AI’s workplace revolution is here – and anxiety is rising with it
Essential brief
A new Guardian series explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs, expectations and worker power across industries
Hello, and welcome to TechScape.
I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, The Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you while cheering on Team USA in the Winter Olympics.
Introducing our new series about AI and the future of work Throughout 2026, The Guardian will publish a series of stories about how artificial intelligence is affecting modern labor.
We’re calling it Reworked: A series about what’s at stake as AI disrupts our jobs.
Our first story published this morning.
Artificial intelligence, in particular the increasing automation of coding, has changed the attitude in the tech industry from one of relentless optimism and quirky perks like office ball pits to a default of grinding and austerity.
Arielle Pardes reports on San Francisco’s new work ethic: In the last year, as the magic dust of artificial intelligence has settled in the City by the Bay, the vibe among tech workers does seem different.
The excitement about a new epoch in tech – and all the money that comes with it – is now tempered with anxieties about the industry and the economy.
Some workers are going all-in on AI while also questioning whether all that AI is good for the world.
Others are effectively training machines to do their jobs better than they can.
And many of the same workers who are racing to build the future are now wondering if the future they’re building has a place for them in it.
The work of Mike Robbins, an executive coach in Silicon Valley who has worked with companies like Google, Salesforce, and Airbnb, illustrates the change.
Robbins used to be asked to speak to companies and their leaders about topics like employee burnout, wellbeing and belonging – top priorities in the years during and shortly after the pandemic. “Quite frankly, we’ve stopped talking about all that,” he says.
Now, company leaders want advice on topics like change, disruption and uncertainty in the workplace.
Rather than a model of how we should all work, the tech industry may be a premonition for the anxiety and attempts to compensate that are coming for all of us.
The change afoot in San Francisco serves as an early alarm to other industries – my own included – as AI encroaches on all types of work.
Automating work rarely opens time for leisure.
Instead, it increases expectations of productivity.