CEO to staff: You're not getting a raise. We're spending on AI instead
businessinsider.comThis seems like AI washing to me. If the company was already doing well, the AI investments should allow it to grow faster and therefore still be able to give employees bonuses. This announcement implies they view this as a zero-sum investment. Well-run businesses tend not to think this way.
I’m honestly wondering where this “win in the market with AI” goes for companies. It’s not unique to this place, it’s in every layoff tweet. What’s the strategy? Just “AI harder” than others?
I’m working at an AI pilled company and I just don’t see the gigantic improvements. Not in my work, not in anyone else’s. It’s a great technology, we finish some tasks faster, some tasks really 100x faster, sure, but it’s a <2x improvement at an organization scale. It’s not like suddenly we cleaned out the defect list. It’s not like I can use any app without seeing 5 bugs in the first five minutes. It’s not like I got any meaningful new features.
Ever since 2022, interest rates (and thus the reasons for investment) have been what passes for high these days. Hence companies running out of runway because they can't keep loaning more.
AI is an excuse.
Not hiring replacements for the few percent of staff which churn every year would probably save the same amount of money without demoralising your staff.
This looks like a simple cost cutting to boost earnings - their sales have been steadily decreasing over the past few years whilst EPS have been increasing, which isn’t a healthy look
The secret is while they flipping over, they believe whatever that is stays. That way they can claim the improvement as their ingenuity. The correct response is take their knowhow which is their moat but not protected by law and walk over to their competitors. Tank their moat as fast as possible. They want to play we should help them play more challengingly.
It's not like their staff can quit in this job market.
> The decision applies to employees in countries where regulators do not require market-aligned salary adjustments.
“You” being the operative word. The writing is on the wall when an AI-centric cloud company with falling profits can’t compensate its workers in an age where other companies are scrambling to jam AI into everything. It reads as a last ditch effort to resuscitate the business.
It won't be long before workers will be paid only to automate their job away. The profits of course will not go to the workers; they will be shown the door once their value has been extracted into the automaton.
If you will automate all the jobs, who is buying your goods or services?
Consumers won't, but interfacing businesses will. As an example, imagine an accounting business -- they still need to interface with some payroll and taxation systems.
That's just moving problem little bit down. Sure accounting companies are B2B by nature, but if businesses which they are doing accounting for, cease to exist, because they don't have consumers, accounting companies will cease to exist too.
I am working in a company which is B2B as well. But if our customer would lose consumers, we are screwed as well.
Yes, but banks will be around to fund new B2B ventures (that keep pushing the problem down). For example, a bank will fund a real estate+business venture that is a medical office. The business will be expected to also derive partial revenue from selling training data to AI giants.
Ultimately I think people will have to fight for basic benefits from the government derived from taxing business profits. The benefits must include food, healthcare, and some cash. Instead, the dumb voters voted for a government that took away food and healthcare benefits, so it's partially the voters fault for making their situation worse.
In this thread, people learn about capitalism.
The industry should give more security in exchange for reduced pay. We need a social movement for this.
Will the CEO also not get any raise?
Why should the executives have to suffer?
You're right, my bad. They took all the risk.
Next: Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mmmk… oh oh! and I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up.