tech's transformation from keyboard to warrior like Palantir, a data and analytics firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, which has a current market cap of $360 billion. Palantir's financial network and its alumni are responsible for bringing numerous defense-tech startups into being. And it helped brush away the tech industry's reticence to be involved in war-making.

Now, a growing canon of books by and about Palantirians is helping to crystallize, and proselytize, tech's new hawkishness. Last year, Karp and his Palantir colleague Nicholas W. Zamiska published "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West," which outlined their austere vision for a militarized republic secured by Silicon Valley technologies and led by highly skilled engineers. Last fall, New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Steinberger published an authorized biography, "The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State." Now, Shyam Sankar, Palantir's chief technology officer and one of the four techies-turned-officers, has published "Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III." Cowritten with his colleague Madeline Hart, "Mobilize" claims that the US government needs to urgently boost military production — with the help of Silicon Valley — in order to head off a conflict with China, which the authors think will attempt to capture Taiwan in 2027.

From these books, and from a battery of public statements by Karp and his cofounders, a distinctive worldview emerges — an unapologetically nationalistic attitude that has total contempt for one's enemies in politics and business and that sees constant, world-rending conflict in our future. This belief system was developed by a group of people who exhibit a profound wish to live in interesting times, to be the shield defending America in a world of constant threats. You might call it Palantirianism.

Birthed from the 20-year-long global war on terror, which coincided with the tech boom, Palantirianism holds that America's adversaries don't negotiate for peace. They surrender entirely — or, as Karp has said, they will be too "scared" to challenge the US in the first place because they fear immediate destruction. Palantirians' catchword is "deterrence" — derived not from fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or diplomacy but by developing overwhelming AI-based firepower. "The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war," Karp writes in "The Technological Republic."

Under Palantirianism, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about is good for the world — but it would be far better with the tech industry's participation and leadership. "Eisenhower wasn't warning about the existence of the military-industrial complex; he was warning about its potential for undue influence, a distinction often lost," write Sankar and Hart. In their view, bringing together Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is not a step toward undue influence for America's tech billionaires. It's exactly what the country requires: "American capitalism and the American military need each other," they write. "Reuniting the American industrial base, commercial and defense, is an existential issue."

Palantirians see securing American military hegemony as the national priority. Karp, who once called himself a "neo-Marxist" and a Democratic Party supporter before drifting rightward, told his biographer that national security is the only issue that matters to him, and that the tech industry's workers should devote themselves to the same. "A generation of programmers remains ready to dedicate their working lives to sating the needs of capitalist culture, and to enrich itself, but declines to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built and for what purpose," he writes. The answer for Karp, the high priest of Palantirianism, is obvious: What ought to be built is what makes people safer. What makes people safer is empowering the military, police, and intelligence services. That is his vision of the common good.

His vision is now transforming the tech industry, the military, and how we look at national security. "We have made the mistake of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return. What should the public demand for abandoning the threat of revolt?" Karp writes, sounding like the Marxist of his youth. "Free email is not enough."

Palantir grew out of a program at PayPal — where Thiel was CEO — to fight financial fraud in its system. The company itself was later founded in 2003 with an explicit mission: defending the West, which its founders see as imperiled. "A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West," Karp writes early in his book. It's not always clear what those threats are (or even what constitutes "the West"). In the conservative tech mogul's imaginarium, wokeness and DEI seem to be as dangerous to the American public as a revanchist Russia. Karp frequently refers to an organized "assault on religion," without elaborating except to say that it "left us vulnerable as a society."

With seed money from the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital firm — which the agency established to help incubate national-security startups — Palantir slowly grew to become the go-to analytics platform for much of the military and intelligence establishment. It wasn't an easy ride: The company was in the red for more than 20 years, and it sued the US Army, claiming that it had boxed out Palantir by violating its own procurement rules. Palantir won the lawsuit, cultivated numerous government and military insiders (who were sometimes given its software for free), and now runs a software platform, known as Project Maven, that's used across the US military and NATO. It has other software tools that have been used by corporations, police departments, hospitals, and the federal government when it was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maven started as software to analyze drone video feeds, with a $10 million contract going to Google. After Google employees protested working for the Pentagon and Google dropped the project, Palantir, working alongside other tech companies, picked it up and ran with it. Maven eventually became "an all-purpose AI operating system" integrating vast data sources into a dashboard that intelligence analysts have said makes their work much easier, even saving lives in the field. Maven is now used in conjunction with other systems, such as Anthropic's Claude chatbot, which sits on top of Palantir's platform. The Washington Post reported that Claude was used to rapidly generate thousands of targets for the ongoing US-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. The US military is investigating whether AI was used to target the bombing of a school that killed at least 100 Iranian children. In a sign of how Maven has the potential to take humans out of the loop, Sankar and Hart note in their book that "machine-to-machine connections were enabled to allow Maven to communicate with weapons systems and send confirmed targets directly to artillery."

With its martial mission, Palantir isn't like many software companies. Most employees have one of three job titles: deployment strategist, product development engineer, or forward-deployed engineer. The latter group is software engineers sent to work directly with clients — whether in Manhattan or Kabul — to customize Palantir's tools and troubleshoot on the fly.

Leading this motley "artists colony" is Karp, who has a Ph.D. from Goethe University, enjoys cross-country skiing with his Norwegian ex-commando bodyguards, practices tai chi, and retains four Austrian assistants with whom he speaks in German. An ex-Israeli intelligence officer serves as "a kind of fixer" for Karp, who describes to his biographer a lifelong feeling of personal vulnerability.

Karp once had a policy of never spending more than $1 million for a home; that was before he received a $1.1 billion pay package in 2020. Now he owns a private jet and lavish properties all over the country, most of them in ski areas. Recently, he spent $120 million on a Benedictine monastery in Colorado.

He calls himself "a fluorescent praying mantis." With his many-limbed mannerisms and braggadocious quips, Karp has turned himself into a mascot for Palantir's culture. "Always energetic and upbeat around the office," he's known for launching into impromptu talks with employees that become an "orgy of free association," Steinberger writes. He can be "a little bit incoherent," but also exhibits "crazy charisma."

In public, his mad-mogul image can play well, generating viral clips of his vows to drone enemies with "fentanyl-laced urine." TV producers began to love him because "he was reliably unfiltered, thanks in part to his practice of getting hopped-up on Mexican Coke beforehand."

The son of a white Jewish father and a Black mother, Karp's identity has been a core throughline in his life and career. As a child, Karp was bullied at school, contributing to a sense of fear and personal instability.

"You're a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic — would you not come up with the idea that you're fucked?" Karp says to Steinberger. In this context, Karp's sense of identity was hopelessly complicated and a potential social liability.

Karp didn't tell his Palantir colleagues that he was Black until 2019, but he presented differently in his youth. He went to college at Haverford, where he "was active in black student affairs, and his social life mainly revolved around Haverford's black community," Steinberger writes. He organized a conference at Yale about racism on college campuses and wore a Palestinian keffiyeh in a yearbook photo. One of his close friends from the time said, "He was much more of a Black man then than he is now."

After college, Karp enrolled at Stanford Law School, which he almost immediately regarded as a mistake. He became friends with another disenchanted classmate, Thiel, who at the time was already a deeply ideological veteran of campus culture wars.

After Stanford, Karp moved to Germany to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Goethe University. Karp would later say that Jurgen Habermas, one of Germany's postwar intellectual giants, was for a time his dissertation advisor, which Habermas has denied. According to letters examined by Steinberger, Habermas tried to steer Karp toward an English-language degree in another subject. "Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic that often overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of us native speakers — and yours, you won't blame me, even more so," Habermas wrote to Karp.

Karp didn't listen. He went on to finish his dissertation — an examination of how aggression is used as a tool of social integration — which he wrote in German under the supervision of Karola Brede, who had previously studied under Habermas. With Brede, Karp cowrote an academic article — the only one he published — a consideration of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism and Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

In the years since, Karp has embraced his Jewishness while expressing reluctance to claim his Black identity. The story of his parents' relationship became for him a kind of cautionary tale of how identity politics run amok.

"My father wanted to marry a Black woman," says Ben Karp, Alex's brother. "Dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism," Steinberger notes. Leah Jaynes liked that Bob Karp was Jewish, and Karp liked that she was Black. They eventually divorced, after which Bob Karp remarried and adopted biracial children. Bob's new family didn't sit well with his sons. "Alex's realization, years later, that racial and ethnic identity had been foundational to his parents' relationship was part of the reason he developed a visceral dislike of identity politics," writes Steinberger. "He felt as if he had been the product of virtue signaling, and it bothered him."

Steinberger depicts Karp's personal reckoning over his parentage as part of what moved him to the right. In 2015, he told company employees that he didn't like Trump. According to "The Philosopher in the Valley," Karp once told a friend that he wouldn't mind pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of a helicopter. The company has gone on to work for ICE and other government agencies executing hardline Trump policies.

Two global events contributed to Karp's political metamorphosis: COVID and Hamas' attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. During the pandemic, Karp stocked up on canned food and bullets, and loved his time in isolation. "While the pandemic was wretched for most people, Karp found it blissful," writes Steinberger. Plenty of time for cross-country skiing.

After Palantir returned from remote work, Karp's proclamations became more extreme. He started calling Palantir "a prepper company" and reveling in its role in doling out violence to enemies of the West.

Oct. 7 reanimated Karp's sense of personal vulnerability and his commitment to Israel. Having once celebrated the virtues of debate with his friend and political opposite Peter Thiel, he told Palantirians that the company wouldn't tolerate any disagreement over its work for the country. Palantir took out a full page ad in The New York Times declaring, "Palantir Stands With Israel."

Under Karp's never-apologize-never-explain leadership, Palantir has become a leading bogeyman for opponents of the surveillance state. New York City is now speckled with posters denouncing the company as the "enemy." Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich recently called Palantir "America's most dangerous corporation."

The truth is more tangled. By its own claim, Palantir proudly stands for American militarism, abets the surveillance state, and has catalyzed a shift in the tech industry toward supporting the security services. But influential as Palantir is, the company makes software — tools to implement government policy. It does not directly collect data or conduct surveillance. It sucks up that information from clients, including authoritarian states, making the job of war-making or repression potentially much easier. There are numerous firms beyond Palantir — including the big five "prime" defense contractors — engaged in this kind of work.

Palantirianism — a belief system that is now being spread through venture capital investments in startups like Anduril, Saronic, and Shield AI, and tech's close alliance with the Trump administration — is far more influential than Palantir itself. People "want to know they are safe, and safe means that the other person is scared," Karp said at an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum. This is the simple core belief that now animates the defense tech industry and swaths of the Silicon Valley elite. (Elon Musk is a Karp fan.)

By 2025, Karp was writing in shareholder letters that the West owed its success to its primacy at "applying organized violence" — a notion of which he evidently approved. He started talking about how certain cultures were "regressive and harmful" compared to others.

"We have been building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, and irrational, a world in which you have to show strength," Karp said during an earnings call. People "have to pick sides." Some people "are violent and not conformant with morality."

For many years, Karp said that fascism was his greatest fear. He wanted nothing more than to stem the rise of the far right in America. Yet Karp's company has provided direct assistance to what many observers have described as the most authoritarian president in US history. He did all this with the help of his close friend Peter Thiel, Palantir's chairman, an early Trump supporter who decades ago said that he had tired of electoral democracy. Steinberger summed up the contradiction: "With Trump restored to power, it appeared that authoritarianism had triumphed in the United States and that Palantir, which Karp had always touted as a bulwark of the liberal international order, would henceforth be serving the agenda of a president who was contemptuous of America's political tradition."

Although Karp has matured, in his biographer's view, into a "statesman CEO," he is still driven by spleen. Throughout "The Philosopher in the Valley," he repeatedly complains that his college alma mater hasn't invited him to give a speech or cultivated him as a donor. Karp seems to detests Haverford with a similar passion that he applies to terrorists and student protesters. "I eventually came to realize that he needed enemies," Steinberger writes of Karp. That need, it turns out, has implications for us all.

Jacob Silverman is a contributing writer for Business Insider. He is the author, most recently, of "Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley."

• Companies like HP and IBM have signaled they're replacing jobs with AI.
• In February, CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Block was eliminating approximately 40% of staff.
• Klarna's workforce has halved in the last four years, and its CEO says it will shrink more.

Worries about AI one day replacing human workers have intensified in recent years — and as it turns out, that future has already arrived.

MIT released a study last year that found that AI can already replace 11.7% of the US labor market. The study utilized a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which models 151 million US workers and measures how AI overlaps with skills in each occupation.

As AI starts to replace human workers and companies invest heavily in the tech, companies have been increasingly open about the role AI adoption is playing in recent layoffs. However, while some companies have directly cited AI as a reason for workforce reductions, others have vacillated with their messaging, leaving ambiguity around the exact reasoning and whether AI is directly replacing workers.

Even as some companies replace human workers with AI, they might end up hiring more people in other roles because of it. A World Economic Forum survey found that 41% of companies globally are expected to reduce their workforces over the next five years because of AI. Meanwhile, tech jobs in big data, fintech, and AI are expected to double by 2030, the WEF said.

Here's a list of companies that are replacing — or signaling they may replace — humans with AI.

Amazon

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said that AI-driven efficiency gains would shrink the retail giant's workforce in the coming years — but in the company's two recent mass layoffs, Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI.

"Our ambition is to be the world's largest startup," Amazon executives wrote in two memos viewed by Business Insider in January. "That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation — which requires us to continue evolving how we're structured."

An Amazon spokesperson also previously reiterated to Business Insider that the cuts last October were not driven by AI.

When the October layoffs were announced, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology wrote in a blog post that the move reflected a continued effort to run the company "like the world's largest startup." The SVP, Beth Galetti, also referenced a need to be leaner in the age of AI.

"This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," Galetti wrote in the post.

Atlassian

Atlassian announced cuts of 1,600 jobs in March, totaling about 10% of its global workforce. The move comes as the Australian-American software company says it is restructuring to focus on AI and enterprise growth.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the reduction was part of a broader effort to reposition the business for what CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes described as the "AI era."

"It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does," Cannon-Brookes wrote in a message to employees.

On the "20VC" podcast in October last year, prior to the cuts, Cannon-Brookes said he planned to have more engineers at the company in five years.

"They will be more efficient, but technology creation is not output-bound," Cannon-Brookes said.

Block

In a post on X last month, billionaire and Block CEO Jack Dorsey said he was slashing nearly half of Block's workforce, cutting its over 10,000-person staff to under 6,000. The move came as he said business was strong and profits were growing, but a new way of working was emerging.

"We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," Dorsey said in his memo on X.

In the company's earnings call that followed the memo, Dorsey said that more companies will follow suit in using AI to drive efficiency gains. Block is already ahead of the trend that "all companies will eventually" adopt, the CEO said.

Fiverr

Micha Kaufman, the CEO and founder of Fiverr, said last September that the company was slashing roughly 30% of its workforce. The cut would affect about 250 team members, and the freelancing platform had 762 full-time employees as of 2024, according to an SEC filing.

The CEO said that the cuts were needed to help turn Fiverr into a leaner and faster "AI-first company."

Kaufman said in a staff memo last April that AI was "coming for your jobs," and in May, he told Business Insider that Fiverr would only hire people who know how to use AI.

"If you don't ensure that you sharpen your knives, you're going to be left behind. It's that simple," Kaufman said.

HP

HP said it's reducing the size of its corporate workforce as a result of AI initiatives. In an earnings report last November, the company said it plans to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2028, estimating the changes would save around $1 billion.

HP's earnings presentation at the time said part of its strategy was to cut costs through "workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation, and productivity measures" and to increase customer satisfaction, innovation, and productivity with "artificial intelligence adoption and enablement."

IBM

Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, told The Wall Street Journal last year that it had replaced hundreds of human resources employees with AI.

More recently, the company announced last November that it would cut thousands of workers in the fourth quarter of 2025, affecting a "single-digit percentage of its global workforce." Its CEO, Arvind Krishna, said the company is shifting priorities to hire more people around AI and quantum. He also said the company plans to increase hiring among recent college graduates over the next year.

Krishna has also said AI adoption has led to the company hiring more employees in programming and sales.

In 2023, Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM had halted or slowed hiring for back-office roles, like in human resources, that could be replaced by AI.

"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he told the outlet at the time.

Klarna

Klarna's CEO says its workforce has halved over the last four years and will shrink further in the coming years.

In an interview with Harry Stebbings on the "20 VC" podcast on Monday, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there are about 3,000 employees at Klarna, and he expects the company's workforce to drop below 2,000 by 2030. The company had 7,000 employees in 2022, he said.

The CEO said the reduction is a result of layoffs and "natural attrition," which is when the company doesn't replace workers who leave.

Siemiatkowski said on Monday that "human connection" will be vital for the company, and jobs involved in that will not be replaced by AI.

"Those jobs will remain, but for the rest it's going to be definitely smaller," he said.

Klarna declined to comment further when contacted by Business Insider. A spokesperson previously said that its AI assistant handles the equivalent workload of 853 full-time agents, up from 700 at launch. The spokesperson said it was saving the company an estimated $58 million annually.

Salesforce

Salesforce cut fewer than 1,000 workers in February, including employees from marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI product.

In an episode of "The Logan Bartlett Show" released last August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company was using AI agents in its customer support division to replace humans and help the company work through more sales leads.

"I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he said in the interview. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."

A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider previously that Benioff was referencing an organizational transformation that took place over several months to reshape its customer support function.

After deploying Agentforce, the company no longer needed to "actively backfill support engineer roles," the spokesperson said, adding that it successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas of the company, like professional services, sales, and customer success.

Wisetech

Zubin Appoo, the CEO of Wisetech, said the logistics software maker is cutting 2,000 jobs, or 30% of its staff, because of AI-led efficiency.

In a conference call on February 25, Appoo said that AI enables greater productivity in less time and with fewer employees. The Sydney-based company employed about 7,000 people, according to an annual report released in October.

"I am prepared to say this clearly: the era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over," Appoo said. The technology is "unlocking levels of efficiency gains across WiseTech that were previously out of reach."

In some parts of the workforce, such as customer service, one in two workers will disappear, he added.

Correction: December 1, 2025 — The bullet points of this article have been updated to clarify Amazon's statements about how AI may affect its workforce.

• Saul Van Beurden thinks employers and employees share responsibility for AI adoption.
• Wells Fargo doesn't mandate AI use; instead, it aims to generate "grassroots enthusiasm."
• Van Beurden said employees need new skills to stay competitive for both redeployment and new jobs.

Saul Van Beurden is the man helping Wells Fargo confront a question hanging over banks of every size: What happens to jobs in the age of AI?

He and his central team can't, and shouldn't, figure out what an AI-ready Wells Fargo looks like alone. The bank must teach employees skills to stay competitive in a changing industry, and they must choose to learn them, Van Beurden said.

"You cannot deny things," Van Beurden, who is the head of AI and the co-CEO of consumer banking and lending, told Business Insider. "But how do you make it a thing where everybody has a role to play and takes their own accountability and responsibility?"

The bank is leaning on AI literacy programs and demos, among other things, to hopefully inspire "grassroots enthusiasm." The goal is to make employees comfortable enough with the technology that they can be redeployed if their jobs change, or competitive in the job market if they leave Wells Fargo, he said. Wells Fargo doesn't mandate AI usage, even as it bets the technology will help supercharge its growth following the Federal Reserve's decision to lift a $1.95 trillion asset cap.

Van Beurden thinks that fluency starts outside the office. He's trying to build an agent to help pull documents for his 2026 tax returns, and believes it's crucial for employees to use AI in their personal lives, too.

"It's really important to have that personal usage, to understand the power of what it can do. And then we are enabling that and allowing that to happen at the workplace," he said.

Still, Van Beurden emphasized that everyone needs to "stay cognitive," since AI could generate all of our ideas if we let it. He suspects that most college students are comfortable with technology but should invest time in activities like reading or playing chess. Staying sharp, he thinks, will help them in what's broadly a brutal job market.

Wells' workforce, like many of its competitors, is already changing because of AI. The bank's CEO, Charlie Scharf, said in November that it will probably "have less head count as we look forward," and added in December that generative AI has already made engineers up to 35% more productive.

Van Beurden didn't say whether the bank would need 30% fewer engineers as a result or whether it would necessarily alter hiring, leaving it at, "it's a great question." Instead, he said that growth and head count aren't always one-to-one.

"How great is it to grow without the need to hire people, because you have created the capacity to take on more clients, to take on more customers with the same amount of people?" he said, calling AI the "ideal tool" for that growth. Wells Fargo recorded $21.3 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 4% year over year; revenue in its consumer bank, which Van Beurden oversees, rose 7% year over year.

The leaders of other big banks have also said that AI will likely eliminate some jobs and slow hiring, both publicly and in internal memos. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said his bank has "huge redeployment plans."

Efficiency promises and big technology budgets aside, the head count cuts haven't yet materialized at most banks. Around 60% of 240 financial services CEOs surveyed by EY said they expect AI investments to maintain or boost their head count this year.