The Coming AI Rules Battle

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, the coming AI rules battle. Before that in the headlines, OpenAI plans to double its workforce with a big emphasis on the enterprise. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. We are officially live with the first round of voting at agentmadness.ai. The projects that you guys shared were so cool. At some point this week, we will do a run through of some of the projects. I'll show a little bit more about the bracket and how it was put together, which, spoiler alert, I let Claude and ChatGPT debate so that it was not my call. For now, though, go check it out at agentmadness.ai. Like I said, voting is now live. We kick off the day with OpenAI bucking the AI layoff trend with a massive hiring plan. The Financial Times reports that OpenAI plans to double their headcount this year. That would bring headcount to around 8,000, requiring the equivalent of a dozen hires per day. The new employees will be added to product development, engineering, research and sales teams. And OpenAI also plans to recruit specialists to focus on what they call technical ambassadorship, assisting enterprises to make better use of their tools. This is a fairly significant shift from where Sam Altman had positioned the company coming into the year. In a live stream town hall event in January, he said, We are planning to dramatically slow down how quickly we grow because we think we'll be able to do so much more with fewer people. Since then, Anthropic Surging Growth has challenged OpenAI's leadership and CEO of Applications, VG Simo, has delivered a quote-unquote wake-up call to the company on enterprise sales. A little over a week ago, she told staff that, quote, We are very much acting as if it's a code red. The net result is an urgent need to scale up in order to capture the enterprise market. An unnamed executive from OpenAI told the FT that the success of AI coding tools had, quote, opened up entirely new lanes of things we can do. They added, It does change how you think about everything from your products to how you serve the market. All of a sudden, the company kind of rotated on its axis. Jason Hall writes, I run eight AI agents every day, and I still think adoption is the hardest problem in this space. OpenAI apparently agrees. They're doubling their workforce in one of the roles they're specifically hiring for is helping businesses actually implement their tools. An $840 billion company that still needs dedicated people to get customers to use the product says a lot about where we really are. Adam GPT from OpenAI responded, It feels like we are top of the third inning. The models aren't the problem. They're smart enough now. Now it's about applying them at scale. AI enabling a process or workflow like we've been doing is one thing. But reimagining and repaving that process or workflow as AI native is where transformational change will begin to occur at scale. It goes slow until it goes really fast. I think that'll be the story of 2026 To which Mark Cuban responded, If by repaving you mean reinventing, yes. One of the challenges is that most corporate knowledge is still in someone's head. Knowledge is far different than information. LLMs and agents can capture all the information it can touch, internally and externally to the company. But there are things that you, me and everyone, security guards, salespeople, whoever, do to make the things we do fit the way that we want them to. None of that is documented anywhere. Now that got into a whole longer discussion about the nature of adoption, which I think is probably worth its own show. But I think print summed it up when they wrote, Welcome to the era of AI capabilities overhang, in which OpenAI feels obligated to hire specialists focused on technical ambassadorship to teach enterprises how to extract value from AI agents. One company that is trying to move quickly into this future is apparently FedEx. The logistics giant is delivering AI training to every member of their 400,000 strong workforce. The initiative began in December and is intended to make employees more knowledgeable, efficient, and promotion ready. Accenture has partnered to deliver the curriculum, which is designed to be updated to keep pace with changes in the technology. The program is tailored to individual employees and includes role-based training on the AI systems FedEx is putting into place. In addition, employees are encouraged to take part in what FedEx is calling communities of practice, which includes use case sharing as well as hackathons. Said EVP and Chief Data and Information Officer Vishal Talwar, The more we invest in our talent being on the leading aspect of that learning journey, the better off they will be, the better off we will be, and the better off the broader industry is going to be. Now you might be thinking to yourself, this is just some random PR push from FedEx. To get credit for doing this program, so why are you featuring it on this show? But there is actually a specific answer to that. While I don't know the details, it sounds to me like what FedEx is designing here is something actually fully bespoke and continuous. Whether Accenture is the right partner for that, who knows, but I do think that we are in a moment where the changes in AI have completely outstripped any sort of traditional upskilling or certification methodology. I think the more that companies think in these broad, expansive and bespoke type of training approaches, even though they are obviously going to cost much more than previous types of workforce development, the absolutely better off they are going to be. On the other end of the spectrum and showing just the diversity in how different companies are responding to AI, HSBC is apparently weighing deep job cuts. Bloomberg reports that as many as 20,000 employees could be laid off as the bank bets on AI to cut headcount in middle and back office functions. This would be a 10% headcount reduction for the global bank, which has a huge footprint across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Sources said that if the plans go ahead, the layoffs would take place over three to five years as part of a medium-term transition plan. More broadly, HSBC is expected by some to be a harbinger of deep cuts across the financial sector as AI automates more of the work. Last year, a report from Bloomberg Intelligence predicted that 200,000 positions would be eliminated by global banks over the next three to five years, and a survey of banking CTOs conducted by Business Insider found that they expect 3% workforce reductions on average.