The long and the short of IT - the week in digibytes

Anthropic, OpenAI and Salesforce - the skinny on the investment that Microsoft got in the way of

No-one can have missed out on the fact that Anthropic has been dealt the ‘Black Spot’ by Trump 2.0 in recent weeks. The problem for so many other vendors now is their association with Anthropic has also fallen foul of Big Government, a situation that does need to be resolved soon for the sake of all.

So I was fascinated to hear a little insight into the background of the relationship between Salesforce and Anthropic, with the latter’s tech pretty heavily tied into the former’s own AI push. From what CEO Marc Benioff says, things might have turned out rather differently if others had been more open to courtship:

We were really pining after investing in OpenAI, and no matter what we did in OpenAI, they kind of refused to let us invest, because Microsoft blocked us. So because we were feeling so down about Microsoft blocking us, even though we knew OpenAI was a great company, and we wanted to invest in OpenAI, and we liked the OpenAI team and the leaders and were friends with them and so forth, they wanted us to invest personally, but not professionally.

We felt very conflicted with that, and so we were looking for more opportunities. So we invested in a series of AI companies, you know, including Cohere and Mistral, and also Anthropic, because we just wanted to be part of this next generation of models. And that's how we ended up investing about $30 million so far into Anthropic.

But Salesforce does want to hang on to a hefty degree of agnosticism, he adds:

One of the great things about Slackbot, and Agentforce too, is that the different model companies, including Anthropic and also OpenAI, are all part of our ecosystem, and all of those model companies, we want to have a home in Salesforce's architecture. We believe at the very base of the stack is the Large Language Model. It's an incredibly new but exciting part of our architecture.

That said, Benioff is pragmatic about the limitations of some emerging AI tech today, not getting carried away by the OpenClaw hype of recent weeks, for example:

I think it's great, but it's not enterprise grade. At Salesforce, we have a research project underway called Albert, and that idea is, how could we build an OpenClaw - and we have some great architects who are working on this - that could be enterprise-grade, that is trusted, that is secure, that is reliable, that is available, and that can work within Slack, but also with all of our applications?

My take - Oh Sam, Sam, Sam, as the rumors continue to swirl about Microsoft suing OpenAI’s corporate ass for cheating on it with Amazon with a cheeky little $50 billion deal on the side, a little glimpse into what might have been...

Those layoffs in full

An interesting, if ultimately depressing league table of tech job losses passes by desk this week from personal finance and trading education platform RationalFX where they’ve compiled layoff data from multiple verified sources, including US WARN notices, TrueUp, TechCrunch, and the Layoffs.fyi tracker, covering announcements made since the start of 2026.

So far this year, according to this analysis, a total of 78,557 tech layoffs have been recorded globally, with the United States accounting for the vast majority, 59,510 job cuts across 54 companies, or roughly 76.7% of the total. Oracle (25,254), Amazon (16,000), Block (4,000), and Meta (2,200) account for the most significant workforce reductions so far this year.

AI is being blamed as a driver for a large percentage of these layoffs. AI-related restructuring accounts for 37,638 layoffs, close to half of all tech job losses in 2026. That stat has been heavily skewed in recent days by Oracle’s round of cuts, although prior to that Block, Atlassian and Telstra all cited AI-related factors in their decisions.

And there’s more to come, according to data analyst Alan Cohen, who predicts:

According to our calculations, if the current pace of tech layoffs continues, 2026 will end with roughly 318,592 tech layoffs in total, coming closer to the tech layoff peak in 2023 when an estimated 430,000 people lost their jobs.

Elsewhere executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas back up the doom and gloom with its own stats, announcing that US job cuts in March rose 25% on February, with AI cited as the main excuse.

Technology firms announced 18,720 job cuts in March, bringing the total so far this year to 52,050, up 40% from the 37,097 cuts in this sector announced in the same period last year. That is the highest year-to-date total for the sector since 2023 when 102,391 tech job cuts were recorded.

In March, AI led all reasons for all sector job cuts, with 15,341 announced during the month, 25% of the total,  and up on the 4,680 cuts recorded in February. So far in 2026, AI has been cited for 12,304 job cut announcements, or eight percent of job cut plans. For the whole of 2025, 54,836 job cuts were attributed to AI, five percent of the total.

According to Chief Revenue Officer Andy Challenger:

Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs. The actual replacing of roles can be seen in Technology companies, where AI can replace coding functions. Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can’t replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs.

My take - Happy Easter, everyone.

AI realism in action 

Timing is everything. For US carrier, AT&T, putting in the foundations that serve it well today in the AI era began some years ago, as Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President of Wireless Technology, told the NSR/BCG Global Connectivity Leaders Conference in New York:

I think we're all privileged to be in a company that actually established a Chief Data Office more than a decade ago. And we went through big data to machine learning and AI. And obviously, when the new capabilities of generative AI showed up 3 years ago, the team was able to be one of the early movers to help us to adopt those technologies at scale across the companies. We all have access to capabilities, whether it's in software development, whether it's in day-to-day work, we all have access to the latest models and the latest capabilities and across the company, no matter if it's in customer service or fraud detection or in finance or in other areas, capabilities are being built to the benefit of operating our company.

On the network side: 

We’ve been building Machine Learning and AI capabilities for years in the network space. No doubt that 2 things help us to accelerate this. One, obviously, the advancement in AI capabilities. The other part is our move into an open architecture. It allows us to have more structured data model that's flowing up into models, and it helps us to take action, what we call in our terminology closed loop in an easier way, follow intent and being able to build modules, software modules and AI modules that helps us to operate our network, whether it's energy savings, which, again, we've been doing for years, like what we call cell site sleep where you take down carriers when you don't need them in order to save.

The next trick for AT&T to pull off will clearly center on the roll out of 6G-enabled AI. Elbaz confirms this was the topic du jour at the recent Mobile World Congress, but personally he’d like to move the agenda on to a different approach:

I think the cycle of Gs over the years was instrumental to the success of the wireless industry and the ability to connect 7 billion or 8 billion people around the world to the Internet. However, in a world in which every month or two, a new language model or foundational model is getting dropped at us, I don't think we, as an industry, can talk about what we think our industry is going to enable in 2030. That doesn't work.

If you think about the state of the architecture of wireless today, it's already based on software. It's based on openness, AI, cloud-native infrastructure. None of those technology domains live in five or 10-year cycles. So I think the first thing we need to do as an industry is completely de-couple the Gs or the cycle of the Gs, and our ability to innovate. We need to move to a continuous innovation and continuous progress and being able to consume new capabilities and innovation as it becomes available.

My take - I agree with Elbaz, but on the other hand, good luck with that!

Look behind you!

If you’re reading this on your phone or mobile device in a cafe or a bar or some public place - and why are you? It’s the Easter break! Put down your gadget and go hunt some eggs! - then be careful who’s looking over your shoulder!

We’re also all guilty of snooping when it comes to sneaking a peek at the phone of the person sitting next to us, yet, for some reason, we seem to assume that it won’t be happening to us.

New research by Samsung reveals a growing "privacy illusion", where smartphone users feel in control of what others can see on their screens, despite knowing how visible that content really is. Public transport is the biggest hotspot for these moments (61%), followed by queues in shops and supermarkets (36%) and social spaces such as bars, restaurants and cafés (14%).

Now, that’s embarrassing if you’re checking out OnlyFans in public - and that’s very naughty, stop it now! - but it’s positively dangerous if your phone or tablet is displaying corporate confidential business information, let alone personal information such as banking information or medical information.

And yes while nearly half of us reckon that if we catch someone looking at our screens, we would close the device, but only one-in-ten say that they would actively confront the snooper! Yeah, sure you would, Jan, sure you would...

My take - As a Brit, I’m supposed to avoid social confrontation in such circumstances, but to hell with that! As for the sneaking a peek at other people’s phones/tablets/laptops, I long ago realised that the best place to pick up unauthorised, uncleared information was on a plane heading out to a major tech industry event, where the rest of the seats are full of business people on a 10 hour flight trying to catch up with the work they were supposed to have done days ago!

Confession time - one of the reasons I fell out with Tom Siebel years and years ago was a result of sitting next to one of his sales team on a plane, said exec repeatedly wandering off to the bar and leaving his laptop open on his chair. At one point, he even asked me to hold it for him, without shutting it down or putting it to sleep. I did feel obliged to admit to him that I was a tech journalist/analyst, but I think there may have been one too many in-flight cocktails taken by that time for that to sink in...

He said what?

I think, for San Francisco, this is the home of the Summer of Love. This is the home of gay rights. This is the home of many great companies, like Levi Strauss, gap, Salesforce, even, you know, it's the home of a lot of innovation. It's where we started with the Gold Rush. All of those ideas, the spirit of transformation and innovation, all started in San Francisco, and that kind of idea is still present here, because it's about the energy that's present here in the city. So when you're walking down Haight Ashbury street, you're still going to get that vibe. You're looking into the future of what's happening and what's possible.

After so much negativity of late about San Francisco’s ‘doom spiral’, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff strikes a note of welcome optimism. I’d like to think he’s correct.