Ford CEO Says AI Could Replace Half of All Office Jobs

Ford CEO Jim Farley said artificial intelligence will replace “literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” during a public interview. He added that AI will leave many white-collar employees behind.

Farley delivered the forecast at the Aspen Ideas Festival in a conversation with author Walter Isaacson. The comment illustrates how CEOs have shifted from evading the job-loss question to providing explicit estimates of potential cuts.

The article reports that corporate leaders are now openly discussing large-scale workforce reductions rather than avoiding the topic. Their direct estimates frame AI as a force for sweeping changes to office employment, not incremental efficiency tweaks.

London-based voice AI startup ElevenLabs plans to open new global hubs and be ready for an IPO within five years. CEO Mati Staniszewski detailed the ambitions in an interview with CNBC.

Potential hubs include Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, adding to current offices in London, New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore. ElevenLabs is valued at $3.3 billion after a $180 million round backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ Growth, Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said the company has not chosen a listing venue and will decide based on user concentration, noting London must accelerate to stay in the running. The remark echoes concerns that the U.K. market remains unfriendly to high-growth tech firms after IPO missteps like Deliveroo.

Six-month-old, bootstrapped vibe-coding startup Base44 has been acquired by Wix for $80 million in cash. Wix announced the deal on Wednesday.

Base44 had just eight employees, who will split $25 million in retention bonuses. The startup amassed 250,000 users and recorded $189,000 in profit in May despite high LLM token costs.

The acquisition is being cited within the vibe-coding community as proof that near-solo ventures can achieve sizable exits in months. Wix gains a profitable, fast-growing no-code platform at a fraction of the multibillion-dollar sums rivals such as OpenAI paid for Windsurf.

An AI-created act called The Velvet Sundown has pulled in over 500,000 Spotify listeners less than a month after its debut. The group released two classic-rock-styled albums—“Floating On Echoes” and “Dust and Silence”—with a third scheduled in two weeks.

Internet users uncovered that the four listed members don’t exist and spotted obvious AI artifacts in the band’s Instagram photos. Spotify offers the music without any AI label, while Deezer adds a disclaimer that some tracks were generated by artificial intelligence.

The episode shows how seamlessly AI music can slip into mainstream playlists and attract human-scale audiences. It also highlights a transparency gap, as leading streaming platforms disagree on whether listeners should know when creativity comes from a machine.

A former content marketer at Every turned a set of personal ChatGPT workflows into a new position as the company’s AI operations lead. The role materialized during a 27-minute Zoom call with CEO Dan Shipper, who immediately announced the move internally and on X.

Struggling with depression, she had used ChatGPT to automate drafting, revising, and outlining tasks, becoming a hyper-productive “AI power user.” Those experiments now direct how everyone at Every creates content, turning informal hacks into companywide systems.

The episode shows that large language models reward clear thinking and sharp questions, not traditional credentials. Skills honed in humanities studies—like parsing complex texts and recognizing patterns—translate directly into AI fluency and unexpected career paths.