employees

rehire old employees

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A few years ago, Ford plunged headlong into automating its production chain. It wanted its artificial intelligence systems to check each part and detect faults before the vehicle left the factory. On paper, it seemed like the perfect plan; in practice, A.I. showed some problems more complicated to correct that translated into an increase in recalls of their cars. The Ford reliability problems Not only were they not solved with the investment in automation, so the company had to thoroughly analyze the problem and, now, they believe they have found the ideal solution: rehire former engineers to fix AI goofs. The mistake of trusting everything to AI. Charles Poon, vice president of hardware engineering at Ford, acknowledged that “we mistakenly thought that just by introducing artificial intelligence and incorporating the design requirements we had, we would get a high-quality product.” It wasn’t like that. The problem wasn’t just in the technology they were using. He was in what he had been taught. An AI is worth what its training data is worth, and Ford had left out the people who could bring the most knowledge and experience to that training. As I collected Bloombergthe company acknowledged that it left aside the knowledge of its most senior engineers in key phases of the process. The veterans “with gray beards” return. Ford’s response was to rehire many of the engineers it had laid off to bring back all that knowledge. In the last three years it has incorporated 350 engineers with experience in product development and quality control. Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer, pointed out that these specialists “look for weak points,” and above all, find solutions before they become a real problem for the customer. Their mission was not to replace AI, but to occupy the place they should have adopted from the beginning: to be supervisors of the AI’s work and to correct it when its results were incorrect. In addition, these expert employees are in charge of training new talents, ensuring generational change. Something that was especially concerned to the CEO of Ford. The change is noticeable in the quality figures Did you compensate for this change in direction with the incorporation of engineers as supervisors of that automation? The numbers say yes. Ford went from place 15 among generalist brands in 2023 to lead that category in 2026. It improved by 41 fewer problems per 100 vehicles compared to the previous year. Ford was the brand that experienced the greatest progress among all non-premium brands. Three models, the F-150, Mustang and Super Duty, topped their segments for the second year in a row. Only Porsche and Genesis were ahead of Ford in the general reliability ranking prepared by the JD Power studiowhich measures failures detected in the first 90 days of use. Less guarantees, fewer revisions, more savings. The improvement in quality is also noticeable in Ford’s bottom line. Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, spoke of hundreds of millions of dollars saved thanks to the drop in warranty costs. The company expects to close the year with billion of dollars in operational savings, in part thanks to this quality work. Even so, Ford remains the brand with more security calls in the USA. In 2025 alone it issued 153 recalls, almost double the previous record held by General Motors. These notices affected almost 13 million vehicular. The latest data suggests that Ford has managed to change its dynamics by improving reliability figures. In Xataka | Henry Ford: “I would rather 20,000 employees be happy and well fed than a few become millionaires” Image | ford

The price you will pay will be the dismissal of 100,000 employees and the closure of more factories

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Just a year and a half ago, Volkswagen reached an agreement with the unions to lay off “only” 35,000 employees to ensure the continuity of some factories, ensuring their operation until 2030. a bad drinkbut acceptable in order to preserve the employment of many other Volkswagen employees. Today the German group has announced that this pact it’s broken. The numbers don’t work. The German magazine Manager Magazine advanced that the group’s CEO, Oliver Blume, had presented a new adjustment plan to the board of directors. The number of layoffs is the highest that the German manufacturer has ever announced: up to 100,000 layoffs worldwide, and four factories in Germany with closure on the table. The size of the problem. Volkswagen closed 2025 with more than 662,000 employees all over the world. Losing 100,000 jobs means losing almost one in six workers. As and as highlighted the agency EFEthis is the largest restructuring in the group’s 89-year history. The plants designated for closure are those in Hannover, Zwickau and Emden, all three of the Volkswagen brand, plus the Audi factory in Neckarsulm. The plan also includes a 15% reduction in investments for the next five years and a general spending cut of 11 billion euros before the end of the decade. The accounts don’t add up. The numbers for the first quarter of 2026 explain this drastic move by Volkswagen. Operating profit fell by 14% year-on-year to 2.5 billion euroswith a margin of 3.3%, while sales fell 7%. Analysts expected almost 4,000 million in operating profit. Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz left no room for doubt in the seriousness of the situation in the results report for the first quarter of the year: “We must radically transform our business model and achieve structural and sustainable improvements.” The group has already reduced around 29,000 positions from 2023 and cut its production capacity from 12 to 9 million vehicles per year. For management, these measures are not enough to compensate for the drop in sales. Chinese pressure and tariffs. There are two sources of pressure that have accelerated the deterioration of Volkswagen’s situation. The first and most obvious are the Chinese manufacturers. In 2025, cars made in China reached 7% of sales in the EUexceeding one million units for the first time. At the same time, European exports to China plummeted by 43%. Volkswagen, which has one of its largest markets in China, has been losing share there for years due to the unstoppable push of local Chinese brands. The second key factor comes from the opposite extreme: the United States. The tariffs that Trump has imposed on European vehicles have hit hard a group that has most of its factories in countries affected by the tariffs. Blume he recognized it at last week’s general meeting of shareholders: “Never before has the risk situation been so high.” To gain liquidity, the German manufacturer has just closed the sale of 51% of its Everllence marine engine division to Bain Capital for 7.4 billion euros. This could be just one more of future asset sales to obtain more liquidity. The union wall. As might be expected, the plan has not been well received by unions. The late 2024 agreement with IG Metall promised that there would be no factory closures or forced layoffs in Germany until at least 2030. The new plan blows up those commitments. Daniela Cavallo, president of the Volkswagen works council, and Christiane Benner, head of IG Metall, reacted with a joint statement of frontal rejection of the announced layoffs: “If these plans go ahead, we will stop them with all our forces.” On July 9, the supervisory board of the Volkswagen group will debate this workforce adjustment plan, which would affect one in every six of the company’s employees. The decisions made at that meeting will decide the future of Volkswagen. In Xataka | Volkswagen cars are no longer as popular as they used to be, so Volkswagen wants to start making… missiles Image | Volkswagen

Richard Liu, CEO of “Chinese Amazon”, points out the fate of 700,000 employees

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One of the internal debates that some of the largest technology and logistics companies are having to take on revolves around the automation of your templates: replace human workers with robots that do not sleep, do not get sick nor do they demand salary increases. At the same time, they are faced with the dilemma of leaving a good part of their staff unemployed. Richard Liu, founder and CEO of e-commerce giant JD.com, considered the Amazon of China, believes that replace your employees It is inevitable, but consider that technology will “complement” humans, but human labor will find a new space. The key, according to Liu, is for companies to prepare their staff to fill it. The diagnosis, without euphemisms. Liu assured in the framework of the summit of APEC Economic Leaders (Asia-Pacific Economic Corporation) held in Shenzhen that “In the future, when robots deliver packages, the day will come when delivery people will no longer be needed.” But Liu added that he is not going to leave his employees stranded. “Without a doubt, robots will be the ones who deliver the packages. But I really don’t want our 700,000 colleagues to go hungry or lose their jobs,” the manager insisted. The CEO of JD.com no longer proposes a hypothetical replacement of employees with robots, but rather takes it for granted. That is, the question is no longer whether it will happen. What large companies have on the table is when this change will occur, and what is done in the meantime. Amazon was already raising a similar issue with the replacement of 600,000 warehouse employees with robots. JD.com bill more than 150,000 million dollars a year and has more than 900,000 employees. That its CEO speaks in these terms about replacing more than two-thirds of its staff is a very serious matter. The Nirvana plan: 120 schools for 700,000 people. However, JD.com’s approach does not stop at drawing a future of labor collapse, but rather assumes that the new situation will require human labor in other tasks. As I collected Financial Timesthe company has signed contracts with 120 centers education throughout China. Its objective is to train current delivery drivers in robot repair and maintenance tasks in a training program called Plan Nirvana. The idea is that those who today deliver packages on the street end up working in offices programming and maintaining the robots that have replaced them. Liu spoke of “white collar employees” as a destiny for those who are today workers. That means training them as robot technicians, AI trainers and maintenance personnel. The great challenge for JD.com is the scale of converting 700,000 delivery workers into specialized technicians. China: the ground that can sink. Liu’s announcement comes just as a report estimated that China will reach 320 million workers of the “gig economy”. Five years ago there were 200 million. That figure represents about 40% of all urban employment. They are delivery drivers, app drivers or factory workers. People with little economic margin to face a long or uncertain transition that replaces them with robots. However, China seems willing to lead this industrial transformation at all costs and has put robotics at the center of his five year plan approved in March. Xi Jinping’s goal is to make robots the engine of Chinese growth. The government steps on the accelerator of automation and at the same time tries do not overwhelm the most vulnerable with its progress. JD.com, like Amazon, is already doing it. The Chinese trading giant, like its western counterpartalready operates warehouses without staffdelivery drones and autonomous vans in China. At Shenzhen airport, delivery robots They already bring meals at boarding gates, and others they travel by subway to resupply stores. The technology that Liu claims will replace his delivery drivers is already in the testing phase within his operations. Amazon now exceeds one million of robots in its logistics centers and could stop hiring more than 600,000 people until 2033. However, what sets Liu apart is the directness of his speech, which removes some of the uncertainty (and rejection) that are causing this entire process of automation of the labor market among employees. In Xataka | We believed that AI was going to retire an entire generation of workers early. The opposite is happening Image | World Economic Forum, VX Logistics

“I would rather 20,000 employees be happy and well fed than a few become millionaires”

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Three Kings’ Eve in 1914 appeared in The New York Times a surprising announcement: Henry Ford, Head of Ford Motor Company, will distribute ten million dollars among his employees throughout 1914. He will do so semi-annually and it will be an addition to the salary of each of the workers. The figure of 10 million dollarsas Henry Ford himself would confirm to the newspaper in an edition a few days later, was an estimate. He planned to distribute that amount at the end of the year but it could rise to 12 million dollars. Or it could be less. Those 10 million represented half of the profits expected at the end of the year. The day after the publication of the announcement, The New York Times echoed the madness: 10,000 employees showed up at the door of the Ford factory in Detroit to get a new job. That day, the company was already paying another 15,000 employees for whom entering the factory was more complicated than ever. “I think it is better for the nation, and much better for humanity, for 20,000 or 30,000 people to be happy and well fed than for a few to become millionaires,” Ford himself assured the journalist who went to cover the news. The announcement caused such commotion at the time that many changed jobs to form lines on the Ford Model T assembly line, as explained at the beginning of that same article in which the case of a 16-year-old boy who changed fields from the factory is told. But it also raised eyebrows among the competition to the point that it was questioned whether the owner of the company was not engaging in some type of anti-competitive action, they state in Barrons. “If Ford wants to have fun, so be it. He can afford it. Others can’t,” noted rival automaker Joseph J. Cole on Five Dollar Day. Five Dollar Day On Three Kings’ Day 1914, the day following the appearance of the aforementioned advertisement in The New York Timeshe Detroit Free-Press He referred to it as “Five Dollar Day”. This exemplified that Ford would pay at least five dollars to its employees with this new measure, double what it had been doing until now. As we said and as Henry Ford himself tried to explain in the article in The New York Times, It was not a salary increase. The worker continued to earn the same amount but, he calculated, this is what he would earn if a dividend of 10 million dollars was distributed among everyone. Ford was asked if he was a “socialist” for distributing profits among his employees, which was immediately denied. But he presented his theory: if workers performed at a good level, they should enjoy part of those benefits. And if they had the incentive to win it, they would work better. Furthermore, no exceptions were made, the sweeper and the person in charge of his line would collect the dividends that corresponded to them. That is, a payment strategy for objectives without distinctions. What Henry Ford discovered is that chain assembly was essential to impose his car on the competition. The higher the production volume, the lower the cost for the brand and the lower the cost for the customer. If the worker was attracted by the salary, there were more possibilities of attracting workers and continuing to feed the production chain. The result is that in a market where no one else could produce their cars at that rate and price, the Ford Model T became the best-selling car in the world. In fact, It is still among the 10 best-selling cars in history despite the fact that the production process has been perfected to the point of satiety. Car mass production completely changed the industry. He fordism It laid its foundations by rewarding workers. Much has been written about it, about Henry Ford’s intention to create a new middle class and for them to be the consumers of the products they manufactured. In Forbes They cast doubt on this theory repeated over time. By increasing the money to be received, they explain, what Henry Ford intended was to establish a workforce committed to the company and with a very low turnover. Employment was tough and in 1913 alone more than 52,000 people passed through the company despite the fact that 13,000 people worked in the factory. This high turnover prevented the assembly line from operating at full capacity because replacements had to be found and employees had to be retrained. They even claim that the assembly line came to a standstill due to the number of employees who left their jobs in search of a different job even though at that time charging just over two dollars was already good money. Doubling them and growing them to five dollars was a promise that was difficult to believe but also difficult to reject. Forbes He points out that Ford even hired people who went to employees’ homes to certify that the worker was behaving “in the American way.” That is to say, he kept himself from bad company and from getting drunk outside of office hours. And alcoholism was one of the biggest problems that the company’s assembly line was dealing with. Whether or not the corresponding part of the bonus was delivered depended on the verdict of these people. What they explain in this medium is that the theory that Ford wanted its own employees to buy its products is not true because, simply, it would have a very small impact on the company’s final accounts, but they do highlight that, sometimes, the quickest way to reduce costs is to increase salary costs, as paradoxical as it may sound. They say that John R. Lee, Ford’s advisor, defended his position by pointing out that “a man who comes from a well-balanced home, who does not fear for the basic necessities of life of those he cares for, who does not live in constant … Read more

Freepik became Magnific to embrace AI. Now it proposes an ERE for almost a third of its employees in Spain

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Generative artificial intelligence is not only changing the tools we use to create images, videos or designs. It is also forcing many companies to ask themselves what they want to be in a market that moves at an unusual speed. freepik It is one of those cases that we have seen up close: it was born associated with graphic resources and for years it was a reference for those looking for images, vectors or templates. Your conversion into Magnific He wanted to tell precisely another story, that of a company that embraced AI to leave its previous stage behind. We are faced with news that fell this Wednesday afternoon: Magnific has raised a ERE in Spain. According to the information collected by Xataka, the procedure is still in the negotiation phase and involves around 30% of the 350 employees that the company has in the country. The nuance is important because Magnific is today a company with an international presence and some 450 employees globally: the ERE, according to what we know so far, affects its Spanish organization, not the entire global workforce. An ERE in full transformation towards AI It is worth stopping for a moment on the term. An employment regulation file is not equivalent, in itself, to dismissals already carried out, but rather to the legal procedure provided in Spain to propose a collective dismissal for economic, technical, organizational or productive reasons. The Workers’ Statute establishes that a period of consultations must be opened with the legal representation of the workers, a phase designed to negotiate the scope of the processits conditions and possible measures to reduce or mitigate its impact. In other words: what is now open is a procedure with prior negotiation before an eventual final decision. After hearing the news, we have contacted Magnific to find out its position. The company confirms the procedure and refers to the following statement: “We are in an internal process that affects part of the organization in Spain and is subject to a period of negotiation with the workers’ representation. As long as this process remains open, we are not going to make public evaluations out of respect for the people involved and the process itself.” To understand the context it is advisable to return to the starting point. Freepik became known as a platform for graphic assets: images, vectors, icons, templates and other materials that designers, content creators and marketing teams could incorporate into their projects. Magnific represents another ambition. The company now presents itself as a creative platform based on generative AIwith tools to generate, edit and transform visual content, and integrating models and capabilities that no longer fully fit with that initial idea of ​​a large repository of digital assets. Images | Magnificent In Xataka | Meta laid off 8,000 people and relocated 7,000. The result: the work environment is unbreathable

While Google brags about AI, its employees do something else on an internal social network: laugh at it

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If there’s one company pushing AI it’s… well, apparently all of them right now. The industry has rushed into the arms of this technology and, with so much money investedthey must use it for something. Google is one of those companies and Sundar Pichai, CEO of the company, has on occasion boasted about how quickly Google itself has adopted AI and how much its engineers use the tools. The boss assures that 75% of Google’s new code It is generated by AI (these companies have an obsession with pointing out that their code is made by AI, Tell Anthropic). The point is that these engineers have an internal document in which they record their daily work with AI, but not to mark progress or benefits, but for something much more curious. Laugh at her. Google engineers making Google AI memes I am one of those who thinks that, if they take away the memes, what are we left with? I have come to have conversations directly based on memes, both established and invented, and I love that both Google engineers and I have something in common: we like crappy and classic memes. Because with generative AI you have people making these crappy memes with… AI, but the ‘sauce’ of the matter is looking for low resolution images and making a crappy edit. That’s part of the joke of the meme, and the ones from Google are great. Obviously, they have not been making them public because Google would not be very happy about it (in fact it has spoken out about it), but this matter has come to light thanks to an investigation by the media. 404 in which they have recreated some of these memes that Google employees themselves made not on any Monday, but on the most important date on the calendar for the company: I/O 2026. While Google presented those AI features that engineers had been working on for the past few months, those same engineers were sharing memes about the presentation on the aforementioned private ‘board’. These memes are ‘voted’ with a system of emojis like the classic raised thumbs. And there are not a few who enter the game. Google meme recreated by 404 Media This one is tough from the start: “I/O Announcement: New Ways to SLOP.” It’s a direct attack on the company that, these employees say, quickly received more than 100 thumbs up from other employees. Google meme recreated by 404 Media Me, working. AI Bro: “still not using AI? Why is it taking you so long? AI is magic, are you a muggle? The best AI tool has been released today” Google meme recreated by 404 Media Jetski, why did you do that stupid thing I told you not to do? Jetski: “Jetski is an internal Google tool” Google meme recreated by 404 Media Jetski has created a functional operating system on its own. Google Engineer: I doubt it Google meme recreated by 404 Media Barbie: what happiness making changes to the code with vibe coding Oppenheimer is the human who must review that code written by a machine Google meme recreated by 404 Media Companies trying to get you to use their new AI features Beyond these artisanal memes, there are two curious things. The first is that several of these engineers share that boredom with AI that is also seen in part of social networks, and it is curious that not even the people who make the tool buy the marketing discourse of those who sell that tool. The second, and getting more serious, is that there are those who want to escape the development of this technology, but doesn’t see alternatives because all the technologies they are in the same boat. There are statements like “I have no motivation and feel burned out by the constant changes, but I have no alternative” or “AI-related projects are prioritized while everything else is put on the back burner.” There are also statements that show a disconnect between internal work policies and the need to push AI development as far as possible. “We are finding that AI has relieved the pressure and bottleneck in code generation,” says another employee, “but everything else has become a bottleneck: build times, testing, the delays in human review, the comparatively slow infrastructure, and the version comparison system.” “The conclusion that many colleagues are reaching is that Google’s infrastructure and engineering culture was built to be stable and intentionally slow, but the pressures to accelerate the pace using AI are colliding with that strategy,” says another. In the end, It is logical that they are pushing this technology internally. Goal, for example, also doesputting pressure from above for employees to use it. And there are good things, but the problem is that these large companies are finding themselves in a situation in which the tools have changed a lot, as well as the tasks, but the core of the ‘bureaucracy’, so to speak, has remained the same. For example, another employee claims that he has completed many tasks quickly thanks to AI, but when the work is finished needs a human review which then takes the same time as always. That’s where the bottleneck is. What Google says Memes are funny, but Google sure wasn’t amused. Have you answered anything? Well yes. 404 includes two statements from Google. On the one hand, the first one they sent: “We encourage our engineers to rigorously test and critique our internal tools. That honest feedback loop is vital to how we build technology. AI coding models are designed to assist developers, but it’s critical that we keep humans in the process, including the oversight and expertise of our world-class engineering talent. “We continue to refine our internal tools based on employee feedback to ensure they are facilitating, not hindering, daily productivity.” Very marketing, but the curious thing is that, after 404 published the article showing the memes, andThe Google spokesperson sent another statement: “We encourage our engineers to … Read more

The CEO of a technology company has explained to his employees why he will not raise their salary: they will spend it on AI

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That AI doesn’t take your job It does not free you from suffering the consequences of its implementation. And if not, tell the Teradata employees who have seen how their salaries were frozen this year, not to balance somewhat tight accounts, but because they have decided that every available dollar should go to AI. what has happened. They tell it in Business Insider. In January of this year, Teradata CEO Steve McMillan sent an internal message to the company’s 5,100 employees telling them that they should not expect a salary increase in 2026. Teradata’s goal for this year was to “win in the market with AI,” for which they need to increase investment in AI talent and tools. In Xataka An Atlassian engineer was fired. He then published a video on YouTube explaining how the company works When AI takes your paycheck. According to two employees of the company with more than ten years of service, they normally received an annual raise of between 2 and 4%, but this year they have been left without it, although they were able to receive a performance bonus and shares. This measure affects countries where regulations do not require wage adjustments linked to the market. Teradata is not the only company that has preferred to invest in AI over people. The consultant TTEC also decided to pause its contribution to the retirement plan 401(k) because they are going to focus on AI certifications, tools and automation. A choice, not an inevitability. Speaking to Business Insider, the labor expert Jennifer MossHe affirms that cutting employees’ pockets is not the only way out. It is true that both Teradata and TTEC have recorded revenue declines (5 and 3.2% respectively), but there are options such as resorting to external financing to pay for the investment in AI, cutting non-essential expenses or adjusting senior management compensation. It also mentions alternatives such as staggering investments in AI over time, resorting to strategic acquisitions or accepting lower margins for a limited period, instead of loading the entire cost of the transformation on salaries. AI and augmentations. We recently talked about the logic of salary increases has been broken with the arrival of AI. Previously, raises were granted based on parameters such as experience, seniority and job category. However, in the technology sector this scale has changed and in 2026 many companies have frozen their salaries. Although AI is not directly responsible as in the case of Teradata, it has contributed to creating an elite of highly paid profiles and has amplified the gap: now the company you work for and how central AI is to its business matters more than your simple progression from junior to senior. {“videoId”:”x806n3d”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”TECHNOLOGY and THE JOBS OF THE FUTURE – Insert Coin with Manuel Hidalgo”, “tag”:”employment”, “duration”:”1806″} Firing is expensive. Normally when we talk about the impact of AI on the labor market, we talk about layoffs. So far this year, it is estimated that 92,000 tech employees have lost their jobs with the excuse of compensating investments in AI. However, the reality is that the layoffs are costing them a fortune for compensation and exit packages. Oracle, for example, has reserved 2.1 billion to cover compensation after lay off 30,000 employees. To avoid legal disputes, giants like Microsoft or Google are betting on incentivized “voluntary layoffs”, assuming the enormous risk that their best AI talents will take the money and go to the competition. Image | Jakub ZerdzickiUnsplash In Xataka | These are not your imaginations: your CEO has developed delusions of grandeur with AI and it is part of a pattern (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news The CEO of a technology company has explained to his employees why he will not raise their salary: they will spend it on AI was originally published in Xataka by Amparo Babiloni .

Amazon wanted its employees to continue using AI. They have just cut their losses by asking that “you do not use AI just for the sake of using it”

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Amazon wanted to force its employees They will use AI as if there were no tomorrow. It implemented a tool that measured that usage, but after a few weeks the company realized something: people were using AI for absurd and worthless tasks. That has made Amazon make a decision forceful: abandon this initiative completely. what has happened. Amazon has had to cancel an experiment that measured the performance of its employees based on their use of corporate AI tools. The reason is simple: the engineers had begun to cheat and took the opportunity to automate completely useless and redundant tasks with the sole objective of climbing positions in the ranking. The labor scam has also absurdly increased the computing and infrastructure costs of the company itself, so the experiment has failed. The controversial Kirorank. The service in question was a scoreboard internally named Kirorank. It measured the activity of Amazon developers within Kiro, the “Claude Code of Amazon.” Amazon management wanted 80% of its programmers to use AI every week, an ambitious goal. What the developers ended up doing to score points with their bosses was deploying autonomous agents based on MeshClaw —the version of OpenClaw from Amazon—so that they would run processes in a loop and devour tokens for almost no purpose. The era of tokenmaxxing. Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell had to intervene this week before the staff to announce that developers no longer had to use this tool. Although he admitted that the experiment had originally been designed with “good intentions,” the practical result ended up being an economic hole due to the tokenmaxxingthat newly coined term that defines the action of artificially inflating the consumption of tokens to simulate productivity. “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” the executive demanded of his engineers, urging them to focus on creating better products instead of burning server resources. Cost through the roof. Treadwell’s announcement is no small matter, because this shows that companies have realized that cost control is necessary with AI. Companies like Anthropic—of which Amazon is the largest investor and whose Claude model they use intensively—have recently migrated from flat monthly fees to a per-use pricing model based strictly on token consumption. With this new billing scheme, the fact that the engineers dedicated themselves to “playing” with the bots to rise in the ranking significantly multiplied the bill that Amazon had to pay. Meta suffered the same problem. The Amazon case is not an isolated event. In the Meta and Microsoft offices identical situations have been experiencedwith employees sabotaging internal AI usage rankings through massive token consumption. The irony for Amazon is tremendous: the company has been executing waves of massive layoffs to cut costs and be able to finance its gigantic investment plan in data center infrastructure and AI. Your theoretical capex for 2026 It is estimated at 200,000 million dollars. Lesson learned: AI must be used well. The failure of this “gamification” of work has ended with Amazon abandoning this experiment. To prevent developers from cheating again, a company team is going to change metrics. Instead of measuring raw token consumption, they will analyze so-called “normalized deployments.” From now on, the goal will be to measure how many times the interaction with AI results in useful lines of code that are truly integrated into the company’s products. In Xataka | Customers demand that a human solve their problem. The surprising thing is that if humans serve them they think they are an AI

Samsung has made a lot of money from the memory crisis and its employees wanted their cut. Result: bonus of $340,000

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Employees at Samsung’s chip division were in high gear. And it is logical: your company is becoming gold thanks to the rise of data centers for AI. The demand for memory chips is extraordinary and that has caused Samsung’s market capitalization to skyrocket over a billion dollars. The company, yes, was being very selfish, but the threat of a strike He has made her see reason. The bonus of the crisis. Samsung Electronics workers have ratified a multimillion-dollar compensation agreement. One that will see employees of the semiconductor division receive an average bonus estimated at 513 million won (about $340,000). Agreement in extremis. The vote was approved by 74% of members of the majority union, and was closed in extremisbecause there were 90 minutes left before an indefinite strike began that threatened to paralyze this giant’s supply chains. The risk was too high. This agreement avoids a scenario that would have been catastrophic for the AI ​​industry. Samsung is the largest memory chip manufacturer in the worldand its modules power everything from mobile phones and electric vehicles to the GPUs used in AI data centers. Considering that the market is already stressed by the memory crisis and demand that far exceeds supply, adding this bottleneck would have had unforeseeable consequences. Only Saudi Aramco surpasses Samsung in estimated operating profits for 2026. Source: Bloomberg. Memory chips are pure gold. Samsung is on its way to close one of the most profitable years in its history, and its semiconductor division already indicated that its profits had multiplied by 48 in the first quarter of the year, an absolutely extraordinary figure. She is not the only one taking advantage of this phenomenon: SK Hynix and Micron They have broken the trillion-dollar market capitalization barrier for the first time. Some so much and others so little. Although the agreement has avoided a logistical disaster, it has also caused a very uncomfortable situation internally. The bonuses are linked to the financial performance of each business unit, which means that the 28,000 members of the chip division have benefited significantly, but the rest of the company has not. The differences are clear: Engineers in that division will receive bonuses of up to 600 million won ($400,000). They will share 40% of the total allocated as bonuses. Personnel in divisions such as home appliances or telephony will receive a testimonial bonus of just 6 million won ($4,000). They share 60% of the bonus, but there are many more in number, about 260,000 in total. The average salary of Samsung employees in 2025 was 158 million won (about $105,000) according to internal company information published in March. Unions divided. This asymmetry of 100 to 1 has caused great tensions to appear between departments, and this has also been noted in the negotiation and conversations in the union. While the majority bloc (which included the majority of workers in the semiconductor division) supported the agreement with more than 80% of the votes, the secondary union, which brings together employees from other divisions, rejected the document with only 21% of votes in favor. TM Roh takes action. The situation is so worrying that TM Roh, head of the device division, has sent an internal statement to try to calm things down. He has admitted that the results of the negotiation have left thousands of employees feeling “alienated, dispossessed and hurt by the company.” Top management has promised to monitor the conditions of each unit, but while Samsung has managed to control the chaos in its factories, it could have an even more disturbing problem on its hands. Image | Wikimedia Commons (Choi Kwang-mo), IntelUnsplash (Liam Briese) In Xataka | Samsung has just achieved a milestone that has not been recorded for eight years. The problem is that it is a mirage

7,000 employees move to AI while 8,000 clear their desks

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Thousands of Meta employees will go to sleep tonight without knowing if tomorrow they will have work. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has set a date and time to put end to the long agony that their employees were suffering in one of the further staff cuts that Meta has done in its recent history. According to advanced Reuters, the company has asked its US employees to telework tomorrow while layoff notices are rolled out. A measure that, beyond logistics, reflects the enormous tension that the company knew would be generated that day. Layoffs at 4 in the morning and without relief. According to an internal document to which the news agency has had access, the layoffs will be carried out in three waves that will begin at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, local time, in each region. This was detailed by Janelle Gale, director of Human Resources at Meta, in an internal memo shared with employees. “Many leaders will announce organizational changes,” the directive wrote. According to that document, the set of layoffs will affect about 10% of the entire workforce of the 77,986 employees that Meta had at the end of March. Furthermore, the company has withdrawn 6,000 offers of work to fill vacancies that were open. More than 7,000 employees relocated to AI. The layoffs are just one part of the restructuring movement that Mark Zuckerberg is carrying out. Meta has already reassigned more than 7,000 employees to new positions in new projects linked to AIaccording to the same Gale memo. Some transfers have already become effective before May 20, but in other cases employees will be notified throughout the same Wednesday. In that internal communication, Gale explained the goal of the changes: “We are now at a stage where many organizations can operate with a more horizontal structure, with smaller teams of groups or cohorts that can move more quickly and with greater autonomy.” The company also will eliminate middle management to flatten your hierarchy and speed up decision making. Weeks of anguish before the cut. The last few weeks at Meta have been especially hard for workers after the news of the layoffs leaked, and the hasty confirmation by the company. Meta employees rated the experience as “a hell of 28 days.” During these days a group of employees protested against the use of mouse tracking technology to monitor productivity, in a tension scenario in which many workers questioned their permanence in the company. The price of betting everything on AI. These changes are part of a profound renewal at Meta this year, which many are already calling Meta’s “second Year of Efficiency”, in reference to the first major restructuring that Mark Zuckerberg applied between 2023 and 2024. According to pointed Business Insider, several company leaders did not rule out further cuts beyond this initial 10%which makes May 20 the beginning of a process of thinning the Mera structure that is more intense than anticipated in the initial figures. In Xataka | Technology companies have laid off 92,000 employees to invest in AI. The problem is that the layoffs are costing them a fortune. Image | Unsplash (Mariia Shalabaieva), Goal

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