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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. AI is starting to reshape the workforce If you want a glimpse of how AI could reshape corporate staffing, look to Salesforce. CEO Marc Benioff said during a Labor Day podcast that the company has already cut 4,000 customer support roles after deploying its own AI agents. Ive reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads, Benioff said, calling the past eight months the most exciting of his career. (A Salesforce spokesperson later clarified that many of the affected jobs were support engineers who were shifted into other roles.) Still, Salesforce may be an outlier. Benioff was likely promoting his own AgentForce platform. Gartner predicted back in March that half of all organizations will abandon plans to shrink their customer service staff because of AI. In a poll of 163 customer service leaders, 95% said they intend to keep human agents and use AI more strategically. Customer service is a particularly sensitive area for automation, since it involves direct contact with customers. Many companies may prefer a human touch. Other roles behind the sceneslike software engineeringmay prove easier to replace. Junior developers, for example, are increasingly vulnerable as coding agents such as Cursor and Claude Code take on much of the basic work. A recent Stanford study found that employment for 22- to 25-year-old software engineers fell nearly 20% between late 2022 and July 2025, even as hiring for older engineers grew. Other research points to broader disruption. A new study from the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity estimates that AI will put 45 million U.S. jobs at risk by 2028, including roles such as retail managers, HR coordinators, and administrative assistantsoften the rungs younger workers climb toward stable, middle-income careers. The Fund warns that this hollowing out of entry-level jobs threatens long-term mobility for an entire generation. It advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a cushion for displaced workers. Reskilling remains another challenge. Research from LinkedIn found that many professionals feel overwhelmed by the pressure to learn new AI tools, describing it as another job added to their workload. Nearly half said they arent using AI to its full potential, and 30% admitted they rarely or never use it (31% acknowledged exaggerating their AI skills at work). Meanwhile, more than a third of executives say they plan to hire and evaluate employees based on AI expertise. For many workers, theres no simple path through this AI-powered transition. While its human nature to ignore major disruptions, experts say there are real advantages to embracing AI and exploring the possibilities. The best strategy may be to expand their use of AI beyond general chatbots like ChatGPT, and find specialized toolsperhaps including new AI agentsthat can handle mundane, low-skill tasks. Doing so frees up time for higher-order, uniquely human work, much of which requires creativity and empathy. What the Google antitrust decision means for AI search companies A federal court in Washington, D.C., decided that Google will not have to sell off its Chrome browser after being found guilty of monopolistic practices in internet search and advertising last year. The remedies chosen by Judge Amit Mehta are more surgical: Google will no longer be able to ink exclusive deals that establish its search service as the default on other platforms. That change directly impacts one of Googles most lucrative arrangements: its multibillion-dollar payments to Apple to keep Google Search as the iPhones default. Google will likely go on paying Apple to put Google Search on the popular devices, but it will no longer be able to pay Apple to be the only search service on the devices. This opens the door for other search providersincluding new AI search upstartsto pay for a presence on Apple devices too. Mehtas decision also compels Google to periodically share its search indexincluding data on the quality and popularity of linkswith competitors. Google built its whole company around its search index, a vast and ever-changing database of all the sites and content on the internet (or at least everything that Googles web crawlers can reach). Now Google will have to share that crown jewel, including data about the quality and popularity of indexed web content, with a new wave of AI search providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. These new playerswhich deliver fully fleshed answers to users, not just a list of linkscan use the index data to improve the quality and accuracy of their own search results. Activists are using AI to unmask ICE agents The federal government has long failed to pass any meaningful legislation to protect peoples privacy from surveillance technologies. Now, in a strange twist, the government has become a victim of its own inaction. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids spread and become more bold, activists are attempting to use AI to unmask, then publicly identify, ICE agents. Politico reports that a Netherlands-based immigration activist Dominick Skinner and a group of volunteers have developed an AI model that analyzes the faces of ICE agents within screenshots of ICE raid and arrest videos. If at least 30% of the agents face is visible, the AI can generate a reasonable facsimile of the agents whole face. Using the AI-generated image, activists can use image search tools to find the ICE agent on social media or elsewhere, Politico reports. Skinner says his group has now publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. The AI unmasking project is part of a larger effort called the ICE List, an activist web archive that has published the identities of more than 100 ICE employees and agents. The Department of Homeland Security insists that the ICE agents wear the masks to avoid being doxxed and harassed. But critics say the sight of masked agents (sometimes displaying no badge or other agency identification) manhandling alleged undocumented immigrants on the street presents a powerful image of callous authoritarianism and unaccountable government force. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Fantasy football nerds are using AI to get an edge in their leagues this year This startup is using AI to take on high real estate commissions 5 ways to write better AI prompts How Japan is using AI to prepare Tokyo residents for this natural disaster Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Ford Motor Company is rebranding its motorsports program to Ford Racing.The rebrand and new logo were announced Thursday in a letter to employees by Will Ford, the great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford.The motorsports arm of the company had previously been called Ford Performance. The company, noted global director Mark Rushbrook, was founded on racing when Henry Ford in 1901 won a race in a car called “Sweepstakes” that catapulted him to form Ford Motor Company two years later.“This is so much more than a simple name change. This is the reintroduction of our racing brand and signals a completely new way of thinking about the business, brand, and products that our racing efforts bring to life,” Will Ford wrote.The new logo consists of the stylized Ford in white lettering inside a solid blue oval, with the capitalized word RACING in a bold blue under the oval.Will Ford said the rebranding will help link the manufacturer’s road and race operations while allowing the development of on- and off-road performance production vehicles, as well as racing vehicles.“Under one global leader, our super-talented engineers, designers and aerodynamicists will find innovative solutions for the track and bring them to our road products and vice versa,” Will Ford wrote. “This dedication extends beyond the paved track; the lessons learned in grueling desert races directly inform the engineering of our performance off-road vehicles like the F-150 Raptor.“All this is being done to bring the best products, technologies, and experiences to our customers.”The first Ford Racing production vehicle will make its debut in January at Ford’s season launch, but the logo and name change implementation will begin immediately. It will be on racing vehicles in January at Dakar and Daytona.“Ford Racing will continue to compete at the highest levels of motorsports,” Will Ford wrote. “The Blue Oval will be in front of a global audience like never before, at venues as diverse as F1, Dakar, Le Mans, Bathurst and Daytona. And we are going in with the same goal we always have at Ford to win them all. After all, we are America’s race team!”Rushbrook said the rebrand was vital in linking personal and performance cars to racing vehicles.“The very core of our company is to have these very passionate products that we can sell to our customers to park in their garage or their driveway or on the street in front of their house that are truly born out of racing,” Rushbrook said. “Everything we are learning in racing we are truly taking that into the products. We’re in the same building between the motorsports team and the Ford Performance production vehicle team. We’re now one team that is working on motorsports and infusing that into our road cars and trucks.” AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing Jenna Fryer, AP Auto Racing Writer
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An influencer who documents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents activities on TikTok was arrested by ICE while livestreaming from her car. Tatiana Martinez was detained last month in Los Angeles while sitting in her Tesla outside her home. The 24-year-old was streaming on TikTok when federal agents approached her vehicle. Videos of the arrest show Martinez being dragged from the car and restrained face down. Bystanders can be heard calling for medical assistance as she lies motionless on the ground. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek that Martinez was arrested because of a prior DUI conviction. This influencer drove under the influenceand got convicted for it in Los Angeles, the official ICE account posted on X. Her attorney, Carlos Jurado, has suggested Martinez was targeted for her platform, where more than 40,000 followers on TikTok watch her document ICE raids and share advice on what to do if stopped during enforcement actions. Martinez has also posted under President Donald Trumps push for mass deportations. @tatianamartinez_02 Hasta cuando Dios mío sonido original – Tatiana martinez Social media has increasingly been used to alert communities about ICE activity and document arrests across the U.S. Videos capture workers and family members being taken in daylight, but those behind the cameras risk drawing attention from ICE themselves. “One of the biggest points that was being made to her aggressively by officers was, ‘Did you think that you were going to get away with recording our activities and there wouldn’t be a consequence?’ That was said to her many times by many different people while she was being held in Los Angeles,” Jurado said, according to The Independent. (Fast Company has reached out to Jurado and DHS for comment.) Jurado confirmed Martinez, originally from Colombia and in the U.S. for about four years, was convicted in 2023. He told ABC 7, however, that the DUI was never mentioned during the arrest. Jurado also said Martinez passed out from trauma during the incident and was hospitalized. She is now being detained in Calexico, California, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for later today.
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