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These updates are a semi-automated curation service. They capture AI’s transformation of work, the good and the bad. My goal is to fully automate everything except the data curation. The summary and log are inherently just a list and produce no analysis that needs my brain to intervene. However, as mechanical as this output is, Claude’s writing still requires a lot of handholding and editing, so I stay involved in the output phase, too.
If after reading these new updates about AI’s transformation of work, you are curious about how AI is or isn’t going to transform everything about us, check out my AI risk framework. Ok, on to the new updates.
Four companies reported second-quarter results recently, and they do not agree about what AI is doing to employee headcount. Block cut roughly 40% of its workforce. Six months later it reports 150% more code changes per engineer, with Square releasing 130 features in the first half. Fiverr lost 10% of its revenue, to $97.8 million, as automation ate low-value freelance work. CEO Micha Kaufman attributed a deceleration in marketplace traffic to recent LLM releases. TaskUs, a business process outsourcer, grew revenue 5% to $308.9 million, its AI Services segment now in a seventh straight quarter of growth. The company raised its full-year guidance. DoorDash grew revenue 36% to $4.5 billion.
Google’s ATLAS study classified 14.65 million Gemini interactions collected over two weeks in April. That use spans 70% of occupations, which together account for 90% of U.S. employment, yet the average worker applies Gemini to 21% of their tasks. Fewer than 10% of those interactions aim at automating non-routine cognitive work. OpenAI analyzed more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from U.S. business users. It found that 44% of occupation-specific requests involved tasks belonging to another profession, with customer service workers, designers, and HR professionals crossing most often.
Ernie Tedeschi of Stripe Economics asked whether the aggregate data show a matching gain. They do not. US labor productivity grew about 2.5% over the past year, against a 1.6% two-decade average, but total factor productivity stayed near zero. AI adoption showed essentially zero correlation with productivity growth across sectors, once Tedeschi removed the 2016 to 2019 trends. Tedeschi attributes most of that acceleration to higher capital utilization, which means firms ran infrastructure they already owned harder.
The price of running the models appeared as a stated limit in three separate entries. Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% after CEO Melanie Perkins judged the average cost of serving an AI task too high. The Linux Foundation established a Tokenomics Foundation in June to standardize how companies disclose what they spend on inference. Revenium now caps how much of the expensive models its engineers may use, moving them to open-source models once the allocation is spent.
Julie Averill, Lululemon’s chief information officer for eight years, reports that pilot after pilot failed. Each one failed because a dozen separate systems recorded the same data differently.
Salesforce reports the average number of agents per organization nearly tripled over its fiscal year, the time from creation to first use down 53% to two days. Those figures come from Salesforce’s own platform. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told analysts that order volume arriving from outside AI agents remains low. He attributed the gap to AI platforms prioritizing enterprise customers and coding tools over physical fulfillment.
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Aug 7, 2026 · Salesforce
Salesforce’s 2026 Agentic Enterprise Index reports the average number of agents per organization nearly tripled over the fiscal year, and the time from agent creation to first use fell 53% to two days. Retail generates 22% of monthly agentic work units. Pandora’s Agentforce concierge handles 60% of routine support requests. The data comes from Salesforce’s own platform.
Aug 7, 2026 · Fiverr
Fiverr’s second-quarter revenue fell 10% year over year to $97.8 million as AI automation compressed high-volume, low-value freelance work. CEO Micha Kaufman said recent LLM model updates contributed to a marketplace traffic deceleration that carried into the third quarter. Projects worth more than $1,000 now account for 15% of completed-project gross order value.
Aug 5, 2026 · Canva
Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% after CEO Melanie Perkins judged the average cost of serving an AI task too high. Rebuilding on in-house models reduced that cost by 90%, and Canva’s video model now runs 17x cheaper than a frontier model. June-quarter revenue still grew 25.2% to US$921.9m.
Aug 5, 2026 · Block
Six months after Jack Dorsey cut roughly 40% of Block’s workforce, code changes per engineer are up 150% and Square shipped 130 features in the first half, more than three times the same period last year. Product development expenses fell 17%. Second-quarter revenue rose 9% to $6.62 billion and gross profit rose 25% to $3.17 billion.
Aug 5, 2026 · DoorDash
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told analysts that agentic order volume from AI partners remains low, because most AI platforms prioritize enterprise customers and coding tools over physical fulfillment. DoorDash’s own tools assemble a grocery cart in under two minutes and generate merchant catalogs automatically. Second-quarter revenue rose 36% to $4.5 billion on 970 million orders.
Aug 5, 2026 · TaskUs
TaskUs reported second-quarter revenue of $308.9 million, up 5%, and raised full-year guidance to between $1.22 billion and $1.24 billion. Its AI Services segment grew 26% year over year and has now grown for seven straight quarters. The outsourcer pairs AI automation on simple tasks with human agents on complex ones.
Aug 3, 2026 · (Multiple)
Corporate AI budgets swung from tokenmaxxing to token minimizing after firms burned through millions with no agreed way to price what they bought. The Linux Foundation established a Tokenomics Foundation in June 2026 to standardize disclosure. Revenium caps how much of the expensive models engineers may spend, pushing them to open-source models once the allocation runs out.
Aug 3, 2026 · Julie Averill (Lululemon)
Julie Averill, Lululemon’s chief information officer for eight years, reports that pilot after pilot failed because a dozen separate systems recorded the same data differently. She cites MIT Project NANDA’s finding that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots produced no results, and warns executives against cutting jobs on efficiency gains they have not yet earned.
Jul 27, 2026 · OpenAI
OpenAI analyzed more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from U.S. business users and found that 44% of occupation-specific requests involved tasks belonging to another profession. Customer service workers, designers and HR professionals crossed boundaries most, at roughly three-quarters of their occupation-specific prompts. Chief economist Ronnie Chatterji says job boundaries are already loosening.
Jul 23, 2026 · Google
Google’s ATLAS study classified 14.65 million Gemini interactions collected over two weeks in April. Use spans 70% of occupations, which together account for 90% of U.S. employment, yet the average worker applies Gemini to only 21% of their tasks, and fewer than 10% of interactions aim at automating non-routine cognitive work.
Jul 23, 2026 · Ernie Tedeschi (Stripe Economics)
Stripe Economics economist Ernie Tedeschi finds US labor productivity growing about 2.5% over the past year against a 1.6% two-decade average, while total factor productivity stayed near zero. After removing 2016 to 2019 sector trends, the correlation between AI adoption and productivity growth falls to essentially zero. Higher capital utilization explains most of the acceleration.
Read the full log of 203 entries:
