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Tech Brew

Future of Work

Patrick Kulp

emergingtechbrew.com

In the high-stakes war for AI talent, you never know which way the wind will blow next.

 been in talks to acquire AI coding platform Windsurf when Google 

 to hire away the startup’s top talent and secure nonexclusive licensing rights to some of Windsurf’s assets. Then Cognition, the AI startup behind coding agent Devin, 

The episode is the latest in a string of reverse-acquihire-style deals that have become fashionable in the AI space. A Big Tech company will peel off top employees from a startup and license rights to some tech assets, while stopping short of an outright acquisition. Some examples include 

 These types of deals notably sidestep the traditional merger review process, which might have been especially attractive under the Biden administration’s 

 pointed out that these deals have another advantage that could explain why they’ve lived on into 

: expediency. In a breakneck AI development race where every week counts, absorbing startups this way allows for much quicker integration than a traditional acquisition.

“We note this deal mirrors the increasing[ly] popular partnership structure between large technology companies and some fast-rising GenAI startups that upgrades talent and provides access to key new GenAI products, without facing the scrutiny of equity ownership or acquisition,” Colin Sebastian, senior research analyst at financial firm Baird, wrote in a research note.

While Cognition ended up purchasing the remains of Windsurf, there were a couple of days when it seemed that remaining employees might be left in the shell of a company without the usual trappings of a startup exit.

The situation raises the question: If there’s a chance that a startup’s founders and other top employees might jump ship en masse, does that change the incentive math for tech pros considering working at one?

Rudy Torrijos, PitchBook’s director of industry research, told Tech Brew this particular deal was the result of a one-of-a-kind situation that’s not likely to become commonplace. However, it could lead venture capitalists and startup leadership to carefully consider internal structures and ensure that incentives are aligned for companies.

“This will likely prove to be a rare occurrence and was likely due to very unique circumstances,” Torrijos said in an email. “However, this event is likely to spur VCs and startup boards to review founder [and] CEO compensation or employment agreements and make sure leadership interests are aligned with investors and employees more explicitly and transparently.”

Putting structures in place that discourage founders from abandoning teams is especially important in times of major transformation in the tech industry, Torrijos said.

“In times of significant platform changes, like during the rise of the PC and the dot-com era, leadership matters most, suggesting that VCs and startup boards will likely add provisions, incentives, or disincentives for abrupt CEO departures,” Torrijos said.

 The episode also shows just how heated the battle over top AI talent has become among leading AI companies. At a time when Meta has been offering OpenAI researchers 

, big-name AI researchers are currently among the most in-demand resources in the AI race.

“Larger companies are desperate to hire anyone with raw talent or extraordinary experience,” Torrijos said. “Advanced technical talent has always been hard to find.”

Image of people shaking hands on a multicolored surface.

Windsurf drama shows how poaching is a new norm for AI deals

Google snagged execs from the AI coding platform before another startup bought the rest of Windsurf’s assets.

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ChatGPT and its ilk seem to be taking on ever more work in modern offices.

 from Gallup finds that AI use at work has been accelerating. Nearly one in five workers now say they use it a few times a week, and 8% of respondents report daily AI interactions. Both those numbers have essentially doubled from Gallup’s first measure in 2023.

But not all workers use AI equally. The surge is mostly among white-collar workers, for one; production and frontline staffers have actually seen a slight dip in usage over the past couple of years (from 11% to 9%). Sectors with the highest concentrations of workers frequently turning to AI included the tech industry (50%), professional services (34%), and finance (32%).

 have shown, AI usage among employees has also continued to race ahead of employer planning and leadership on the tech. That can create security headaches and lead to a lack of consistent guidelines for workplaces.

While the number of organizations that have communicated a clear plan for integrating AI improved from 15% to 22% in the past year, “it’s still quite low,” according to Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being.

“[Organizations] need to be intentional about the planning process, about the training process,” Harter told Tech Brew. “They’ve got to have a plan about how it can best benefit their company and the jobs that they have, and how it can be a companion for efficiency’s sake in those jobs.”

 about AI’s potential to reshape the job market, many of these workers are also notably not worried about being replaced by the technology. Only 15% of workers expect robots, automation, or AI to threaten their jobs in the next five years, a figure that remains unchanged from 2023.

Worries were slightly more pronounced in certain industries, however: 21% of tech workers and retail employees and 20% of finance workers think their jobs could be at risk in the same time frame.

“I think people are sort of embracing it as more of a companion, which probably is the right way to think about it right now,” Harter said. “We don’t know what direction it’s going and how quickly…and it probably will be quickly.”

Perhaps tech workers are right not to be overly worried at the moment. Another 

 of tech C-suite leaders from Deloitte this week found that seven in 10 said they’re increasing headcount in tech as a response to generative AI. Around 45% said that GenAI prowess is urgently needed, and there are talent shortages and skill gaps around the technology.

The survey, which queried more than 620 senior tech leaders in the US this spring, found that AI might best augment in-demand skills like cybersecurity (56%), cloud orchestration (47%), and data science/analytics (39%).

“Businesses are rapidly pivoting from AI as experimental to an engine for transformation and innovation. In organizations where the C-suite leads the shift, more value can be realized,” Ranjit Bawa, Deloitte’s US chief strategy and technology officer, said in the report.

Workers in an office space with surrounded AI patterns.

AI use at work has almost doubled in the past year, Gallup finds

White-collar workers are using it more than frontline and production roles.

AI agents were the talk of the town as Silicon Valley leaders descended on the Big Apple for New York Tech Week. But some discussions still began with an 

The decentralized conference consisted of more than 1,000 events, from pickleball matches and movie nights to panels and rooftop soirées, scattered throughout the city. This year’s iteration drew more than 60,000 RSVPs from attendees, according to one organizer.

A sizable chunk of those events focused on the rise of autonomous generative agents, billed as the 

 have gone all-in on this concept with lofty predictions about digital workforces at companies of the future.

But separating the hype from the current reality—or even nailing down a firm definition of what agents 

—can be a tall order sometimes. Dan Balaceanu, chief product officer of enterprise conversational AI platform Druid, said buzz around the term has swallowed up some of the more precise terminology in the AI world.

“Somehow this agent name absorbed all the related terms,” Balaceanu told Tech Brew before he appeared on a panel on enterprise agents. “We don’t talk about virtual assistants anymore—we call them AI agents. We don’t talk about bots, we call them agents, we don’t talk about intents and skills or conversation flows, we talk about agents. In my opinion, maybe it’s not 100% accurate, but if we understand we are speaking about AI completing and helping humans, it’s fine.”

The slipperiness around what an agent is doesn’t seem to extend as much to software developers, who are already using agents every day, according to Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of AI command line terminal startup Warp.

“The development stuff is in production and real and I’ve used it, whereas a lot of the other stuff, it’s more in demo-land or pitch-land, or even deck-land,” Lloyd told Tech Brew. “Every enterprise company has an agent product, but we’re not using any of them.”

Merrill Lutsky, co-founder and CEO of code review startup Graphite, said engineering might offer more clear-cut use cases for agents, whereas AI in other fields might be stymied by more varied processes or regulatory concerns.

“There’s a pretty clear drop-and-replace or drop-and-augment workflow there for AI to come in, versus…a combination of the models not being quite as powerful relative to humans yet in other domains, and that workflow not being as well-defined. And then also, obviously, you know, some regulatory concerns.”

 George Mathew, managing director at venture capital firm Insight Partners, said on stage at an SAP panel on agents and copilots that AI has had the biggest impact thus far on three fields: coding, legal, and accounting.

“There’s a good, bad, and ugly to all this,” Mathew said. “The three most disruptive moments in AI right now—code, legal and audit, accounting—all three of those are being completely reimagined at the entry level.”

But Jared Coyle, chief AI officer for SAP, said on the same panel that even when enterprise technology is available to fields like sales, there’s a big challenge getting organizations to break from tried-and-true existing practices.

There are also plenty of technical hurdles when it comes to governing how agents interact. “As it turns out, there’s a lot of engineering aspects that you don’t think about,” Coyle said. “There’s orchestration considerations. There’s a lot of just validating who has access to what, and how do you define that from a governance perspective, and all of those have to be considered.”

When AI does make a big business impact, however, you may not see it in headline news, according to Coyle.

“The best AI is boring,” Coyle said on stage. “We’ve done a quantitative evaluation of the 34,000 or so organizations that are actually using our AI. And what’s interesting is you can make [that] one conclusion from it…It’s not the ones that you see on the keynote stage. It’s the ones that you sit back and you go, ‘Oh, that’s actually the most impact that we’re seeing and the most uptake.’”

Illustration of AI agents connected to a grid system.

Everybody was talking about agents at NY Tech Week

Business leaders reflected on the challenges and potential impact of autonomous AI systems at work.

Two and half years after the release of ChatGPT, the pace of AI development 

. A constant stream of new enterprise AI tools promises to remake work as we know it across every industry. But how much is generative AI actually moving the needle for companies that use it?

A handful of new reports aims to quantify how much businesses are adopting AI—as well as what they’re getting out of the technology.

 in generative AI, these surveys show many companies are rushing to test them out. But the data on how much all this AI spending has yielded in terms of results is mixed.

 A PwC survey of more than 300 executives in April found that 52% have either broadly or fully adopted AI agents; 27% reported limited usage. The rest of the companies either hadn’t yet adopted agents or had no plans to do so.

The top use cases were customer service, sales and marketing, and IT and cybersecurity. Most companies surveyed said their budgets were increasing because of agentic AI.

But the report authors wrote that while agents provide “a meaningful boost in productivity, [the technology] stops short of transformation.”

 Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research studied the effects of chatbots on work in Denmark in late 2023 and 2024, and found their impact somewhat underwhelming. They found that despite substantial investments from the companies they studied, the technology yielded less than 3% in productivity gains for workers, on average. While the study noted that randomized control trials showed more than 15% in time savings in some professions, those impacts were negated by other jobs and don’t translate fully into the real world.

“Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes,” the authors wrote. “Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformations due to generative AI. While adoption has been rapid, with firms now heavily invested in unlocking the technological potential, the economic impacts remain small.”

An IBM survey of CEOs in May found that only a quarter of their AI projects “have delivered expected ROI over the last few years, and only 16% have scaled enterprise-wide.” A little over half said they were seeing business impacts beyond cost savings.

“CEOs are balancing the pressures of short-term ROI and investing in long-term innovation when it comes to adopting AI,” Mohamad Ali, SVP and head of IBM Consulting, said in the report.

 Despite some of these mixed results, Box’s 2025 state of AI enterprise report pointed to a growing divergence between companies that have adopted AI and those that haven’t in terms of productivity gains.

Box found that 47% of more than 1,300 IT leaders described themselves as in the “early stage” of AI maturity, and 39% as in the “developing” phase. Those that are further along are seeing much bigger productivity gains, according to Box, with “leading edge” businesses clocking 37% ROI, on average. The most common measures of AI success were time savings, employee productivity metrics, and cost reduction, according to the survey.

“AI-first organizations—with clear business objectives, thoughtful implementation, and robust governance—are gaining significant advantages that appear likely to compound over time,” the authors wrote.

Latest reports paint a mixed picture of AI’s business impact

We rounded up some of the most recent data on how businesses are adopting AI.

TBR-AI first audio embed

Almost every company these days is AI-curious. Growing numbers are also AI-ready. But only a handful of CEOs have had the audacity—and perhaps the chronic LinkedIn habit—to publicly declare their companies “AI-first.”

 are among the companies that made waves with memos in which their CEOs laid out a vision for an “AI-first” future. (Shopify didn’t use this exact term, but the sentiment’s there.) These documents detail how AI will transform operations, employee expectations, and overall strategy going forward.

In Shopify and Duolingo’s case, the declarations have grabbed the most attention for their somewhat mask-off quality. While most executives are careful to say that AI is 

 their workers, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke was up-front about only expanding headcount when AI won’t suffice. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn admitted his company will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that Al can handle.”

. But Gartner distinguished VP analyst Arun Chandrasekaran told us the public at large isn’t necessarily the only audience for these moves. The execs might be more concerned with sending a message to investors—and employees—that they’re serious about this technology, he said.

“It’s a way to signal to the investors that we’re not going to be lagging behind. We want to be the disruptor, we don’t want to be the disrupted one,” Chandrasekaran said. “It’s also a signal to their own employees that this is going to come fast and furious, and you’ve got to be ready for this journey.”

Adam Brotman, who helps guide companies through digital transformations as co-CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Forum3, said the announcements could also be—maybe ironically—about the types of human hires they want to make.

“They want to attract the kind of people and retain the kind of people that are forward-thinking,” Brotman told us. “My guess is that that goes into the thought process as well.”

Richard Socher, CEO and founder of AI enterprise tools startup You.com and former chief scientist at Salesforce, said there’s also plenty of competitive pressure in the market driving these decisions.

“Shopify is under a huge attack from companies like Lovable,” Socher told us. “You see that wave coming and you have to adapt.”

 But companies need to weigh the decision to plant such a stake in the ground carefully, Chandrasekaran said. For one, they need to actually have the AI prowess to back it up. If a company declares itself “AI-first” and then you have a “subpar experience” with its AI customer agent, it’s going to show a gap between ambition and capabilities, he said.

Klarna caused a big stir when it declared last year that it had 

 as AI replaced workers, especially customer service agents. In an 

 this month, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company is backtracking and preparing for a hiring spree to ensure it has live representatives.

Duolingo has faced online criticism for its pledge to replace contract workers, in the form of angry social media posts and a flood of one-star reviews.

“CEOs cannot be knee-jerkish and tone-deaf in terms of how they message this to the market,” Chandrasekaran said. “They have to think about the social implications of this. They have to think about the brand implications. And they also have to really think about the human implications, both outside and inside the company.”

Brotman said companies need to be careful to make clear that AI-first is an approach to technology and not about replacing humans.

“It can be construed as opposed to human-first, which is not really what it means, in my opinion. I’m old enough to remember “digital-first” and “mobile-first,” and they weren’t anti-human,” he said. “There’s something about AI, for good reason, that causes people to be fearful and skeptical.”

 As for whether other companies will follow suit, Brotman said most CEOs his firm talks to are not yet in a position to make pronouncements like these. “[They] are still trying to get their head around what this technology is and how they should even be thinking about it,” he said.

Many companies are thinking along these lines in private, but not as open about declaring a big public vision, according to Chandrasekaran.

There could also be only a short window of time before this sort of “AI-first” thinking is taken for granted, according to Brotman, who previously served as the first chief digital officer of Starbucks.

“At some point it just becomes table stakes to be AI first,” he said. “It’s possible that there’s not going to be a need for these kinds of memos by this time next year…you’ll almost be feeling a little silly if you’re saying you’re AI-first.”

Illustration conceptualizing a chief AI officer

Why companies are declaring themselves ‘AI-first’

Expect to see the trend accelerate, despite the risks.

It may seem that Gen Z is ahead of the curve when it comes to GenAI savvy. But that know-how can vary by region in the US.

A new poll from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation, and the nonprofit Heartland Forward found that only about a third of Gen Z employees in the 20 interior states defined as the American heartland feel at least somewhat prepared to use AI at work. Four in 10 heartland Gen Z students between fifth and 12th grade feel ready to integrate AI into eventual jobs.

 lately about the role that GenAI should play in schoolwork and education. But it’s important that students have exposure to and training around AI to ready themselves for AI-dominated workplaces, according to Angie Cooper, COO and president of Heartland Forward, which aims to promote economic growth in the middle of the country.

“When we work with rural students and entrepreneurs across those 20 states, we know that AI is here. AI is going to be leading the future of work. It’s going to be bringing additional innovation to our heartland communities,” Cooper told Tech Brew. “We want to make sure that people in the heartland have the knowledge and skills on how to harness AI.”

 AI preparedness among Gen Z employees also varied across industries: 61% of those in STEM roles said they were at least somewhat prepared to use AI at work, along with 43% of respondents in education, 32% in other white-collar jobs, 30% in blue-collar and service work, and 22% in healthcare.

“Addressing gaps in students’ and workers’ AI use and training will be particularly important for those living in lower‐income and rural areas, as well as blue‐collar, service‐based, and healthcare workers, all of whom report the lowest levels of AI knowledge and support from their schools and employers,” the report said.

Because blue-collar industries like agriculture, construction, and transportation are more common in the region, heartland jobs are actually not as exposed to potential AI displacement, the report found. But the authors go on to say that Gen Z in particular might be more vulnerable to AI because of its disproportionate impact on entry-level jobs: “Research suggests that entry‑level jobs—many of which are filled by workers in the same age range as Gen Z is today are the most likely to fall victim to full automation,” the report noted.

“One of the things we see when we talk to employers, small businesses, manufacturers [is that] AI is kind of everywhere,” Cooper said. “It’s changing rapidly, so we want to keep on pace, and we want to make sure that we’re supporting the heartland in the right way.”

Heartland Forward also announced this month that it’s teaming up with edtech startup Stemuli to offer a game-like AI learning platform for rural students and entrepreneurs to get up to speed on the technology.

Cooper said the group, which describes itself as a “think-and-do tank,” will continue to review the findings and look for more opportunities to expand AI literacy.

“Because AI is ever-changing, I wouldn’t be surprised for us to look at other areas that we can dig into the data and then figure out how we go take action,” Cooper said.

Image of a member of Gen Z in a suit running away from a laptop.