Amazon is planning major job cuts among its corporate workers as soon as this week, multiple media outlets have reported. The online retail giant plans to lay off as many as 30,000 employees as part of cost-cutting measures led by chief executive Andy Jassy, according to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Each cited sources stating the same number of layoffs. Amazon declined to comment when contacted by the BBC. If confirmed, the layoffs could be one of the largest seen in recent months.

Imagine the dream employee: They don't take breaks, go on vacation or request meetings. For some industries, this type of worker could soon be hired. In recent months several companies have announced they are building AI agents, or'synthetic employees.' These digital workers could upend the workplace as we know it - answering emails, organizing invoices, responding to customer service inquiries and managing a calendar - possibly doing away with admin employees or pricey third-party technology. Mr Broussard, whose company works with Sam Altman's OpenAI, told DailyMail.com the next two years will see leaps and bounds of progress with these types of workers.

What if every student could use artificial intelligence to do any form of writing for their classes? A recent technology called GPT-3, a machine-learning model that understands and generates natural language text, is attempting to make this a reality. Created by an artificial intelligence company called OpenAI, GPT-3, formally known as Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is trained to recognize 540 billion words and 175 billion parameters, which are the variables that allow AI models to make predictions. The training enables the technology to produce human-like text for several types of writing, including outlines, long-form essays, sales pitches, and poems. But how well does it work?

Ivanti worked with global digital transformation experts and surveyed 10,000 office workers, IT professionals, and the C-Suite to evaluate the level of prioritization and adoption of DEX in organizations and how it shapes the daily working experiences for employees. The report revealed that 49% of employees are frustrated by the tech and tools their organization provides and 64% believe that the way they interact with technology directly impacts morale. Conflicting views remain between C-Suite, IT, and employees when it comes to the future of work and technology's role in enabling the culture of hybrid work. Just 13% of knowledge workers prefer to work exclusively from the office, yet 56% of CXOs still feel that employees need to be in the office to be productive, although 74% of the C-Suite report they are more productive since the start of the pandemic – showing a disconnect between what they have experienced and what they believe employees need to do to be productive. Globally the C-Suite's number one priority was employee productivity, with workplace culture and employee satisfaction falling further down the list.

Our team is proposing to run a full-scale energy demand response experiment in an office building. Although this is an exciting endeavor which will provide value to the community, collecting training data for the reinforcement learning agent is costly and will be limited. In this work, we examine how offline training can be leveraged to minimize data costs (accelerate convergence) and program implementation costs. We present two approaches to doing so: pretraining our model to warm start the experiment with simulated tasks, and using a planning model trained to simulate the real world's rewards to the agent. We present results that demonstrate the utility of offline reinforcement learning to efficient price-setting in the energy demand response problem.

As a result, more than two thirds (68%) are calling on their employers to deploy more AI-based technology to help them execute their daily work better and faster. According to IDC, global spending on AI technologies reached $50.1 billion in 2020, a figure that is expected to double in the next four years. So it's no surprise that AI is transforming the workplace as a result. But while employees were initially skeptical of this technology, new data suggests perception is shifting. This new study, conducted across the US and UK, sought to understand how workers across various lines of business – from HR to Finance to Marketing, and more – feel about working with AI technologies today.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Eighty-one percent of employees believe AI improves their overall performance at work. As a result, more than two-thirds (68%) are calling on their employers to deploy more AI-based technologies to help them execute tasks. That's the top-level finding from a study published today by 3GEM on behalf of SnapLogic, which surveyed 400 office workers across the U.S. and U.K. about their opinions on AI in the workplace. "In recent years, there was concern among office workers that AI would drive job losses, but employee opinions seem to have changed. The more they've been exposed to AI and see it in action, the more they've realized how much it can assist them with their daily work," SnapLogic CTO Craig Stewart said in a statement.

Waiters, shelf stackers and people working in retail are the most likely to be replaced by automated systems in the future, according to new research into AI employment. The study, funded by trade electrical suppliers ElectricalDirect, found that while manual and repetitive tasks were easy to replace with robots, doctors and teachers were safe'for now'. The jobs most at risk from automation, according to the study, are waiters, shelf fillers, retail assistants, bar staff and farm workers. At the other end of the scale, with those in the most'secure from automation' roles are doctors, teachers, dentists, psychologists and physiotherapists. The researchers found an obvious geographical trend as well, with the north, particularly Wigan, Doncaster and Sunderland at the greatest risk from robots.

Japanese tech company SoftBank has created a version of its Pepper robot that can detect whether office workers are wearing a mask. The 47-inch-high robot with human-like features is already in operation in some countries welcoming visitors to shops, exhibitions and other public spaces. But the upgraded version is designed to stand at the entrance to offices, conferences, airports and other public spaces, to provide a gentle reminder to people to wear masks. Pepper uses enhanced AI face detection to scan a person's face and if it detects the lower half is uncovered, it displays a red circle around on the screen on its chest and says: 'I see one of you is not wearing a mask.' If it sees that the visitor then puts on a mask, the circle turns green and the robot follows up with: 'Thank you for having put on your mask.' SoftBank has developed and released a mask detection feature for its robot Pepper, which it first debuted in 2014.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses of all shapes and sizes have had to quickly adapt to remote work. Many experts predict that this year's rapid transition to remote work constitutes a point of no return. In many ways, the growth of remote work parallels the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). It wasn't so long ago that AI was confined to the realm of science fiction. Now, like remote work, AI promises to transform nearly every industry and every company.