The Internal Revenue Service will deploy Salesforce’s Agentforce AI across its Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services and Appeals divisions. The system will handle case summarization and search to close taxpayer cases faster. The agency’s workforce shrank from 100,000 to 75,000 this year after Trump administration layoffs, heightening the need for automation. Salesforce says guardrails stop the agents from making final decisions or disbursing funds, ensuring humans stay in charge. The move gives Salesforce a marquee government customer and showcases large-scale AI use in the public sector. A 38-year IRS veteran calls the shift inevitable as the agency modernizes legacy systems and competes with private law firms.
McKinsey has cut 200 tech jobs globally this week, focusing on non-client-facing and tech-support positions. The firm says those duties are being automated as it rolls out new AI tools. Headcount has already fallen from about 45,100 at the end of 2023 to around 40,000 in May, a 10% drop across 18 months. Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels says the company will keep hiring client-deployed consultants while trimming back-office roles through AI. The layoffs place McKinsey among the 30% of companies its own research says are reducing staff because of AI. Industry reports cited in the article show clients increasingly favor AI-powered, leaner consulting teams over the legacy pyramid model.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market. The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For lawmakers preparing billion-dollar reskilling and training investments, the index offers a detailed map of where disruption is forming down to the zip code.
The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) said. Highly skilled professionals, on the other hand, were forecast to be more in demand as AI and technological advances increase workloads "at least in the short to medium term."
Overall, the report expects the UK economy to add 2.3 million jobs by 2035, but unevenly distributed. The findings stand in contrast to other recent research suggesting AI will affect highly skilled, technical occupations such as software engineering and management consultancy more than trades and manual work.
