Permanent Tech Layoffs, Clorox Bets Big, Wimbledon AI Judges

Amazon chief Andy Jassy told investors the company’s push into AI will reduce our total work force in coming years, and Microsoft has just laid off about 9,000 staff. The twin signals ignite a sector-wide argument over whether AI endangers entry-level employees or seasoned veterans.

Data from ADP show employment for tech workers with under two years is down 20-25% since its 2023 peak, while positions for colleagues with more tenure have grown. Still, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have shed thousands of seasoned engineers and middle managers since 2022 as AI investments force cost cuts.

A Microsoft-backed study reports that AI coding assistants lift junior developers’ output far more than senior peers. Leaders quoted in the story say the math now favors small teams of AI-enabled juniors supervised by a few experts, leaving many mid-level roles redundant.

Nearly 94,000 tech employees have been laid off in the first half of 2025 as companies replace roles with AI systems. That averages 507 workers losing their jobs to automation every day.

Microsoft, Tesla, IBM, Meta, and others slashed positions across HR, software engineering, marketing, and gaming while redirecting budgets to AI engineering, infrastructure, and research. IBM swapped 8,000 HR staff for its AskHR chatbot, Microsoft says GitHub Copilot now writes 30% of new code, and Intel is cutting 21,000 jobs to focus on AI chips.

Unlike past downturns, the cuts arrive during strong earnings—Microsoft’s revenue rose 13% while it axed over 15,000 roles. CEOs Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, and Andy Jassy openly declare that AI enables growth with permanently smaller workforces.

Clorox is flooding its marketing and R&D teams with generative AI tools as part of a five-year, $580 million digital overhaul. Employees now use chatbots and image generators to create ads, prototype products and parse customer feedback in hours instead of weeks.

AI visuals for Hidden Valley Ranch let marketers micro-test dozens of food pairings and fixed a dull chicken-wing image by tweaking their prompt. The firm also mines Amazon and Walmart reviews for attribute-level insights and has approved a foaming “Toilet Bomb” cleaner while discarding ideas such as “bleachless bleach.”

Adoption is employee-led, with leadership only spreading methods that teams prove useful. Clorox says the added output has cost no jobs even as it seeks to claw back ground after its stock fell roughly 50% from 2021 highs.

Wimbledon replaced human line judges with an electronic line-calling system for the first time this year. Players including Emma Raducanu and Jack Draper say the AI system is making incorrect calls that cost them points.

Raducanu cited a ball ruled in that TV replays showed was out, while Draper questioned the technology’s claimed accuracy. The system also shut off mid-rally in a Kartal-Pavlyuchenkova match, forcing a replay and a formal apology from tournament officials.

The series of failures shows how fully automated officiating can erode athlete trust even at elite events. The Telegraph notes the backlash is fueling calls for a renewed human-AI balance rather than total replacement.

Across controlled trials in Turkey, Nigeria, Harvard, and Stanford, researchers chart starkly different outcomes from student use of generative AI. Unguided ChatGPT help cut Turkish high-school exam scores by 17%, while a teacher-supervised GPT-4 tutor in Nigeria delivered learning gains more than twice those of top education interventions.

An MIT Media Lab study showed college students using ChatGPT remembered less about their essays and, four months later, displayed reduced EEG activity while writing compared with a no-AI group. Conversely, well-prompted AI tutors lifted performance in a Harvard physics class and a massive Stanford programming course, reinforcing the Nigeria findings.

The research points to the method, not the machine, as the determinant of educational value. When models default to giving answers, learning suffers; when prompts force them into a tutoring role under teacher guidance, engagement and retention rebound.