A new Work AI Institute report said generative AI is quietly eroding core worker skills. Coauthor Rebecca Hinds said early-career staff risk losing vital skills as AI replaces apprenticeship. Hinds said leaders focusing on AI usage encourage shallow use over real learning.
Speaking on the sidelines of Goldman Sachs financial services conference, Scharf, said: “We have gone through the budgeting process, and even pre-artificial intelligence, we do expect to have less people as we go into next year. We’ll likely have more severance in the fourth quarter.”
“AI is extremely significant, both in terms of the efficiencies it can drive and what it is going to potentially do to headcount,” he added.
OpenAI published its first State of Enterprise AI report, drawing on usage data and a survey of 9,000 workers across nearly 100 companies. ChatGPT Enterprise messages have risen 8× year-over-year and the consumer version now serves more than 800 million weekly users. Structured workflows are up 19× this year, reasoning token consumption soared 320×, and 75% of employees say AI improves speed or quality. Workers report saving 40–60 minutes per day, with the fastest enterprise growth in technology, healthcare, manufacturing, and markets such as Australia and Brazil. The data reveals a widening gap: frontier workers send six times more messages than the median and frontier firms send twice as many per seat. OpenAI notes it now ships a new capability roughly every three days, making organizational readiness—not model performance—the core adoption hurdle.
London consultancy Global Data TS Lombard reports that unemployment for new U.S. labor-market entrants has jumped more than 2.5 percentage points since 2023. Economist Dario Perkins says the spike stems from companies not hiring, not from AI displacement. In sectors most exposed to AI, job losses are no worse than elsewhere, underscoring the broader slowdown. Perkins attributes the freeze to post-pandemic head-count normalization, policy uncertainty, and margin pressure from Trump-era tariffs. The hiring pullback leaves young workers facing the toughest market in years even as overall employment holds steady. Perkins highlights that the weakness reflects “recessionary levels of job creation” across the economy rather than AI-driven layoffs.
Researchers found that only 20 percent of customer service and support leaders reported reducing agent staffing to favor our would-be robot overlords.
“Customer service and support leaders should avoid framing AI initiatives solely around headcount reduction,” said Melissa Fletcher, senior principal of research in the Gartner Customer Service Support practice. “Leaders should plan for new roles, leverage central resources, and communicate transparently about AI’s impact to manage expectations effectively.”
Meanwhile, 42 percent of organizations are hiring for newly created jobs for humans that incorporate AI into their workflow.
“Although conversations about AI in customer service tend to focus on AI’s role in headcount reduction, many leaders (42%) have found themselves hiring specialized staff to help with their AI initiatives,” the researchers found. “These roles may include AI strategists, Agent assist analysts, AI automations and process analysts, conversational AI designers, and AI analysts and Trainers.”
Utah Governor Spencer Cox launched a “pro-human AI” initiative spanning workforce, industry, government, academia, public policy, and learning. The program sets aside $10 million to create curriculum that makes the state’s workforce “AI-ready.” Cox also unveiled an academic consortium to pursue “moonshot” breakthroughs in human-centered innovation. He said the 2026 legislative session will weigh rules to curb harmful chatbots, mandate deepfake transparency, and limit AI in health care. Cox argued Utah must act because Congress has not passed meaningful AI laws and should not block state authority. The combined training funds and guardrails show a state moving quickly to shape AI adoption on its own terms.
More than half of companies (52%) cite underperforming AI as the primary culprit, while 50% struggle with scaling AI to handle complex tasks.
Nearly half (47%) of organizations attempting to integrate AI into existing workflows point to integration problems as the cause of AI failures. Another 48% said that they found the cost of the technology outweighs the anticipated return on investment. CompTIA’s survey of more than 1,100 U.S. businesses reveals that successful AI deployments require a balance of orchestrating work across people, processes, and technology.
“The findings reaffirm the importance of holistic approaches to AI implementations, from across the tech stack to workflow processes to people skills,” Herbert said.
IT professionals reluctant to accept the impact AI will have on their careers might want to think again. According to a new study from the AI Workforce Consortium, the IT job market is undergoing an unprecedented transformation thanks to AI, and AI skills are becoming a core competency for IT pros.
The findings are based on analysis of job posting data from Cornerstone and Indeed, conducted by the Cisco-led consortium between July 2024 and June 2025 in G7 countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US.
AI is becoming a standard skill The study revealed that AI skills are already explicitly required in 78% of advertised IT jobs. Furthermore, seven of the 10 fastest-growing IT jobs in G7 countries have a direct AI component, including software engineers, AI/ML developers, cloud engineers, and data engineers.
KPMG’s latest survey finds 52% of U.S. workers now fear AI-driven job displacement, almost double last year’s level. The poll covers more than 2,100 employees across industries and was conducted in June and July. While 85% of companies offer some AI training, 84% of employees say it’s insufficient and less than half make it mandatory. Separate research from Economist Impact shows finance chiefs split almost evenly on whether headcount cuts are the most compelling proof of AI ROI.
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.
