by Gary Mintchell | Feb 27, 2026 | Business, Commentary, Generative AI
Update 2: Check out this Om Malik look at the Block news. He looks at how Dorsey tried to switch the narrative from bad management to AI. Wall Street rewarded job cuts–as it always does. Not vision.
Update: John Gruber at Daring Fireball takes a similar stance on the news (knowing the history of Jack Dorsey), while The New York Times takes the AI hype road in its headline regarding the news.
Media companies are struggling to get beyond the hype of AI into reality. Once my favorite news source, Axios has suddenly become the media cheerleader for AI. You can still get the gist of news there, but use your BS filter when approaching AI items. Morning Brew is usually much more balanced—and witty.
Case in point. I’m copying news about Jack Dorsey’s layoffs at Block. Remember Dorsey? He led Twitter before it had to sell. Seemingly everyone in Silicon Valley knew that Twitter was terribly bloated. Proof—Elon Musk slashed 80% of the workforce and the company continued to operate.
AI is, of course, another in a long line of automation tools that will assist humans in doing their jobs. Studies I’ve seen reveal some usefulness of AI in programming. But it’s far from actually replacing humans.
Dorsey goes to Block. Hmm. Seems like it was bloated, also. He announces a 40% reduction in workforce. He, like predecessor CEO such as at Amazon, blames AI for the ability of teams to do more with fewer people. Financial analysts typically look beyond AI into the basic financial need to reduce a bloated workforce.
I bet your experience mirrors my experience that smaller teams are more likely to get things done. If you’re not sure, I encourage checking out Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansson of 37 Signals and The Rework Podcast.
As a professor at university used to use on tests—compare and contrast.
From Axios
1 big thing: Radical workforce cut may embolden CEOs
It was only a matter of time before a future-thinking CEO took the leap and replaced thousands of workers with AI, Axios’ Dan Primack writes.
Why it matters: Block chair Jack Dorsey did just that yesterday. Wall Street’s standing ovation — the fintech company’s shares soared more than 20% in today’s premarket trading — gives other CEOs permission, even incentive, to consider the same thing.
Dorsey, an iconoclast who co-founded and once led Twitter, was blunt in announcing via X that Block will say goodbye to 40% of its 10,000-person workforce, cutting the company to just under 6,000. Block, based in Oakland, Calif., includes Square, Cash App, Afterpay and the Tidal music platform.
Dorsey wrote on X that “something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”
He said he “had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.”
Dorsey added in a shareholder letter: “We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week.”
Zoom in: The fintech’s stock rallied as much as 25% on the news, after having been down more than 16% over the past year and 76% over the past five years.
Block’s declining stock price put Dorsey under pressure to make changes, although he denied that the layoffs were related to Block’s financial performance.
Reality check: CEOs will look to see if they can follow Dorsey’s lead, and most will realize they don’t have the talent to do it. This would destroy most companies — it’s very hard to do.
The big picture: Wall Street was captivated early this week by a viral doomsday scenario for AI’s coming effect on white-collar work. But the stated reasons for most other big AI-related layoffs so far have been much less explicit than Dorsey’s.
Many AI executives and investors insist that the tech will lead to temporary labor dislocations rather than net job loss, echoing the Industrial Revolution.
The bottom line: It’s one thing to replace people with machines. It’s quite another to prove that it makes business sense. If Block can grow its top line with a much smaller headcount, the rest of corporate America will take notice.
From Morning Brew
Payments company Block to slash staff by 40% due to AI pivot. In conjunction with its earnings call yesterday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said it will reduce headcount “from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000.” The company will restructure around “smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work,” according to Block CFO Amrita Ahuja. Affected staff members will receive 20 weeks of base pay, which the company expects will contribute to $450 million to $500 million in charges, primarily in the first quarter. Dorsey also said, “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.” Block stock rose 24% in after-hours trading following the announcement.—HVL
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 20, 2026 | Business, Commentary, Leadership
I was intrigued by an item in News Items by John Ellis quoting the Wall Street Journal regarding the continued slide in manufacturing employment in the US and the prolonged slide in manufacturing activity. The first Trump administration elicited promises of moving manufacturing to the US with the building of plants. Little of that actually happened. The Biden administration invested a few billion, but what has that brought. The second Trump administration thought that tariffs would provide the protection from competition to jump start manufacturing.
I pose the idea that it takes more than investment. And protection from competition really just allows local companies leeway to raise prices. What it really takes is better, bolder, visionary leadership to search out customer needs, design products they will buy, and then produce the products.
It takes more than waving a few dollars at the problem.
This podcast is sponsored by Inductive Automation.
You can view on YouTube or download on your favorite podcast client.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 6, 2026 | Commentary
I’ve been a fan of Om Malik’s writing for decades. There was Red Herring magazine and his GigaOm website. He’s tapped into the tech scene, thoughtful, and insightful.
As you peruse the news, do you get a feeling that it’s just announcement after announcement, video scene after video scene?
You don’t have time to breathe, let alone think, between the decreasing intervals between news cycles.
Check out Om’s Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why.
Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.
People once told me they labeled news sources as politically liberal or conservative. I told them they were missing the point. It was really something like sensational (to capture and hold your attention) or very sensational.
The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”
I empathize and followed a similar path.
For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noiser. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment.
So, why does nothing work?
Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.
With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single story or news event much weight. More content means already fragmented attention fractures even further.
What’s the new meme?
Velocity has taken over.
Remember the good old days of Facebook and Twitter before the rise of algorithms?
Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain.
We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, now you know why.
For example, YouTube.
Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to prepare their reviews.
In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head start gave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using the product for a few months.
These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is going to notice.
The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.
I’m not sure to what extent this has invaded the manufacturing technology space—but I have met a few who are trying. As for me, I’m a thinker and prefer waiting and evaluating. If you don’t like that, it is OK. I am what I am.
Om concludes:
The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months, and no one will read it. It’s the investigation that requires patience. It’s the work of understanding before passing judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.
I like signal rather than noise. Read his entire essay. It’s worth it.
Click on the Follow button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a weekly email update of posts. Click on the mail icon to subscribe to additional email thoughts.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 3, 2026 | Business, Commentary, News
Have you who live in the US noticed how the European and Asian automation and control companies have reduced their footprint in America? Not only that, have you noted how (except for Rockwell Automation) the US-based companies increasingly held their conferences overseas?
Long before Trump, a few politicians recognized American manufacturing’s demise.
Reflecting on my experiences in manufacturing and then writing about it, I long ago noted the “Walmart effect”. That company changed advertising decades ago from “Made in America” to “Lowest Prices Always.” Forcing their suppliers to reduce their price every year forced them to drive all costs both material and labor to the lowest possible. And not only Walmart.
Checking today’s News Items by John Ellis, I spotted this item he cites from the Wall Street Journal.
The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended. Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023. An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office. (Source: wsj.com)
Investment is good. However, it doesn’t come first. What comes first are entrepreneurs—either independent or in a corporation—who see a customer need to solve. They develop a product. Then they need investment to make it—especially investment and encouragement to make it here. And encouragement in a way that does not screw the locality through sucking up resources without paying for them.
I suggest that it’s not merely the Walmart effect. It’s really the lack of imagination and engineering coupled with too many finance majors.
Click on the Follow button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a weekly email update of posts. Click on the mail icon to subscribe to additional email thoughts.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 26, 2026 | Automation, Commentary, Generative AI
Vijay Narayan, Business Unit Head, Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy, Utilities at Cognizant, recently spoke with me about what they are seeing in their consulting work with manufacturing and logistics companies. We broached on AI, workforce, and strategy.
Cognizant promotes developing and using digital twins to pilot new machines enabling simulation for optimization. AI for predictive maintenance has been useful for efficiency. He finds progress in adopting automation across the industries he serves as staggered. Same with AI. Companies take one step up and find they can’t go back. The most useful sponsorship for adoption in his experience comes from the CFO. That office asks about how to gain efficiency. At the local level, the plant manager holds the keys to effective adoption.
Following our conversation, I found this press release about a report on analysis of how AI will impact work and jobs.
The new research reveals AI is changing the workforce faster than previously reported: it’s now capable of handling $4.5 trillion in U.S. work tasks and impacting potentially 93% of jobs today. However, the report also underscores that AI is not a blanket solution for advancing labor productivity: human involvement and adaptable operations continue to be vital to capturing the full value potential of AI.
Cognizant’s analysis for New Work, New World 2026 is based on a reassessment of 18,000 tasks and 1,000 jobs in the O*NET labor database, with a focus on how jobs and tasks could be assisted or automated by AI. Specifically, the new study points to an accelerated pace of change in “exposure scores”—the degree to which a job can be assisted or automated by AI—and highlights how those evolving changes can influence labor and enterprise success.
Click on the Follow button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a weekly email update of posts. Click on the mail icon to subscribe to additional email thoughts.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 14, 2026 | Commentary, Generative AI
Cal Newport’s year-end wrap-up of AI in 2025 echoes Dr. Seuss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
Check out his podcast Ep 386: Was 2025 a Great or Terrible Year for AI? (w/ Ed Zitron). For added bonus points, read his newsletter Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025?
Newport’s entre into the discussion:
Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman made a bold prediction: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Soon after, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, elaborated on this claim when he stated in an interview that 2025 would be the year “that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing…to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He provided examples, such as filling out paperwork and booking hotel rooms. An Axios article covering Weil’s remarks provided a blunt summary: “2025 is the year of AI agents.”
I’ve written to the founders of Axios about their use of click bait and misleading headlines. The content is often spot-on, but ignore the headlines. Aside from that, there was supposed to be a “hockey stick” growth curve in power and usefulness of Generative AI and Agentic AI. Heck, I even wrote a few columns on those relating to manufacturing.
The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-step computer programming problems. It seemed natural that this same skill might easily generalize to other types of tasks. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, became so enthusiastic about these possibilities that early in 2025, he claimed that AI agents would imminently unleash a “digital labor revolution” worth trillions of dollars.
Once again reality beats hype.
But here’s the thing: none of that ended up happening.
As I report in my most recent New Yorker article, titled “Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025,” AI agents failed to live up to their hype. We didn’t end up with the equivalent of Claude Code or Codex for other types of work. And the products that were released, such as ChatGPT Agent, fell laughably short of being ready to take over major parts of our jobs. (In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-down menu on a real estate website.)
Voice of a skeptic:
Silicon Valley skeptic Gary Marcus told me that the underlying technology powering these agents – the same large language models used by chatbots – would never be capable of delivering on these promises. “They’re building clumsy tools on top of clumsy tools,” he said. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy implicitly agreed when he said, during a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast, that there had been “overpredictions going on in the industry,” before then adding: “In my mind, this is really a lot more accurately described as the Decade of the Agent.”
What I have been trying to parse out for all of last year in my AI interviews:
I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.
For those trying to reach me with more AI hype—I am most interested in those pieces of actually useful AI that are helping people do their jobs while providing benefits to organizations. Let’s see more of that. I want to know what’s real.
Click on the Follow button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a weekly email update of posts. Click on the mail icon to subscribe to additional email thoughts.
