The Purr-fect Workplace Solution

A Japanese company hired full-time office cats to reduce workplace stress, and it’s working. 

Tokyo-based Qnote Inc. first adopted a cat in 2004 and has since grown their feline staff to eleven permanent office residents. Employees say the cats boost morale, encourage short breaks, and create a much more relaxed and pleasant work environment. 

Each cat even has an official job title, such as “office clerk”, “manager”, or “auditor”, making them fully integrated into the company culture. 

The company love cats so much that “cat lover” is now listed as a requirement for human job applicants. 🐈

To accommodate their furry employees, Qnote renovated the office to incorporate cat toilets, climbing shelves, and scratch-resistant walls, allowing the cats to roam freely without causing damage. The result? Lower stress levels and stronger team bonding among staff.

Cats purr away work stress, ensuring a purr-fect workplace solution. 

In Malaysia, Bersama announced on July 15 their decision to sit out the sixteenth Negeri Sembilan state polls. 

This represents a calculated maneuver on their part because the state will witness an intense, localized showdown brewing between the Barisan Nasional (BN) and Pakatan Harapan (PH) camps. Moving ahead risked putting Bersama candidates in the crossfire, which will not benefit the young party. 

Instead, Bersama will channel their "full focus" into preparing for the Melaka state election expected later this year.

Considering everything, methinks, it is a prudent move.

Nearly 2M Malaysian Grads Trapped in Jobs Below Qualification Level

Nearly two million Malaysian graduates are trapped in jobs below their qualification level, a far more damning measure of higher education outcomes than unemployment figures, economist and founder and director Williams Business Consultancy Sdn Bhd, Geoffrey Williams shared. 

He said the biggest issue facing graduates was underemployment as they leave universities burdened with debt and accept whatever work is available, regardless of whether it matches their qualifications. 

"Unemployment is low, but underemployment is high. This is the measure to watch. Almost two million are in this category, more than one third of all graduates", Williams (right) told the Sun. 

Data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia showed that 1.96 million tertiary-educated Malaysians were in skill-related underemployment in the third quarter of last year, making up 35.5% of employed degree and diploma holders. Graduate unemployment, by comparison, stood at just 3.2% in 2024. 

Williams said graduate employability should not be treated as a measure of university success. 

"Graduate employability is not a good measure of university success because if businesses do not supply graduate-level jobs, universities cannot do anything about that". 

He rejected the notion that universities should primarily function as workforce training centres, even as industry associations continue to highlight the gap between academic output and labour market needs. 

"The fact is that universities are not training centres – they are not set up to train graduates for the labour force. Most academics have never worked outside of a university and do not know what employers want". 

Williams added that traditional employability measures fail to capture whether graduates are actually securing graduate-level positions. 

"Traditional employability statistics are already irrelevant because they do not show that graduates have graduate-level jobs. One big mismatch for universities is that they prepare graduates for formal contracts that do not exist in large enough numbers". 

Citing Higher Education Ministry tracer studies, he added that about 90% of graduates worked for employers while only 10% became entrepreneurs – a ratio he said was poorly suited to the realities of the modern economy. 

"In a world of artificial intelligence, gig economy and micro-enterprises, employment will be more informal. World-class universities are preparing people for that and Malaysian universities need to catch up". 

And Williams also contended that the Malaysian Qualifications Agency played an important role in maintaining quality across the sector. He said without the agency’s oversight, standards in higher education would deteriorate. 

On June 14, MQA chief executive Prof Dr Mohammad Shatar Sabran (left) said Malaysian higher education met international standards and dismissed claims that declining standards were behind graduate employment difficulties. 

He maintained that strong academic results alone were no longer sufficient and graduates must equip themselves with additional skills to remain competitive.

A Major Reshuffle of Academic Offerings

China's universities are undertaking a massive reshuffling of their academic offerings as part of a drive to better align higher education with the nation's development goals - culling thousands of so-called obsolete degrees in favour of new, tech-focused programmes. 

The sweeping campaign comes as China races to become a global leader in a slew of hi-tech "future industries" and solve a severe graduate jobs crisis, which has left millions of young people struggling to find work. 

Between 2021 and 2025, China's higher education institutions revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate degree programmes while introducing 10,200 new ones, meaning that more than 30% of the nation's university programmes underwent adjustments, according to Ministry of Education data cited by Xinhua. 

The cuts have been heavily concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management - fields that are increasingly deemed outdated or oversaturated in China, where more than 16% of young people are unemployed and the job market is being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence. 

Many of the new programmes, meanwhile, are closely aligned with Beijing's economic development goals. For instance, nine universities have added new majors in embodied intelligence, which dovetails with a national drive to speed up the integration of next-generation AI into the real economy. 

Universities have faced pressure to adapt to rapid changes in the Chinese economy over recent years, as graduate numbers have soared to record levels but many have found their degrees offer little help when it comes to finding work. 

The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, for example, halted admissions for their product design programme this year, with one recent graduate saying the decision was partly based on the poor employment prospects of students on the programme. 

"The rapid development of AI has hit product design hard", said the graduate, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. "Many core tasks, such as modelling and rendering, can now be handled by AI". 

The Communication University of China (CUC) - a prestigious media-focused school in Beijing - has made headlines by restructuring a string of programmes including cinematography, which has been merged with the film and television cinematography and production programme. University alumni said the consolidation was a natural response to technological and market changes. 

Song Song, a videographer who finished CUC's cinematography programme in 2012, said his undergraduate years had coincided with the shift from film to digital. 

"With the rise of live streaming and short videos, the requirements for a cameraman are completely different from traditional television news shooting", Song said. "Changes in education are absolutely necessary". 

However, switching one programme for another is only going to be a short-term fix, and deeper changes to higher education may be needed to adapt to an era of accelerating technological change, warned Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences. 

Many of the programmes cut by universities were only established a few years ago, during an earlier phase of China's push to overhaul university majors, Chu pointed out. As a result, they had little time to develop and improve. 

Rather than continually swapping out one major for another, Chu suggested that universities adopt a more flexible system that gives students greater freedom to select their own courses.

"This would allow them to select courses based on their personal interests, unique strengths, and their demand for different career paths, ultimately building their own distinctive intellectual profile," Chu said. 

As the job market becomes increasingly volatile, many in China are coming to view undergraduate degrees as a starting point rather than a final destination. 

Vincent Zhao, a 48-year-old who runs a media production company in Beijing, encouraged his daughter to choose a programme focusing on statistics and data governance when she entered university last year. 

"We focused on choosing a broad direction that aligns with what she likes and excels at, leaving room for either future postgraduate studies or employment", Zhao said. 

"The old path - where you study one specific major, find a perfectly matched job, and stay in it stably for a lifetime – simply does not exist any more".

AI is Eroding Critical Thinking at Work

Most leaders believe their teams are using Artificial Intelligence as a tool. 

The research suggests something more consequential is happening. Workers are not just using AI to work faster. They are letting it decide, and in doing so, quietly ceding the human reasoning that determines whether those decisions are any good. 

A January 2026 paper from the Wharton School, "Thinking – Fast, Slow, and Artificial" (published February 02, 2026), introduced a term for what is now documented and measurable. Researchers Steven D Shaw and Gideon Nave call it cognitive surrender. 

They define it as adopting AI outputs with minimal scrutiny, thereby overriding both intuition and deliberation. Their framework extends Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's model of fast intuitive thinking and slow deliberate thinking by introducing a third system: artificial cognition that operates entirely outside the brain. That third system, they argue, can supplement or supplant human reasoning. When it supplants it, AI stops being a thinking partner and starts being the decision-maker. 

The performance implications are direct. When workers in the study consulted an AI that was correct, their accuracy rose significantly above what they achieved on their own. When the AI was wrong, their accuracy fell well below the baseline of people who had no AI access at all. The problem is that workers had no reliable way to detect the difference. They accepted incorrect AI answers 80% of the time. Their confidence rose either way, whether the AI had helped them or led them astray. 

This dynamic is particularly consequential with the large language models now embedded in most workplace tools. LLMs do not retrieve facts. They generate plausible-sounding responses based on patterns in training data, without access to an organization's specific context, strategy, institutional knowledge, or the domain expertise of the person using them. They do not flag uncertainty. They speak with consistent confidence regardless of accuracy. 

Getting strong output from an LLM requires a skilled human on the other end: one who validates what it produces, identifies what it missed, expands the ideation beyond the initial response, and applies judgment to decide. Cognitive surrender eliminates every one of those steps. 

A Microsoft Research study "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking" by Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch, et al, CHI '25, April 26-May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan, found that confidence in AI was among the strongest predictors of whether knowledge workers engaged in critical thinking at all. The higher the trust in the tool, the less scrutiny is applied to what it returned. 

As researchers noted in that same study, there is a fundamental irony at the center of automation: when routine cognitive tasks are mechanized and handed to an external system, the human is deprived of the routine practice that builds and sustains judgment. The reps disappear. And so, over time, does the muscle. 

And a McKinsey "State of Organizations 2026” report, published in February, found that only 23% of organizations qualify as AI Pioneers, those actively deploying AI across most departments and functions with a clear understanding of how it will reshape their work. The vast majority are still experimenting, running isolated pilots, or deploying AI in piecemeal ways that have yet to generate measurable enterprise-wide impact. 

That gap is the opportunity. Cognitive surrender is not yet the organizational norm. Supplementing human reasoning rather than supplanting it is still a choice leaders can architect into how AI gets deployed. The window to make that choice intentionally, before passive AI reliance becomes the default operating culture, is shorter than most leaders assume. 

The structural interventions the research points to are specific. Leaders who build these practices into how AI gets deployed now safeguard their organizations from a culture where AI supplants human reasoning rather than supports it, and from the performance costs that follow. 

• Build verification steps into AI workflows before employees read the output, not after. Once a confident-sounding response has been read, the cognitive tendency to accept it is already in motion. 
• Require employees to evaluate counter-arguments and alternative perspectives before concluding. Prompting for what the AI missed keeps human judgment actively in the process. 
• Build a culture of intellectual accountability in which employees are expected to interrogate AI output rather than relay it. 

The Wharton researchers found that workers with stronger confidence in their own expertise engaged in more critical thinking even when using AI, because they had a personal stake in the quality of the output.

That ownership does not emerge on its own. It has to be built into how leaders set expectations and design the work. The organizations that will extract the most from AI are not the ones deploying it most aggressively. They are the ones deploying it most intentionally, treating AI as an amplifier of human judgment rather than a replacement for it, and actively protecting the reasoning capacity that makes that amplification possible.  

Eating Snacks Offered in Job Interview Equals Job Rejection

Job interviews are often about far more than resumes, qualifications and technical skills. From body language and communication style to confidence, etiquette and decision-making, recruiters frequently evaluate candidates on subtle behavioural cues during the hiring process. 

In today’s highly competitive job market, even small actions during an interview can shape first impressions and influence recruitment decisions. 

Recently, career coach Simon Ingari shared a story of one such job interview on his X-handle, where the candidate was evaluated on a rather strange assessment.

As per the post, the candidate received a call from the company's HR department informing him that the organization would not be moving forward in the hiring process. Curious about the rejection, the applicant politely asked for feedback regarding the reason behind the decision. What followed left many social media users stunned.

According to the HR representative, the deciding factor was the candidate's response when refreshments were offered during the interview. The recruiter explained that while both snacks and water had been placed before the applicant, he chose to eat the snacks instead of simply opting for water. 

The company allegedly considered this part of an informal behavioural assessment designed to judge qualities such as discipline, impulse control and decision-making under casual circumstances. The candidate, visibly surprised by the explanation, questioned whether his professionalism was truly being measured based on eating food during an interview. 

However, the HR executive defended the practice, claiming that the exercise helped the company evaluate a person’s cultural fit beyond conventional interview answers and technical performance. 

Not convinced by the reasoning, the applicant responded sharply, stating bluntly that he was actually relieved not to be selected if such unconventional "hunger tests" formed part of the company’s hiring culture. 

His response quickly resonated online, with many users criticising the interview method and calling it excessive, unrealistic and unfair. 

The post soon gained traction across social media platforms, sparking widespread discussions around toxic workplace expectations, bizarre recruitment strategies and the growing pressure candidates face during job interviews. 

While some users argued that companies often observe small behavioural cues during interviews, others felt the assessment crossed the line between professional evaluation and unnecessary psychological testing.

The Pink Slips Keep Coming: Cloudflare and Others Reduce Headcount

While Meta grabbed headlines with their layoffs, the rest of the tech industry has been quietly swinging the same axe.

Slash, slash, slashing jobs!

[For the complete Meta backstory, you can take a look at my posts from May 24 and yesterday].

One example I know of is Cloudfare. 

On May 07, 2026, the San Francisco, US-headquartered Internet infrastructure and cyber security company announced that they would trim 1,100 jobs, representing approximately 20% of their workforce across thirteen global offices. 

The leadership at Cloudfare had noted a 600% increase in internal AI use over a three-month period, reducing the need for headcount in specific back-office and support functions. 

This was candidly stated by CEO Matthew Prince that the restructuring around an "agentic AI-first operating model" is making many roles obsolete, significantly boosting productivity. 

The move is notable in the tech industry because it was initiated during a period of record-setting financial growth rather than a revenue decline.

Even the crypto and fintech world has not been spared. Block slashed 4,000 jobs. Coinbase let go of roughly 700 staff. PayPal plan to trim nearly 4,800 over the next few years. Website builders Wix and Webflow both announced rounds and enterprise software company Atlassian cut about 1,600. Many of these firms cited AI directly. 

However, there are dissenting voices. 

Demis Hassabis (left), Google DeepMind CEO told Wired in an interview published on May 19, 2026, just ahead of the Google I/O developer conference that when developers become 3 or 4 times more productive, the smart move is to do 3 or 4 times more work, not march people out the door. 

To him, treating AI gains as a reason to shrink headcount is a failure of nerve dressed up as strategy. 

Jensen Huang (left), Nvidia CEO had called the AI-to-layoffs narrative as "just too lazy". 

In a Channel NewsAsia interview on May 25, he pointedly asked: "AI has just arrived. 
How is it possible they're already losing jobs?"

And Sam Altman (right), OpenAI CEO had admitted last week, that the human element is still essential for most work. He had earlier brashly predicted humans may not be needed for jobs as soon as 2035. 

Now, he admits that this isn’t possible.

Mark Zuckerberg's Superyacht Arrives in Seattle as Meta Eliminate 1,400 Local Jobs

Here's an interesting follow-up to my May 24 post, "Meta's Final Email: Collect Your Belongings and Leave". If you recall 8,000 employees were fired as Meta shifted around their priorities on AI. 

As reported by Yahoo! Finance on Friday, "...(Mark) Zuckerberg himself decided to celebrate the sweeping layoffs, by bringing his 390-foot superyacht out to Seattle – a city with 1,400 newly unemployed former Meta workers". 

Zuckerberg's yacht, named Launchpad, docked in the city Tuesday according to the Seattle Times. The yacht reportedly cost $300 million, and was met with insults and jeers as it swept into the Seattle area. 

The co-founder of Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (left) wasn't even present – he seems content to merely own the yacht, without having to go through any of the trouble of actually using it. The yacht has apparently remained a hatesink on its pier, with passing cyclists and joggers swearing at the boat as they go by. 

Zuckerberg's $300 million yacht cost more than a year of employment for every person in the Seattle area that Meta just dismissed – the company averages a salary of $162,700 for software engineers in the area, according to ZipRecruiter, and Zuck's big boat cost about 1,844 times that number. It almost seems like a trade: Seattle loses 1,400 jobs, and in exchange the guy who cut those jobs puts his boat there instead. 

It tells us a lot about Zuckerberg!

Skills AI Can't Replace

Let's make it clear from the start: AI is not taking jobs – it's changing them.

Already, artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the workplace. In just the last months, we’ve seen the speed of the shift, the size of layoffs and the re-organizing of the workforce. Tasks that once required years of training – data analysis, content generation, even elements of decision-making – can now be completed in seconds. 

For leaders, this raises an urgent question: What, exactly, should we be preparing people to master? 

This Rolling Stones piece "The Skills AI Can't Replace – And Why We Need to Start Teaching Them in Schools" by Elan Gepner and published May 11, 2026 shares with us the new direction educators must urgently take note of. 

For decades, the answer has been straightforward: build knowledge, develop technical skills and increase efficiency. But as AI begins to outperform humans in many of these areas, that equation is changing. 

Big Tech leaders already know this and they are pivoting to these skills that are becoming extremely essential: communication, knowing how to work effectively with others, adaptability — the ability to pivot and find solutions — and self-regulation, resilience and stability under pressure. 

When they unpacked it, it made sense. We’re entering a world where nobody knows exactly what they need to know or what’s coming next. The elite skills of yesterday can be obsolete in a flash tomorrow. Technical skills can be replaced quickly. What’s necessary are workers who can collaborate through transformation, take initiative to find new solutions, master new tools without feeling threatened and sustain themselves through uncertainty. 

One unidentified senior manager overseeing more than 2,500 engineers said he pretty much no longer cares what someone knows, only whether they can keep reinventing themselves without being crushed by the pace of change. 

We are entering a moment where the most valuable skills are not the ones we’ve traditionally prioritized. 

In fact, much of the current conversation around AI and the workforce centers on reskilling: learning to code, understanding data, staying technically adaptable. These are important, but increasingly automatable. 

What AI cannot replicate, at least not in any meaningful way, are the core human capacities that shape how we think, interact and respond under pressure: the ability to stay calm in uncertainty, listen deeply, collaborate with empathy and remain focused in a distracted world. 

I wouldn't label them as soft skills; rather they are foundational performance skills, which have been long under-appreciated, and now becoming the differentiators of the modern workforce. 

In an AI-powered world, the competitive edge is no longer what you know. It’s how you show up. 

In environments of constant change and ambiguity, technical competence alone is not enough. Employees must regulate their responses, sustain attention and navigate complex interpersonal dynamics. 

To be sure, four capacities stand out: emotional intelligence and regulation; attention and presence; human connection; and self-awareness. 

These enable teams to function effectively and cannot be replaced by AI. Yet we still treat them as afterthoughts. Schools often treat them as secondary or expect them to develop on their own as a byproduct of “real learning”. 

Organizations are increasingly aware of the need for these capabilities. Leadership programs, wellness initiatives and communication training are on the rise, yet many struggle to create lasting change. 

These capacities are not easily installed in adulthood. They are developed over time, through repeated practice. By the time someone enters the workforce, patterns of stress response, attention and emotional regulation are deeply ingrained. 

Changing them is possible – but likely, to be very challenging. In many ways, the workplace is trying to retrofit skills that were never systematically built. 

For business leaders, this shift has important implications. Workforce development must expand beyond technical readiness to include human readiness. 

We must also rethink how we evaluate talent. In an AI-driven world, the most valuable employees may not be those who process the most information, but those who remain grounded, focused and effective in complexity. 

AI may be less a threat, and more of a mirror, revealing the skills we’ve neglected to prioritize. 

As machines take on more, the question is not just what humans can produce, but how we lead, connect and collaborate. Organizations that thrive will not simply adopt new technologies, but invest in deeply human capabilities, early and intentionally. 

In a world where AI can do more, the most valuable employees will be those who can remain human under pressure. And that is a skill we cannot afford to begin teaching too late.

Meta's Final Email: Collect Your Belongings and Leave

Weeks of anticipation ended in a stark reality for thousands of Meta employees as they received their termination notices. One sentence captured it: "Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated as part of today's reorganisation". 

Then came another line. "If you are already in the office, we ask that you please gather any personal items at your desk and head home". 

The email, obtained by Business Insider, landed in inboxes at 04:00 AM on Wednesday as Meta began cutting nearly 8,000 jobs – roughly 10 percent of their workforce – while simultaneously shifting more than 7,000 employees into AI-focused teams. 

The message was formal. Calm. Carefully worded. But beneath the corporate language sat the reality of another sweeping restructuring inside one of the world's biggest tech companies. 

Meta called the layoffs part of their "continued effort to run the company more efficiently" and said the cuts would help "offset the other investments" they are making – a reference to the company's massive AI push. 

Employees were informed that their badges had been deactivated. Access to internal systems would be removed. Within an hour, they would instead be redirected to Meta's "Alumni Portal" for details on severance, visas, benefits, and job assistance. 

The layoffs mark Meta's biggest company-wide cuts since Mark Zuckerberg launched his 2022-23 "Year of Efficiency", a period that erased around 21,000 jobs across the company. This time, the cuts come as Meta sharply increase spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company's forecast of capital expenditure said to be between $125 billion and $145 billion this year – more than double their 2025 spending. 

Another detail from the email stood out. Meta had earlier instructed employees to work from home on the day layoffs began. But for those who still showed up to office campuses, the email carried a quiet finality: collect your belongings and leave. 

Significantly, the company had around 78,000 employees as of March. Between layoffs and internal reshuffling toward AI initiatives, nearly one in five Meta workers is now being affected by the restructuring in some form.

FIFA's Legal Setback Just Before 2026 WC Kick-off

FIFA have suffered a legal blow just weeks before the World Cup after the French footballers’ union UNFP achieved a landmark decision in the European courts. 

The UNFP have successfully advanced a complaint about the health and safety of players’ working conditions and a lack of collective bargaining as a result of decisions made by FIFA. 

The UNFP’s complaint at the European Committee of Social Rights is against the French state for failing to uphold protections that they have committed to under the European Social Charter. 

They will now proceed to a full hearing and, if successful, will apply pressure to governments across Europe to hold FIFA to account over their decisions to expand the global calendar, adding to the workload of professional footballers. 

“Violations of fundamental labour rights – on health and safety, working time, and the right to collective bargaining – are not isolated failures of individual states”, said a statement from international players’ union FIFPRO Europe. 

“They are a structural feature of professional football, driven by FIFA’s expanding competition formats and their unilateral decision-making and control over the international match calendar, in which players and their representatives have no meaningful say. 

“France is not alone: many other states are in a comparable situation, with minimum standards for working time, rest periods, occupational health and collective bargaining structurally undermined by decisions taken at global level. FIFPRO Europe therefore regards the UNFP complaint as a signal case with implications well beyond France”. 

The legal battle is the latest to be waged between player unions and FIFA as a result of the governing body’s introduction of a 32-team Club World Cup and expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams.

Gen Zers Are So Fearful AI Will Take Their Job

AI’s capabilities are growing more sophisticated by the day, and business leaders are rushing to adopt the technology to remain competitive.

But one obstacle to AI adoption is catching companies off guard: their own workers. 

A new report published April 07 from enterprise AI agent firm Writer and research firm Workplace Intelligence finds a significant share of employees are actively trying to sabotage their company’s AI rollout. 

The report – a survey of 2,400 knowledge workers across the US, the UK, and Europe, including 1,200 C-suite executives – found 29% of employees admit to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy. That number jumps to 44% among Gen Z workers. 

The sabotage entails entering proprietary information into public AI tools, or using unapproved AI tools. Some employees report outright refusing to use AI tools. Others have even admitted to tampering with performance reviews or intentionally generating low-output work to make AI appear less effective. 

As AI becomes ubiquitous across society, many people are growing to hate it. A recent NBC News poll found just 26% of registered US voters have a positive view of AI, while 46% hold a negative view. 

Meanwhile, business leaders and AI experts have issued successive warnings about the threat AI poses to human workers. 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could snatch half of entry-level, white-collar jobs, roles many Gen Z workers hold today. 

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman issued a similar warning earlier this year, saying all white-collar work could be automated in 18 months.

An Anthropic study released last month found AI is already theoretically capable of completing the majority of tasks associated with computer science, law, business, and finance, and other major white-collar fields. As the fear of AI automation slowly materializes into reality, many workers, including a sizable chunk of Gen Z employees, are pushing back against the assumed doomed fate of their careers. 

Of those workers who admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI technology, 30% cited fear AI would take their job. “FOBO” – fear of becoming obsolete – is widespread. 

KPMG similarly found in November four in 10 workers fear AI could take their job. But ironically, the survey found workers who refuse to adopt AI are actually more vulnerable to layoffs than those embracing the technology. Sixty percent of executives said they’re considering cutting employees who refuse to adopt AI. Another 28% are concerned about the technology’s security risks. Twenty-six percent think the technology diminishes their creativity or value within the company. Another 26% cite poorly executed company AI strategy. 

Even as some companies rush to implement AI agents, an MIT report released last year also found 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing not because of the quality of the technology, but the learning gap between tools and organizations. 

Yet as some employees drag their feet, researchers found the workers actively implementing AI into their workflows are getting ahead. Dan Schawbel, managing partner at Workplace Intelligence, said AI “super-users”, workers who have mastered generative AI to a high degree of proficiency, are being rewarded for their work more so than laggards. 

“The super-users we surveyed were around 3x more likely to have received both a promotion and pay raise in the past year, compared to employees who have been slow to adopt these tools”, Schawbel said in a statement. “Top AI users are also saving nearly nine hours per week using AI – 4.5x more than the two hours a week reported by AI laggards”.

A staggering 77% of executives said those employees who refuse to become proficient in AI won’t be considered for promotions or leadership roles as business leaders aim to steer their companies into the future with AI, according to the Writer and Workplace Intelligence report. And 69% are planning AI-related layoffs. 

But May Habib, CEO and co-founder of Writer, said the most successful companies are not relying on layoffs: They’re optimizing the balance between agentic AI and human capabilities. 

“The leaders who are putting in the work to radically redesign operations with human-agent collaboration at the center are the ones compounding their advantage in ways competitors can’t replicate”, Habib said in a statement.

Resignation Letter on Toilet Paper

A headhunter in Singapore has gone viral after posting an employee's resignation letter, which was written on a sheet of toilet paper. 

In a LinkedIn post published last week, Angela Yeoh shared that the employee resigned using this method to reflect the treatment they received at the organisation. Neither the employee nor the employer was named in the post. 

"I have chosen this type of paper (toilet paper) for my resignation as a symbol of how this company has treated me. I quit", read the letter. 

Speaking to Yeoh, the employee explained that they felt disposable as an employee, saying, "I felt like toilet paper: used when needed, then discarded without a second thought". 

Yeoh said the employee's words struck a chord with her, emphasising the importance of fostering a culture of appreciation within an organisation. 

She remarked, "Make your employees feel so genuinely appreciated that even when they choose to leave, they part ways with gratitude instead of resentment. Such an experience doesn't reflect a lack of loyalty but speaks volumes about the company's culture". 

She stressed that appreciation is more than just a retention tool – it is a reflection of how much an individual is valued, not only for their contributions but for who they are as a person.

Defending champions Paris Saint-Germain hosted Liverpool in the 2025/26 UEFA Champions League quarter-final first leg yesterday.

The latter went into the game many expect them to lose. And they did not disappoint. 

PSG won 2-0, seizing a clear advantage to take to Anfield for next week’s return.

FYI, Arne Slot's boys ended the game without a shot on target; in fact, they were very fortunate to escape only two goals behind.

The Reds were pitiful, period.

Dual Role at Kajang Toastmasters

On Saturday, I made the long, ardous journey to Prima Saujana in Kajang for the Kajang Toastmasters Club meeting. 

I had decided to challenge myself to take on the twin role of Table Topics Master and Evaluator and I prepared 5 topics centered around the theme "Scaling New Peaks". I thought I did a pretty good job!

Photos from the said meeting:

Oracle were said to have laid off 12,000 people in India – 40% of their local workforce – on March 31, 2026, Moneycontrol reported, citing impacted employees. 

Those affected by the layoffs were informed via early morning emails, which read “...a decision has been taken to streamline the operations, and as a result, unfortunately, the position you currently hold will become redundant”, the report said. 

The impacted workers told the Moneycontrol website that another round of job cuts was likely within a month. 

This latest round of layoffs had impacted 30,000 employees globally, the report added. Oracle declined to comment on the development.

Meta Layoffs Continue in Pivot from Metaverse to AI

Meta are laying off about 700 people at Facebook and their VR division reality Labs, according to a March 25 report from CNBC. The layoffs come as Meta seek to pivot away from their metaverse bet and lean more heavily into AI. 

Less than 24 hours earlier, the company unveiled a new stock program for six top executives that could increase compensation for some of them by as much as $921 million each over the next five years. Meta explained the move was a way to retain their senior talent in the AI era and push them toward ambitious growth. 

The hundreds of new layoffs come after Meta cut about 1,500 workers in January, mostly from Reality Labs, which make the Quest VR headset and the Horizon Worlds platform. Meta employ about 78,000 people in total. 

“Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals”, a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement Wednesday. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted”. 

Facebook were renamed Meta in 2021 because CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought the metaverse was the future. But it turns out that the need to strap a gigantic computer to your face is quite a tall hurdle for mass adoption. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, while a different product and use case, have sold much better, perhaps because they look like normal glasses on your face. 

Reality Labs have burned through roughly $73 billion since Zuck shifted his company’s focus to the metaverse. Last week Meta announced they were shutting down Horizon Worlds only to backtrack just a couple of days later. 

Meta are trying to make a larger push into AI, with a March 25 report from the The New York Times suggesting Zuckerberg (left) was even creating a "superintelligence", or a god-like AI that can act as the ultimate personal companion. 

And if you must know, Meta suffered two legal defeats in the past two days, the first in New Mexico where the state Attorney General had brought a suit alleging they had misled consumers about the safety of their products and the potential harm to children. 

Meta have been ordered to pay roughly $375 million in civil penalties in that case, far less than the $2 billion the state had asked for. 

The second loss in court happened Wednesday when Meta and Google both lost a case brought by a woman who said she’d become addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child and had suffered mental health issues as a result. Meta argued that the woman’s mental illnesses predated her exposure to Instagram. 

The jury awarded the woman $3 million in that case. 

The two cases had been closely watched because there are about 2,000 other cases against Meta pending in federal court around the issues of child safety and social media addiction. 

What's more, it’s entirely possible that more layoffs at Meta are just over the horizon. Reuters reported last week that Meta would lay off 20% or more of their workforce. That would be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15,000 people. 

The reason for the layoffs, according to Reuters, was an attempt to offset “costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets” and to “prepare” for “greater efficiency” that’s supposed to be realized by AI advancements. 

Meta told Gizmodo over email Wednesday that the Reuters report was “speculative” and had “theoretical approaches”, whatever that means.

US Experiences Jobless Boom

As US corporate profits rise and the stock market hits new highs, investors are reaping the rewards. Yet beneath the surge, companies have cut nearly 1 million jobs this year – the most since 2020, when the pandemic slammed the economy. 

The disconnect between soaring company earnings and mounting layoffs amounts to what Chen Zhao, chief global strategist at investment research firm Alpine Macro, calls a "jobless boom". 

Typically, layoffs accelerate when companies are struggling with declining profitability and need to pare costs.

At the heart of the issue, Zhao said, is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, which is boosting business productivity across multiple industries and the economy at large, while also suppressing demand for workers. Although that trend has initially taken root in the technology sector, it is spreading to other industries as businesses adopt AI as a way to boost productivity and lower costs, he noted. 

For much of 2025, the job market was described by economists as "no hire, no fire", meaning an environment where workers could count on job security even as hiring around the US cooled. 

But conditions have changed, and the Federal Reserve cut their benchmark interest rate in both September and October, citing increasing risks to employment growth and with Fed Chair Jerome Powell noting that policymakers are closely watching layoff announcements by big employers. 

Still, the nation's unemployment rate has remained relatively low despite the shifting tides of slower hiring and more layoffs, experts have noted. The jobless rate stood at 4.3% in August, according to the most recent data available. 

Unemployment has remained in check because the nation's labor pool is shrinking due to the retiring baby boom generation and lower immigration stemming from the Trump administration's tighter policies, Zhao said.

"You basically have a labor demand that is going nowhere, and labor supply going nowhere, too", he said. "So that creates a very odd equilibrium". 

Not everyone thinks AI is driving the recent bout of layoffs. Instead, the job cuts are more likely due to businesses recalibrating their needs after the pandemic, when many employers expanded and may have over-hired, said Art Papas, the CEO of Bullhorn, a software company that works with recruitment and temporary agencies. 

Companies feel more emboldened to cut workers now because it's easier to find new talent than during the pandemic, when the labor market was tighter, he said. 

Papas also believes businesses that point to AI as a reason for layoffs are using it more as a buzzword. 

"These companies announce layoffs and their stock goes up – it's a perverse incentive to announce layoffs", he noted. But the change in the labor market is very real, with companies cutting back on hiring for entry-level jobs, Papas said. 

"People point to AI, and say, 'That's because AI is replacing entry-level jobs'", he said. "I say, 'No, that's a sign companies aren't hiring, because companies do most of the hiring at the entry level'". 

David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the most influential and storied Wall Street firms, isn’t convinced either that an AI jobs apocalypse is on its way, saying humans will adapt like they always do: "Our economy is very nimble"!

I agree.