Work/Jobs

A machine can now ingest an absurd amount of scientific literature and treat it like working memory. It can surface connections no human would spot simply because no human can hold that much context in their head at once.

That is extraordinary.

But the machine does not know which connections matter. It finds all of them: the significant ones and the trivial ones, the ones that unlock new treatments and the ones that are statistical lint.

The human who can tell the difference becomes more valuable, not less.

The machine solves. The human selects.

Selection is harder than solving. That is the thing nobody wants to say.

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.

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.”

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.