#technology

Cap size useless HR activities with Agentic AI workflows

That is all

Happened earlier in July but apparently was largely overlooked and then quickly buried by AK's pre-emptive stock warning.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-09/starbucks-taps-ai-to-reduce-reliance-on-microsoft-ibm-software

By Daniela Sirtori and Brody Ford |
July 9, 2026 at 5:15 AM CDT
Updated on July 9, 2026 at 8:31 AM CDT

• Starbucks Corp. is developing in-house tools with the help of artificial intelligence that could replace some software applications it now buys from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.
• The coffee chain is building alternatives to a Microsoft system that tracks inventory and an IBM tool that manages maintenance, according to an internal presentation reviewed by Bloomberg News.
• Starbucks spends about $400 million a year on software alone, and building in-house software can be cheaper, an incentive for the company, which is looking to cut costs as part of a broader turnaround effort.

Starbucks Corp. is developing in-house tools with the help of artificial intelligence that could replace some software applications it now buys from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.

The coffee chain is building alternatives to a Microsoft system that tracks inventory and an IBM tool that manages maintenance, according to an internal presentation reviewed by Bloomberg News. Some of the Starbucks-developed software could roll out by the end of next year, pending the results of testing.

For years, businesses were tethered to their technology vendors due to fear of business disruption and the complexity of building in-house tools. Now AI is shifting that calculus as it makes it easier to develop applications from scratch and as companies push workers to use the technology.

Leading software companies face mounting concerns about whether they’ll be able to fend off competition from products built by upstarts, or their own customers, using AI. This phenomenon has weighed on software stocks this year, with Microsoft and IBM both trailing the S&P 500.

Shares of both companies fell during trading on Thursday, with Microsoft down 2.4% and IBM sinking 5.2% at 9:30 a.m. in New York.

Starbucks spends about $400 million a year on software alone, Chief Technology Officer Anand Varadarajan told workers in an internal forum earlier this year. “There’s clear opportunities to reduce the spend in software,” Varadarajan said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg News.

In-house software can be cheaper, an incentive for companies such as Starbucks, which is looking to cut $2 billion in costs as part of a broader turnaround effort. Though in the long run, building can lead a company to pay higher maintenance and labor costs.

When it comes to technology, the company is reviewing “every contract and service,” according to the presentation. In some cases, that includes building products to replace software that its engineers have to heavily tailor anyway.

Starbucks has been working for several years on building a point-of-sale system that would take the place of Oracle Simphony, according to people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The coffee chain declined to comment. In a blog post earlier this year, the company said AI and other technology advancements will support its long-term growth and free up baristas to focus more on customer service.

Spokespeople for Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle didn’t provide comment.

AI-assisted coding was key to developing the platform that could replace the IBM tool, according to the internal presentation. Starbucks has been pushing tech workers to use artificial intelligence, even factoring usage into their bonuses, Bloomberg News has reported.

There’s skepticism about how much, or how quickly, AI can speed up and automate work. Starbucks recently pulled an AI-powered system to track inventory at stores, reverting to manual counting. It also continues to use software from third-party vendors, including from companies such as Microsoft.

The Starbucks enterprise technology team is on track to reduce its budget by about $30 million in the fiscal year ending in late September, according to the internal presentation. That includes cutting about $10 million in software spending.

Another $13 million will be saved mostly by cutting back on contractors from professional services firms and backfilling some roles with its own staff. Starbucks is setting up offices in Nashville and India that will house some tech workers, while others will remain at its Seattle headquarters. The company has cut about 2,300 jobs since February of last year, including many in tech.

The timing on this is very interesting. . .
Plenty of money for more M&A. Buying their way to revenue growth continues. . .

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/321374/20260723/ibm-acquires-hrl-bring-silicon-spin-qubits-its-anderon-quantum-foundry.htm

where did RM (Global Head of Technology Infrastructure) went?

Occasionally both my laptop and external monitor blink black at very precise intervals. It's happened probably 2-3x/yr since we went WFH about 2020. Now it's becoming more frequent. It almost seems like a screen shot is taken exactly every 10 min. Does this happen to anyone else? How frequently? If it is monitoring, what triggers it, who sees it, how is it being used?

P.S. I know there is no privacy at work/on their equipment, and see the disclaimer every morning. I'm mostly curious.

https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/ibm-q2-earnings-report-2026-stock-ded1f568

OpenAI has admitted that their models made an unprecedented, spontaneous attack on Hugging Face after escaping their sandbox security: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o

Here comes:
1) beginning of AI bubble burst
2) T2: Judgement Day scenarios

Anyone know where Sarah Connor lives?

I have read on reddit somebody mentioned that at his org will be added face recognition for employees for authorization SSO. It sounds weird…. Anybody confirm is this true?

Are you seeing any AI wins around you? It has been three and a half years since AI started appearing in every presentation deck at CDW. So, what have we actually accomplished? Where did all the energy, effort, focus, and money go? Oh, well.

A technology company has announced significant job reductions. This move impacts employees across various departments. The company cited economic challenges as the primary reason for the layoffs. Further details regarding the exact number of affected individuals were not immediately available. This decision reflects a broader trend of cost-cutting measures in the tech sector.

San Francisco, California

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/policy/intel-layoffs-to-hit-data-center-group-division-focused-on-server-cpus-ai-chips-and-data-center-architecture-to-be-hit-by-an-unknown-number-of-cuts

Others seeing this already... Managers running scared schmuck. There time has finally come to learn technology or retire.

And the stories just keep coming.

AK touted how he could eliminate jobs and replace them with AI. Well, now he stew in the aftermath.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-has-nowhere-to-hide-from-ai-c9ff290f

The once-great tech giant’s place in the new tech cycle is in disarray

By: Tim Higgins | July 18, 2026 5:30 am ET

The problem for IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna is that things are going too fast and too slow—all at the same time—and he’s stuck in the middle. That’s a bad place to be in the AI revolution.

Krishna bet big on a hybrid-cloud approach in response to the rise of hyperscalers and has long sold investors on IBM’s role in quantum computing—a next-generation technology he says is three to five years away.

It’s hard to imagine IBM in three years, let alone five, if it has too many more days like this past week.

The stock dropped 25% Tuesday after IBM warned second-quarter results would be far worse than expected. This showed AI isn’t only jeopardizing IBM’s software business, it is making it harder to sell its legacy offerings in an IT market where the new technology is reprioritizing corporate spending away from Big Blue.

It’s the sort of bad dream terrifying plenty of CEOs these days as they try to navigate the revolution. While the biggest tech companies’ cloud businesses have helped position them to adapt to AI, many, like Krishna, find themselves trying to manage legacy businesses even as they struggle to keep pace with emerging, pure-play rivals.

It’s a familiar story that has repeatedly played out in other sectors during prior tech waves. Media, music and cars spring to mind. They all showed that a middle-ground strategy is tough to pull off. Many try, few thrive.

IBM’s current predicament is especially galling given it was once at the forefront of AI with Watson, a natural-language computer processing system that won “Jeopardy!” Big Blue squandered that lead, languished in the following years and today is far, far behind the likes of AI leaders such as Anthropic, which created leading model Claude and is chasing the kinds of corporate customers that once made IBM so dominant.

“IBM trading like Claude mu---red Watson,” Ken Wattana, founder of an AI agentic company called Conto, joked on X Tuesday.

The stock fell harder than it did in the 1987 Black Monday stock-market crash.

For a while, Krishna, an IBM lifer, seemed to be pulling off the middle-ground balancing act. He used his army of consultants to help clients navigate AI while positioning the company to milk its legacy mainframe and software businesses and to offer more tailored AI products.

He essentially bet that corporate clients running critical programs on their own mainframes purchased from IBM couldn’t or wouldn’t migrate to remote data centers offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Instead, Krishna believed his customers would jump at being able to straddle the two worlds. They would gain cloud-computing-like capabilities while keeping certain digital needs in-house. And IBM would be the bridge making this happen.

It was initially a hard sell to investors, but Krishna was well suited for it. There’s something almost statesmanlike about the executive. His manners, his dress, his demeanor.

He even managed to turn a potential liability—at 63 he is older by decades than the executives running emerging rivals—into a selling point. Those extra years, Krishna argued to me in an interview last summer, give him insight into how tech cycles work—the ups and the downs.

“AI is in the first innings,” he said then. “It’s still early to see how the game works out and how it goes along.”

Investors eventually came around. Before this past week, IBM shares had more than doubled since Krishna was named CEO in 2020. That growth pales in comparison with Apple, Alphabet and other tech giants. But it was encouraging to some investors given IBM’s struggles the prior decade.

And Krishna showed he could weather a storm.

In February, Anthropic announced the creation of an AI tool that can rewrite Cobol computer code into a modern language. This seemingly blew a hole in the moat around IBM’s legacy business and Krishna’s hybrid strategy. The stock had what would be its worst day in 25 years—until this week.

Krishna suggested the market had overreacted in February. “I actually think that we were hit in a way that was unfair,” he said on the Norges Bank Investment Management podcast weeks later.

His argument: Rival software companies were at risk to AI while the role of handling client databases and key business functions—presumably IBM’s role—would remain valuable in the years to come.

But he understood investors’ angst. “To give full credit to investors, they’re saying, ‘Look, I can’t decide today…who are the few who might benefit…If I can’t determine that, I’ll take the sector down and then over time that’ll determine itself based on the numbers that you print,’ ” Krishna said.

He was correct for a while. A pair of announcements about AI and quantum computing in May helped IBM shares not only recover from their February swoon, but reach new heights in June.

One of those announcements included IBM and the Commerce Department detailing plans to invest billions of dollars to help fund a quantum chip foundry. This would produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors.

IBM has spent decades working on the idea of quantum computing, getting increasingly more serious in the past 10 years. Krishna is targeting 2029 to deliver the first large-scale quantum computer. The technology uses quantum physics to perform calculations that today’s computers can’t even approach. The potential for discoveries in material science, healthcare and beyond are staggering.

Krishna has staked a lot of IBM’s future on the belief that quantum will unlock the same kind of growth potential that was seen with GPU chips. Those chips popularized by Nvidia have been at the heart of the new AI race, powering much of the advances and, in turn, making that tech company among the most valuable in the world.

But some believe the technology won’t be commercially viable for 10 years or more, far longer than Krishna is hoping.

In the meantime, investors are left with, in Krishna’s own words, “the numbers that you print.” Suddenly, for IBM and Krishna, there’s no middle ground in those.

Pat Gelsinger says the chipmaker went off the rails ‘when it started to be run by business people’. (See: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/former-intel-ceo-says-chipmaker-185823655.html)

Same rule applies to EDA? A software maker derails the moment it is led by a CAE.

Some employees are trying to learn AI on the job to future-proof their careers, but in practice, it isn’t being used effectively to resolve real bugs or drive actual development. There’s a gap between the push to adopt AI and its real, practical impact on day-to-day engineering work.

Why use AI .. apply human mind that is better to development more efficient than AI… human is always win ai just help on that nothing else

The Verizon Home app needs a full redesign rather than incremental fixes — it isn’t performing well as-is. Features like parental controls are overly complex; simplifying these and prioritizing customer-friendly usability should be a core focus of the rebuild.

When’s the last time you heard anyone talk about “touch, trust, technology?” LOL. This morning we got 4 separate emails detailing various ways our technology is failing our clients. Really inspiring.

Have you completely moved off the mainframe to the cloud?

If so, how are you loving Cloudfare?!

Don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel.

Experience any outages???

Laptops are being rationed and recycled. Yes, recycled. So that laptop you just got might be 3 years old and won't handle the windows 11 upgrade. Team members are going through three four and five laptops before they find one that can handle Windows 11.

smh.

They want you to come into the office but they don't want to give you a computer.

Meanwhile we have all these groups pointlessly tokenmaxxing.

Technology has always been pretty bad at Wells Fargo. This is unacceptable. How are we going to sell products customers without compute.

We need to fire a lot more people. Unfortunately we seem to be firing the wrong ones

I saw a site is collecting all the workspace hubs. The message states “this is part of a change supporting a more consistent laptop-first experience across office around the country….just a shift to leveraging your laptop vs a virtual desktop using the hub.”

Any word on Product & Technology Enablement in VBG ?

Two by two, three by three, four by four, and there they go. Replaced by Dan's new army. Farewell Jeff C.

The stock prices is down 2% YTD and most analysts expect very little upside. Also, with very high technology spending and in employee salaries, seems like we should expect a sizable layoffs in the near future. Thoughts?

Watch the Cisco Beat today...
They have rediscovered serious performance monitoring and evaluation and participation in the bullsh-t side of it is becoming mandatory. As a result they are moving it out of all the clunky tools they have today--into a new tool. Which is???

WEBEX!!

Yup, Webex. Likely so that they can use AI to run it all in the backend (which they own/control). So, from now on, you'll be effectively reporting to an AI tool that will evaluate your performance against the latest/greatest HR fashions.

Which means that next time they need to get rid of x'000 people they can ask AI for the list. Which is probably not good news for middle managers.

SpaceX popped it and now IBM and others will follow.

Who is next NVDA or CSCO?

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ibm-sends-shockwave-through-tech-industry-ai-warning

Published: July 14, 2026 9:25am EDT

The industry is tough so I’m being proactive and looking into open technology positions at Truist. Any advice or warnings to share? Keep it real with me folks!

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/cisco-csco-eyes-sentinelone-italy-061043025.html

Just make sure to use the proper pronouns.

😂

Amazon has recently implemented significant layoffs. These job cuts are occurring within a competitive and saturated employment landscape. The company's actions are contributing to a challenging environment for job seekers. This situation highlights broader trends in the technology and logistics sectors. The full impact of these reductions is still unfolding.

Seattle, Washington

https://theloadstar.com/cnbc-amazon-layoffs-take-their-toll-in-saturated-job-market/

How bad can it get?

It allows MS to take screen shots of your computer every so often and store them on the PC.

Has anyone else noticed something that looks like ‘Pegasus’ popping up on their screen? Not sure if I’m imagining it or if this is really happening. Posting this in case it gets taken down curious if others are seeing the same thing

Dell kickin a-s with a third of the market, 40% y/y growth
Powerstore
PowerMax
PowerVault
PowerScale
What's there not to love?

This should only make Oracle stock dive more, OpenAI is being sued for hardware technology theft.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/apple-openai-lawsuit-trade-secrets.html

BNSF utilizing drones to track worker performance and efficiency, while operations testing as a secondary measure…. “In the event a violation of company policy or safety violation is viewed” during the process of rail and equipment inspections in yard and mechanical facilities.

Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, has been appointed to a Federal Reserve task force focused on jobs and productivity. This group will examine the economic effects of new technologies, including artificial intelligence. Sharma recently announced significant layoffs at Xbox. The appointment has drawn criticism due to the timing and the inclusion of other controversial figures. The task force aims to inform the Federal Reserve's policy decisions.

Washington, D.C.

https://www.engadget.com/2211983/days-after-laying-off-3-200-xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-tapped-to-advise-the-federal-reserve-on-jobs/

is there anymore US based technology at TransUnion. Nothing gets done. GCC doesn't do anything. We used to have support and now nothing. How is this business going to survive if nothing is moving.