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A Google Cloud exec shares the two ways she evaluates creativity in job interviews

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Google executive Yasmeen Ahmad is looking for something specific when hiring engineers — and it’s not just technical know-how.

Ahmad told Business Insider that the typical software engineering interview used to focus on detailed coding tests and test suites. Now, as she hires for a forward-deployed engineering team, which will work with customers, she said she’s prioritizing people with fresh ideas.

The strongest candidates are “able to think outside the box,” Ahmad, director of Google Cloud’s data cloud, said. “They’re able to think outside the frame of how we would have normally described a problem.”

The executive added that candidates who take a traditional approach to engineering aren’t performing as well in her team’s interviews. The ideal candidate nowadays, she said, can demonstrate creative problem-solving by using AI to reimagine traditional processes. She said she evaluates that type of thinking in two ways:

1. Constant experimentation

Ahmad said she looks for candidates who are constantly “tinkering” with new tools. That gives her an immediate signal that they’re creative thinkers.

“When you’re interviewing them, they’re naturally immediately talking about, ‘oh, last week I had tried AI in this context, and this is how it made me better at doing my job in this way,'” Ahmad said.

These candidates aren’t trying new tools because their boss told them to or because it’s the new cool thing to try, she said.

“They’re the early adopters,” Ahmad said.

Tech executives have told Business Insider that side projects are becoming increasingly common for candidates to demonstrate their aptitude in interviews. However, Ahmad said candidates don’t need to have a GitHub repository of projects they’ve worked on in their spare time.

“It doesn’t have to be pet side projects, because people are busy,” Ahmad said, adding that workers can experiment on the job by trying out new ways to speed up their work.

2. Scenario testing

AI is being used more often throughout the interview process — in some cases, illicitly by job seekers, and in others, as a way for employers to test candidates’ AI capabilities. As these tools reshape hiring, Ahmad said scenario-based testing has become central component to the interview process, giving hiring managers a better way to assess creativity.

Ahmad said she’ll ask candidates how they would approach a scenario involving AI tools in an industry where they have no domain knowledge.

For example, if the example related to healthcare, a traditional candidate might say that they would take all the patients’ unstructured PDFs, feed them into a single LLM prompt, and ask it to generate a summary for the doctor. That would be a “massive liability,” Ahmad said, because in that scenario the candidate assumes AI can inherently understand the timeline of events or clinical context of an image by looking at it.

Ahmad said she’s looking for a candidate who can “find solutions in a way that breaks the chains of how that workflow process has traditionally gone.” So someone might suggest building the semantic context for the imaging data before the model sees it. Next, they would build a specific framework to ensure the agent is operating in the right time frame of data. Then, they would recommend designing a multi-step process that includes a continuous evaluation loop.

“We aren’t just hiring people to write prompts,” Ahmad said. “We are hiring people who can foresee how a model might silently fail in a high-stakes environment, and who know how to build the automated evaluation loops to catch it before it does.”

She said asking these sorts of questions to vet creativity is especially useful as AI transforms the software engineering industry by automating core parts of the job.

“We’re seeing the human role is evolving to more of an orchestrated role,” Ahmad said. “So rather than having to write all of the detailed code, it’s ‘how do I actually express my intent to a multi-agent system now and have that multi-agent system execute on that intent?'”




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Vinod Khosla suggests scrapping taxes for most Americans in response to AI job losses

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If artificial intelligence eliminates millions of jobs, it might make sense to scrap income taxes for the vast majority of Americans and target capital instead, Vinod Khosla says.

“AI will transform economies and need a rethink of capitalism & equity,” the billionaire venture capitalist wrote in an X post on Monday. “Labor portion of economy (vs capital) will decline sharply. Should we eliminate preferential treatment of capital gains tax and equalize to ordinary income?”

Khosla — who cofounded Sun Microsystems and made the first VC investment in OpenAI — was making the point that AI replacing labor on a grand scale might warrant greater taxes on assets such as stocks and real estate.

The veteran financier, who founded Khosla Ventures after leaving Kleiner Perkins, attached a video highlighting some of the jobs that could be taken by AI, from accountants and therapists to truck drivers and chip designers.

Khosla said in a follow-up post that ramping up taxes on capital would generate so much revenue that the government could scrap taxes for most of the roughly 150 million US taxpayers.

“Could easily eliminate bottom 125 million taxpayers from the tax rolls and be revenue neutral at the same time with a capital gains tax equal to ordinary income and a few other tweaks,” he wrote.

He added that tax breaks such as carrying over tax losses and tax-free borrowing against unrealized gains — which he called a “true abuse!” — are “special interest goodies inserted by lobbyists and campaign contributions, not true capitalism.”

Khosla didn’t address common critiques of higher taxes, including that they can discourage entrepreneurship and investment, that collecting them can be tricky, and that wealthy people may leave the country to avoid them.

Khosla has previously underscored that the advent of AI may require sweeping policy changes. He estimated in late 2024 that in 25 years’ time, AI could be doing 80% of the work in 80% of all jobs, and universal basic income might be needed to compensate for job destruction.

“As AI reduces the need for human labor, UBI could become crucial, with governments playing a key role in regulating AI’s impact and ensuring equitable wealth distribution,” he wrote on his firm’s website.

Khosla isn’t alone in predicting AI will change the fabric of society. Elon Musk suggested late last year that work could become “optional” and money might become “irrelevant” if advances in AI and robotics generate abundant resources for all.

Moreover, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO recently said that retirement savings may not be needed in 10 or 20 years, as everyone might have “whatever stuff they want.”

However, skeptics such as Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame have cautioned the AI boom is a speculative bubble, tech companies are overinvesting in microchips and data centers that will quickly become obsolete, and true AI is further away than many think.




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I moved from the US to Brazil after losing my job. Despite the intense culture shock, I couldn’t be happier with my decision.

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After an incredible three weeks traveling around Brazil, I was on the first leg of my flight home to Chicago when I received a message from my director at work — a 15-minute “check-in” with an HR representative.

Worried I might receive news of a layoff, I frantically deboarded the plane after landing in Rio de Janeiro and joined the call in a quiet corner of the duty-free section of the airport. There, I was informed that my role had been eliminated.

Faced with the reality of returning home to the frigid Chicago temperatures with no job, I quickly changed my connecting flight and decided to hostel-hop around Brazil for another month.

However, even that extra month didn’t feel like long enough in the country I’d fallen in love with. Exploring beautiful destinations while practicing a new language every day was incredibly fulfilling for me.

Once I went back to the US, I realized I was looking for ways to push myself out of my comfort zone. I had always wanted to live abroad, and my unemployment seemed like the perfect alignment to make that move to another part of the world.

So, a few months after my original trip, I relocated from Chicago to São Paulo and was greeted by lots of surprises along the way.

Coming from Chicago, I didn’t expect to feel chilly in São Paulo


The cityscape of São Paulo.

The temperatures in São Paulo caught me by surprise.

Cristian Lourenço/Getty Images



Growing up in the Midwest, I’ve endured my fair share of snowstorms and wind chills so cold that I felt as though my eyelids would freeze together. So, I felt well-equipped for any kind of cold weather Mother Nature could ever throw my way.

Even so, I wasn’t prepared for just how chilly Brazil could feel — especially during a springtime cold front while living in an area without access to central heating.

Although Brazil’s springtime temperatures (which last from September through November) are similar to what I experienced during the Chicago fall, it was difficult to adjust to the lack of central heating. So, I found myself wearing multiple layers of T-shirts and the only hoodie I brought with me.

Before I moved, I’d only visited Brazil during its smoldering summer months, so I had naively assumed the subtropical temperatures in São Paulo would be pleasant year-round.

The food is different — and that’s not a bad thing


A plate of acarajé with shrimp.

I’ve grown to love acarajé: stuffed black-eyed-pea fritters

Isaiah Reynolds



Between seeing unrefrigerated milk in grocery stores to trying vegetables I’ve never heard of, the day-to-day food in Brazil is a lot different than what I was used to in the States.

For example, contrary to the common American adage, breakfast doesn’t seem to be the most important meal of the day here; many Brazilians opt for bread or fruit instead of the hefty pancakes or sausage links I was accustomed to.

For lunch and dinner, many locals seem to rely on a tried-and-true formula: arroz (rice), feijão (beans), some meat, and salad.

Classic dishes like stroganoff (a creamy chicken or beef dish topped with crispy shoestring potatoes) or feijoada (pork and black bean stew) may enter the rotation. Still, the aforementioned combo is a popular default dish that I’ve grown to love.

Although tavern-style Chicago pizza still holds a special place in my heart, my new Brazilian favorites include acarajé (stuffed black-eyed pea fritters fried in dendé oil), acerola (a sweet cherry fruit), and doce de leite (sweet caramelized milk used as a topping or filling).

Plus, there’s a pretty great international food scene here, too. While wandering around the city, I’ve come across a wide range of cuisines, from Lebanese and West African restaurants to Colombian and Venezuelan spots.

Although I was initially worried about feeling welcomed, I can see myself putting down roots here

One thing I’ve noticed since my first visit to the country is that Brazilians are very proud to be Brazilian.

From football matches to the celebrations that occur when Brazilian films are nominated for Academy Awards, the people here seem to be the loudest and proudest fans in the room.

Because of this, I was worried I might not feel as welcome as an outsider. Instead, I’ve found an endearing level of curiosity among many Brazilians I’ve met, who either want to practice English or ask how I’m enjoying their beloved country.

This openness to connect has softened a lot of the original culture shock during my move. Although very different from my life in Chicago, I’m excited to continue building a life for myself in São Paulo.




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Jacob Zinkula

Nvidia rejected this international student. Then he bounced back and landed his dream job there.

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As Sylendran Arunagiri considered moving from India to the US to pursue a master’s degree, some friends and mentors advised him to delay his move. They warned that the US tech job market had become too challenging.

Arunagiri’s goal was to move to the US in late 2023, begin a master’s program in product management at Carnegie Mellon University, and land a Big Tech internship for the summer of 2024. He hoped this would be a stepping stone toward landing an AI-related role, ideally at Nvidia, his “dream company” because of its central role in the AI technologies he’d long wanted to work on.

However, there were several things working against him. For one, the US tech hiring landscape was already creating headaches for job seekers. Openings had plummeted from highs reached a year earlier, and industry layoffs were increasing competition for available roles.

Additionally, Arunagiri had grown accustomed to the job market in India, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from top institutions that he said relied on structured campus placement programs to funnel many students directly into jobs. But from what he’d heard, the US was very different. Job fairs were often more like networking events than recruiting opportunities.

“You’re completely on your own,” said the 30-year-old, who now lives in San Jose.

Arunagiri is among the many job seekers who have struggled to navigate a US hiring landscape that’s become more challenging in recent years. Amid economic uncertainty, the early effects of generative AI adoption, and a broader push to streamline operations, US businesses are now hiring at one of the slowest rates since 2013.

Still, some people have managed to break through in a challenging market. Arunagiri shared how he pursued his goal of working at Nvidia — a company he described as his dream employer — and offered his top advice for other job seekers.

Striking out on Nvidia

Many of the tech companies Arunagiri was targeting had conducted summer internship interviews the previous fall, so he began applying before moving to the US. After sending out many applications, he landed an interview with Nvidia in November 2023.

Arunagiri said the interview process went so well that he stopped applying to other internships. But after moving to the US and completing his final interview in February, he learned that he wouldn’t be getting the role — which left him scrambling to find another internship.

“I had to start from scratch, but by then many of the applications had dried out,” he said

Arunagiri was able to land an AI product manager internship based in India at the tech company Informatica. However, that summer, he found it difficult to stop thinking about what went wrong during his interview process with Nvidia — and began setting his sights on eventually landing a full-time role with the company.

A second chance at Nvidia

Upon reflection, Arunagiri suspected that his final Nvidia interview may have doomed him. He said he was lower energy than usual because he was feeling sick that day, and that he’d been hesitant to postpone it out of fear that the opportunity would be filled in the meantime. In hindsight, he said that decision was likely a mistake.

“I came off as a dull candidate, but I’m usually energetic and conversational,” he said. “I should have probably postponed it to a day that I was feeling better.”

Arunagiri decided to reach out to an HR professional from Nvidia to get insight into where he fell short, and they agreed to jump on a call with him. While they didn’t provide specific insights into his candidacy, he said they recommended he try to connect with people at Nvidia in current roles, including hiring managers and interns, to get insight into the kinds of projects they were working on and how he could better align his profile.

He eventually connected with about five Nvidia interns, who he said provided valuable insights. Those conversations helped shape the personal AI-related projects he began pursuing and sharing on LinkedIn in hopes of standing out.

After the summer, Arunagiri dove back into the job search, eager to land a role before he graduated in December 2024. He knew that if he didn’t land a job within 90 days after graduation, his F-1 visa restrictions would force him to return to India.

In September 2024, he submitted a cold application for a technical product marketing role in agentic AI at Nvidia —a role he described as his “dream AI role” at his dream company. He was asked to interview starting in October, and around the same time, he was also invited to interview for a more junior product management role at Microsoft.

Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads

Advice for other job seekers

In December, with his graduation looming later that month, Arunagiri received offers from Nvidia and Microsoft within days of each other. Given that Nvidia was his dream employer, the role checked a lot of his boxes, and the pay was higher than Microsoft’s, he said the decision was fairly easy — and he accepted Nvidia’s offer. He said that so far, working at Nvidia has been “everything that I’ve dreamed of.”

Arunagiri believes that his LinkedIn presence helped him stand out. During the interview process, he said, the hiring manager told him that he’d reviewed his LinkedIn profile and noticed the projects he’d been working on, including small experiments with new generative AI tools and models he’d shared publicly.

He has a few pieces of advice for job seekers. First, he said, time management is key, particularly because applying for jobs and connecting with people can be time-consuming. Second, he said, never compare your job search journey to anyone else’s, since a variety of factors can influence how it plays out.

Rather than quietly applying and networking, he recommends sharing tangible projects publicly — such as posting about AI tools you’ve explored and linking to projects on LinkedIn or a personal website — so hiring managers can see your work.

“You need to find something that sets you apart from others,” he said.




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Jacob Zinkula

A Gen Zer took a 6-figure job at Meta to rebuild her savings. Then she quit and returned to her dream.

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When Alyson Isaacs joined Meta in 2022, she only had about $200 in her savings account. A six-figure salary offered a chance to rebuild her finances, but her ultimate goal lay outside Big Tech.

After college, Isaacs “completely drained” her savings on a startup she’d co-founded, and found herself grappling with her next career move. After weighing her options, she decided to follow the advice of a mentor: go to “startup rehab” — in other words, take a full-time job.

“You can always get a job at a Big Tech company,'” said Isaacs, who’s 28 and lives in San Francisco.

About four months later, she landed a product manager role at Meta in the company’s Quest for Business virtual reality division. But her entrepreneurial itch never left, and she eventually began mapping out the best path back into the startup world.

“There are ways you can be entrepreneurial,” she said of working at Big Tech, “but it’s very much not the same.”

Over the past year, I’ve interviewed more than a dozen workers who, like Isaacs, chose to quit their jobs at major employers — in some cases without another role lined up. While some eventually landed at another large company, others stepped away from the corporate world entirely — joining a smaller business, launching their own venture, pursuing a career pivot, or focusing on personal priorities like parenting.

They’ve become outliers in an economy where workers are quitting at one of the lowest rates in the past decade — a trend driven by a hiring slowdown that’s left some clinging to their jobs with few appealing alternatives. Those who have called it quits told me they did so for a mix of reasons: concerns about job security, shifts in workplace culture, entrepreneurial ambitions, or a desire for more meaningful work. In short, they wanted greater long-term agency over their careers.

Isaacs shared how she decided to take the leap back into entrepreneurship — and offered advice for others facing a similar career crossroads.

Preparing for a return to entrepreneurship

After leaving her post-college startup, Isaacs took a month to reset. She then spent two months interviewing at smaller companies to fine-tune her résumé and sharpen her interview skills. Eventually, she applied for a role at Meta and landed the job. She moved from the Berkeley area to San Francisco and started in May 2022 — about a year after graduation.

While Isaacs didn’t have firm plans to return to entrepreneurship, she knew that if she ever went down that path again, she’d need to be financially prepared for life without a steady paycheck. So she started living well below her means, including living in a less expensive area, going to a basic gym, cooking at home, and avoiding shopping sprees.

“I saved so hard because I knew that this wasn’t going to be the end game for me, and I wanted to start my own thing again eventually,” she said.

Isaacs also prepared for a potential return to entrepreneurship by spending about five hours a week angel investing, which involved scouting and backing startups. After about a year of saving, she began making a few investments, each under $10,000. She said the experience helped her build a network in San Francisco’s startup scene and spot gaps other entrepreneurs could exploit — insights that helped shape her own business ideas.

The final phase of Isaacs’ preparation was soaking up everything she could from her time at Meta, including transitioning to a product manager position at Instagram — one of Meta’s subsidiaries — in 2024. She said the roles gave her knowledge and experience that entrepreneurship alone couldn’t provide.

“Traditional entrepreneurship was just flying by the edge of my seat and seeing what worked,” she said. “But I needed that level of expertise to go farther in my career.”

The question was when to make the leap and leave Meta. Isaacs said the death of her father in 2024 weighed heavily on her thought process.

“That really triggered this thought in my brain of, ‘Is being a product manager at a Big Tech company what I want to do for the rest of my life?'” she said. “And the answer was resoundingly no — I wanted to do something on my own and prove myself.”

By mid-2025, Isaacs found herself thinking more and more about a startup idea in the consumer AI space — and struggling to focus on her job at Meta. On July 1, she resigned; the next day, she began working full-time on her startup, which she described as an “agentic AI solution for personal wellness.” The company is currently in stealth, meaning the team isn’t publicly sharing full details while the product is still in development. She said she and her two co-founders are testing the product with users and plan to open a pre-seed funding round in the spring.

Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads

Advice for others weighing big career moves

Isaacs said she knows many people might hesitate to give up a Big Tech job. But she believes some underestimate their chances of finding a new role or building something themselves — and end up stuck in jobs they don’t enjoy.

“It’s kind of like dating,” she said, adding that if you anticipate a bad dating pool, “you’re going to stay with your bad ex.”

Isaacs said she wasn’t worried about resigning from Meta, in part because she’s a “super optimist” about her career. If her startup doesn’t work out, she’s confident in her backup plan — the same one she relied on after her post-college startup opportunity fell through.

“Leaving Meta wasn’t scary for me because I was like, ‘I can always get another job in Big Tech,'” she said.

Isaacs has a few pieces of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs. She recommends connecting with as many people as possible who are relevant to the venture you want to pursue — and looking for ways to help them, whether through angel investing, advising, or offering support.

“You kind of create this flywheel of people helping you if you help other people first,” she said.

Additionally, even if your end goal is to build a business, Isaacs said having experience at a big-name company can give you valuable credibility as an entrepreneur.

“I needed to be undeniable as a founder, and having a big-box name brand on your résumé gives you that undeniability,” she said.




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Alice Tecotzky

A Goldman Sachs partner in technology shares the skills young job seekers need in the AI workplace

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Bracha Cohen has a front row seat to Wall Street’s AI revolution — and to how young people can compete in it.

“I would tell the new generation of graduates, in this world where AI is so transformational, to build judgment and not just skills,” Cohen, a partner within asset and wealth management engineering, said. “AI may automate execution, but it can’t fully replace decision-making, systems thinking, and ethical reasoning.”

Cohen joined Goldman as a programmer in 1994, long before anyone had to prove AI fluency on their applications. She said that serving in various roles across business lines helped her ascend to partner, the firm’s top leaders.

Today, her engineering team in asset management focuses on automating operations to help the business scale, including through AI. As of now, the booming business — which holds a record $3.6 trillion in assets — uses AI for routine work, like analyzing and summarizing data, Cohen said.

As white-collar hiring slows and anxiety about AI in junior roles grows, Cohen said young engineers should focus less on simply completing tasks and more on how systems function. Mastering engineering fundamentals is key, she said, since AI should serve “as leverage, but not as a crutch.”


Bracha Cohen

Bracha Cohen is a partner and engineer at Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs



She added that computer science majors should practice evaluating risk and crafting good questions, both for other people and AI models. Two other Goldman partners also previously said that interpersonal skills and communication are becoming increasingly crucial in the AI workplace.

And engineers who want to work on AI in particular have their own set of criteria. Dan Popescu, a newly promoted managing director and Goldman’s head of AI engineering for asset management, previously told Business Insider that the most competitive hires need a suite of skills: knowledge in AI engineering, finance, and traditional software engineering.

Goldman spent $6 billion on technology last year and has rolled out internal AI tools, including an assistant and a limited banker copilot. In an October memo, the firm laid out the latest phase of its OneGS initiative, which it says will drive efficiency, slow hiring, and create a “limited reduction” in roles.

CEO David Solomon is one of several big bank leaders who have said that, in the long run, AI won’t reduce head count, and that the firm needs to focus on attracting more high-quality talent.




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More hiring managers want you to prove you’re good with AI during job interviews

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Leaders at the software company Canva used to wonder whether job candidates were secretly using AI during technical interviews.

By early last year, that concern gave way to a bigger question: How good are they with AI?

Managers saw the company’s engineers getting more done with the technology, so they needed to ensure new hires could do the same.

“We just flipped the script and went, ‘OK, we’re going to invite you to use AI,'” Brendan Humphreys, Canva’s chief technology officer, told Business Insider.

The result, he said, has been stronger hires better equipped to wield powerful AI tools to help write code and solve problems.

Canva is one of a growing number of companies — including Meta and McKinsey — that are inviting some job candidates to use AI in parts of the hiring process.

Broadly, when ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, many employers worried that job seekers would use AI to help talk their way past interviewers. Yet as the technology becomes more capable and embedded in daily work, a number of companies are moving from policing it to evaluating candidates’ AI know-how.

That’s what happened at Arcade, an IT infrastructure startup. The company has always asked technical candidates to complete a take-home exercise. Yet now, it expects them to use AI in the process, Alex Salazar, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.

As the technology’s capabilities surged over the past year or so, he realized that candidates would likely turn to AI regardless of whether Arcade sanctioned it. Ultimately, Salazar said, the company wants its workers, including new hires, to use AI.

“So why are we creating this artificial test that doesn’t even really reflect the work they’re going to do when they get here?” he said.

Humphreys came to a similar conclusion at Canva. To factor in AI, he said, the company reworked its technical interview to make the questions “complex, ambiguous, and problematic.”

“If you just dump the question that we’re giving you into an AI, you’re going to get a substandard answer,” Humphreys said.

To land a job at the company, which has about 265 million monthly users of its graphic design software, technical candidates need to know how to thoughtfully question AI, he said.

Show us you can work with AI

One way to avoid concerns that candidates might be leaning too hard on AI is to have job seekers show their work. In Canva’s case, the company asks candidates to share their screen during a technical interview.

“We want to see the interactions with the AI as much as the output of the tool,” Humphreys said.


Brendan Humphreys

Brendan Humphreys, CTO at Canva

Courtesy of Canva



Arcade tells candidates to use whatever AI tools they want on their exercise, then include a transcript of their conversations with the AI. The idea is to learn who knows how to do the job and to work with an agent. Doing so, Salazar said, comes with a “very real learning curve.”

He said that the shift to allowing AI use in the exercise meant that Arcade placed greater emphasis on a candidate’s “taste.” That sensibility is important, he said, because AI can kick out answers, yet the best results often come from repeated iteration with these tools, he said.

“It’s going to show their ability to use the AI, but it’s also going to show what they think ‘good’ is,” Salazar said of candidates’ interactions with AI.

‘Ride the dragon’

Other companies want workers to demonstrate their AI acumen during the hiring process, too.

In a June post on an internal message board, Meta said it was developing a coding interview in which candidates could use an AI assistant, Business Insider previously reported.

That mode of working, Meta wrote, was “more representative” of the environment in which future developers would be operating. It also makes “LLM-based cheating less effective,” the company said, referring to large language models.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is piloting a change to its graduate recruiting process, asking candidates to use the company’s internal AI assistant, Lilli, during case interviews to assess how they work with the technology, several media outlets reported in January.

The acceptance of, or even the preference for, AI in some parts of hiring doesn’t mean companies will welcome job seekers who use the tools to misrepresent their skills. Even if a candidate gets away with it at first, hiring managers are likely to eventually discover that someone doesn’t have the goods, Susan Peppercorn, an executive coach, told Business Insider.

That’s because candidates who complete an assessment, for example, “are going to have to explain how they arrived at their thinking,” she said.

Understanding that thought process is what Canva seeks in its hiring, said Humphreys, who oversees roughly 2,600 technical employees in roles including software engineering, IT, and machine learning.

It’s a way of seeing whether a candidate makes sound technical decisions when it starts producing code, he said.

“What we’re testing for now in our interview process is an ability to harness that power, to control that power — to kind of ride the dragon,” Humphreys said.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com




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Salesforce made a new round of job cuts. These teams were affected.

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  • Salesforce cut part of its workforce earlier this month.
  • Staff in teams across marketing, product, and data were let go.
  • The cut involved fewer than 1,000 roles, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Salesforce made cuts to its workforce at the beginning of this month.

The cut involved fewer than 1,000 roles, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At least nine employees posted on LinkedIn that their roles had been eliminated. Affected roles included marketing, product management, data analytics, and Salesforce’s Agentforce AI product, according to LinkedIn posts and profiles, as well as two employees who spoke to Business Insider.

The layoffs also come amid an executive shake-up at Salesforce, in which the company appointed six new leaders to replace five high-profile leaders who have announced departures since December.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in August that the company used AI agents to reduce its support staff from 9,000 to 5,000.

Have a tip? Contact Ashley Stewart via email at astewart@businessinsider.com or Signal at +1-425-344-8242. Contact Charles Rollet via email at crollet@businessinsider.com or on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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Is AI to blame for your job loss?

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Who (or what) is to blame?

That’s the question laid-off workers are grappling with in the aftermath of losing their jobs. The No. 1 suspect is often artificial intelligence, but connecting the dots on how that led to their firing isn’t always clear.

Jacob Zinkula has spoken to dozens of laid-off workers who are trying to piece together why they were let go.

Some might deem those efforts fruitless. (Congrats on figuring it out! You’re still unemployed.)

A better understanding helps inform the next career move, and plenty of people could use that. This January saw more layoffs than any January since 2009.

Further muddying the waters is companies’ reluctance to say AI drives layoffs. When Amazon made its first round of deep cuts last fall, many speculated it was due to AI. But CEO Andy Jassy said it was about “culture,” not AI or costs.

It’s one thing to lose your job because of tech. It’s another to hear you don’t have the personality for it.

The way I see it, AI impacts layoffs in three main ways.

AI took my job: While the most direct, it’s also the least common these days. There aren’t many examples of AI doing everything a human can at work. In most cases, there’s still a need for some human interaction.

As much as it stinks to lose your job this way, at least it’s a clear sign you need to change what you’re doing. AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s already here.

AI makes my job a lot easier: This applies to just about everyone. AI can’t automate everything you do, but it can sure carry a lot of the load. At first glance, that seems like a good thing. But if AI enables you to do more with less, your company has the same benefit.

Sure, some will position it as an opportunity to supercharge their employees to drive more business. The more likely outcome is that this is an opportunity to reduce headcount.

The silver lining is that your job is still needed. There are just fewer opportunities out there, and you need to get really good at managing AI to get them.

We need to pay for this AI somehow: The most frustrating of the three. AI isn’t directly impacting your job at all, but those tech bills aren’t going to pay themselves. If you fall into this bucket, chances are you weren’t driving a ton of revenue for the firm. (After all, why kill a cash cow when money is tight?)

It’s a hard pill to swallow. However, it could serve as a wake-up call for how you approach your next gig. Like it or not, AI is the way forward for most companies. So if you’re not helping a business reach that goal, you might need to reconsider what you’re doing in the first place.




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AI job listings surge to a record, even as broader hiring slows

by with No Comment Xpandfy

Even as the broader US job market cools, AI keeps punching above its weight.

New data from Indeed shows overall job postings ended 2025 just 6% above pre-pandemic levels, but postings that mention AI are up more than 130% since early 2020.

The standout stat: more than 1 in 25 job postings now reference AI, pushing Indeed’s AI Tracker to a record 4.2% in December.

The skew is striking. Nearly 45% of data and analytics roles mention AI, compared with about 15% in marketing and 9% in HR, even as hiring across many knowledge-work fields remains weak.

As employers narrow hiring plans, AI roles are absorbing a growing share of expectations, raising a big question: Can AI carry the labor market in 2026?

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.




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