How AI is starting to reshape the workforce

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AI is starting to reshape the workforce

If you want a glimpse of how AI could reshape corporate staffing, look to Salesforce.

CEO Marc Benioff said during a ">Labor Day podcast that the company has already cut 4,000 customer support roles after deploying its own AI agents. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” Benioff said, calling the past eight months “the most exciting” of his career. (A Salesforce spokesperson later clarified that many of the affected jobs were support engineers who were shifted into other roles.)

Still, Salesforce may be an outlier. Benioff was likely promoting his own AgentForce platform. Gartner predicted back in March that half of all organizations will abandon plans to shrink their customer service staff because of AI. In a poll of 163 customer service leaders, 95% said they intend to keep human agents and use AI more strategically.

Customer service is a particularly sensitive area for automation, since it involves direct contact with customers. Many companies may prefer a human touch. Other roles behind the scenes—like software engineering—may prove easier to replace. Junior developers, for example, are increasingly vulnerable as coding agents such as Cursor and Claude Code take on much of the basic work. A recent Stanford study found that employment for 22- to 25-year-old software engineers fell nearly 20% between late 2022 and July 2025, even as hiring for older engineers grew.

Other research points to broader disruption. A new study from the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity estimates that AI will put 45 million U.S. jobs at risk by 2028, including roles such as retail managers, HR coordinators, and administrative assistants—often the rungs younger workers climb toward stable, middle-income careers. The Fund warns that this “hollowing out” of entry-level jobs “threatens long-term mobility for an entire generation.” It advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a cushion for displaced workers.

Reskilling remains another challenge. Research from LinkedIn found that many professionals feel overwhelmed by the pressure to learn new AI tools, describing it as “another job” added to their workload. Nearly half said they aren’t using AI to its full potential, and 30% admitted they rarely or never use it (31% acknowledged exaggerating their AI skills at work). Meanwhile, more than a third of executives say they plan to hire and evaluate employees based on AI expertise.

For many workers, there’s no simple path through this AI-powered transition. While it’s human nature to ignore major disruptions, experts say there are real advantages to embracing AI and exploring the possibilities. The best strategy may be to expand their use of AI beyond general chatbots like ChatGPT, and find specialized tools—perhaps including new AI agents—that can handle mundane, low-skill tasks. Doing so frees up time for higher-order, uniquely human work, much of which requires creativity and empathy.

What the Google antitrust decision means for AI search companies

A federal court in Washington, D.C., decided that Google will not have to sell off its Chrome browser after being found guilty of monopolistic practices in internet search and advertising last year. The remedies chosen by Judge Amit Mehta are more surgical: Google will no longer be able to ink exclusive deals that establish its search service as the default on other platforms.

That change directly impacts one of Google’s most lucrative arrangements: its multibillion-dollar payments to Apple to keep Google Search as the iPhone’s default. Google will likely go on paying Apple to put Google Search on the popular devices, but it will no longer be able to pay Apple to be the only search service on the devices. This opens the door for other search providers—including new AI search upstarts—to pay for a presence on Apple devices too.

Mehta’s decision also compels Google to periodically share its search index—including data on the quality and popularity of links—with competitors. Google built its whole company around its search index, a vast and ever-changing database of all the sites and content on the internet (or at least everything that Google’s web crawlers can reach). Now Google will have to share that crown jewel, including data about the quality and popularity of indexed web content, with a new wave of AI search providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. These new players—which deliver fully fleshed answers to users, not just a list of links—can use the index data to improve the quality and accuracy of their own search results.

Activists are using AI to unmask ICE agents

The federal government has long failed to pass any meaningful legislation to protect people’s privacy from surveillance technologies. Now, in a strange twist, the government has become a victim of its own inaction. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids spread and become more bold, activists are attempting to use AI to unmask, then publicly identify, ICE agents.

Politico reports that a Netherlands-based immigration activist Dominick Skinner and a group of volunteers have developed an AI model that analyzes the faces of ICE agents within screenshots of ICE raid and arrest videos. If at least 30% of the agent’s face is visible, the AI can generate a reasonable facsimile of the agent’s whole face. Using the AI-generated image, activists can use image search tools to find the ICE agent on social media or elsewhere, Politico reports. Skinner says his group has now publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. The AI unmasking project is part of a larger effort called the ICE List, an activist web archive that has published the identities of more than 100 ICE employees and agents.

The Department of Homeland Security insists that the ICE agents wear the masks to avoid being doxxed and harassed. But critics say the sight of masked agents (sometimes displaying no badge or other agency identification) manhandling alleged undocumented immigrants on the street presents a powerful image of callous authoritarianism and unaccountable government force.