Amazon is slashing 16,000 jobs in a second wave of layoffs at the e-commerce giant in three months, as the company restructures and leans on artificial intelligence. Wednesday's cuts follow the 14,000 redundancies that the Seattle, Washington-based company made in October. The layoffs are expected to affect employees working in Prime Video, Amazon Web Services, and the company's human resources department, according to the Reuters news agency, which first reported the cuts. In a memo to the employees, shared with Al Jazeera, Amazon said workers in the United States impacted by the cuts will have a 90-day window to find a new role in the company. "Teammates who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one, we'll provide transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits [as applicable], and more," Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, said in the note provided to Al Jazeera.

Some companies are "stuck in neutral" in their approach to artificial intelligence, according to Microsoft's UK boss, who said a significant number of private and public sector organisations lack any formal AI strategy. A Microsoft survey of nearly 1,500 UK senior leaders across public and private sectors, as well as 1,440 employees, found that more than half of executives feel their organisation has no official AI plan. Roughly the same proportion report a growing gap in productivity – a measure of economic efficiency – between employees who use AI and those who do not. "Some organisations appear to be stuck in neutral, caught in the experimentation phase, rather than in the deployment [of AI]," said Darren Hardman, the tech company's UK chief executive. Microsoft, the biggest financial backer of the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, has been pushing AI's deployment in the workplace through autonomous AI agents – tools that can carry out tasks without human intervention.

The conversation about AI and the workplace is understandably dominated by the downsides – after decades of automation eliminating manufacturing jobs, people in the service sector are worried about being replaced by "robots". But every technological shift creates as well as destroys jobs. Artificial intelligence – at least in its current iteration, which uses large language datasets to create text, audio and video – is no different. What is, perhaps, surprising is the type of jobs it will create. The most visible and obvious new roles are for those with the coding and development skills to help build AI models or adapt them for particular purposes.

People have a natural fear of technology putting them out of work. The word sabotage allegedly comes from French protesters who threw their wooden clogs -- sabots -- into machines to stop them working. And much of the second half of the 20th century was characterised by labour disputes in relation to the introduction of new technologies in manufacturing industries. Many workers in the services and creative industries believed they were immune to such threats, but AI has changed all that. Robot process automation (RPA) and other AI-powered activities are replacing human activities in a whole range of areas, from call centres to accountancy practices; and, as the technology gets smarter, the number of roles that can be replaced increases.

Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence are current buzzwords in the corporate world. In very simple terms, machine learning is the art and science of building programs that learn from the data that the program processes. With machine learning, programs should get better at performing a task as it learns from the data. In other words, machine learning programs are very good at learning patterns in the data and based on these patterns a machine learning program makes decisions on the fly. Machine learning has revolutionised several application areas.

Have you ever ignored a seemingly random LinkedIn solicitor and been left with a weird feeling that something about the profile just seemed…off? Well, it turns out, in some cases, those sales reps hounding you might not actually be human beings at all. Yes, AI-generated deepfakes have come for LinkedIn and they'd like to connect. DiResta, who made a name for herself trudging through torrents of Russian disinformation content in the wake of the 2016 election, said she became aware of a seeming phenomenon of fake, AI computer-generated LinkedIn profile images after one particularly strange-looking account tried to connect with her. The user, who reportedly tried to pitch DiResta on some unimportant piece of software, used an image with strange incongruities that stood out to her as odd for a corporate photo.

Imagine a world where you could have a beachside conversation with your colleagues, take meeting notes while floating around a space station, or teleport from your office in London to New York, all without taking a step outside your front door. Feeling under pressure with too many meetings scheduled today? Then why not send your AI-enabled digital twin instead to take the load off your shoulders? These examples offer but a glimpse into the future vision of work promised by "the metaverse," a term originally coined by author Neal Stephenson in 1992 to describe a future world of virtual reality. While defying precise definition, the metaverse is generally regarded as a network of 3-D virtual worlds where people can interact, do business, and forge social connections through their virtual "avatars."

A: We've been pretty fortunate that we haven't faced some of the large supply chain issues that a lot of other brands have. Part of that is because we control a lot of our supply chain. We have two manufacturing facilities here in the U.S. where we cut lenses, insert them into frames and ship to customers. And we haven't seen a lot of the labor shortages that other companies have seen because of how we handled the pandemic. We actually closed our manufacturing facilities and reworked them based on the knowledge of how covid was being transmitted.

In that time, reproducing the human ability on intuitive tasks such as speech recognition and object detection were the main objective of active research. Albeit those tasks are not totally solved, it is noticeable the achievements in that field, achievements with direct consequences in daily life. We can enlist autonomous driving and spoken language transcription as legitimate examples of that technology. Nowadays however, the main battle field of artificial intelligence moved from the end-user needs to the massive demands of large organizations and governs. As an illustrative example, yesterday the challenge was recognizing the user face to unlock a cellphone.

This story is from The Hill's Changing America publication. The job of a college admissions officer is not an easy one. For any competitive higher learning institution, the admissions process used to hand-pick each incoming student has also come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. To ensure the ongoing success of an institution, admissions officers are tasked with the nearly impossible task of efficiently evaluating thousands of applications each school year, with the expectation that their choices will reflect the institution's standards, grow diversity and inspire enough students to enroll. The process is a balancing act, and one that is expected to proceed without gender-based or racial bias.