Emma Roth reports via The Verge: YouTube is broadening its efforts to crack down on ad blockers. The platform has "launched a global effort" to encourage users to allow ads or try YouTube Premium, YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton says in a statement provided to The Verge. If you run into YouTube's block, you may see a notice that says "video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled." It also includes a prompt to allow ads or try YouTube Premium. You may get prompts about YouTube's stance on ad blockers but still be able to watch a video, though, for one Verge staffer, YouTube now fully blocks them nearly every time.

YouTube confirmed that it was disabling videos for users with ad blockers in June, but Lawton described it as only a "small experiment globally" at the time. Now, YouTube has expanded this effort. Over the past several weeks, more users with ad blockers installed have found themselves unable to watch YouTube videos, with a post from Android Authority highlighting the increase in reports. Lawton maintains that the "use of ad blockers" violates the platform's terms of service, adding that "ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube."

Security reporter Brian Krebs: The top-level domain for the United States -- .US -- is home to thousands of newly-registered domains tied to a malicious link shortening service that facilitates malware and phishing scams, new research suggests. The findings come close on the heels of a report that identified .US domains as among the most prevalent in phishing attacks over the past year. Researchers at Infoblox say they've been tracking what appears to be a three-year-old link shortening service that is catering to phishers and malware purveyors. Infoblox found the domains involved are typically three to seven characters long, and hosted on bulletproof hosting providers that charge a premium to ignore any abuse or legal complaints. The short domains don't host any content themselves, but are used to obfuscate the real address of landing pages that try to phish users or install malware.

Infoblox says it's unclear how the phishing and malware landing pages tied to this service are being initially promoted, although they suspect it is mainly through scams targeting people on their phones via SMS. A new report says the company mapped the contours of this link shortening service thanks in part to pseudo-random patterns in the short domains, which all appear on the surface to be a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. "This came to our attention because we have systems that detect registrations that use domain name generation algorithms," said Renee Burton, head of threat intelligence at Infoblox. "We have not found any legitimate content served through their shorteners."

Can you heat up a pan to 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit? That's the burning question at the center of this proposed class action lawsuit, which claims the advertising for SharkNinja's nonstick cookware violates the laws of physics and thermodynamics. From a report: While SharkNinja is the company best known for its Shark robovacs and Ninja kitchen gadget, this lawsuit takes issue with the Ninja NeverStick Premium Cookware collection, a line of pots and pans it advertises as having superior nonsticking and nonflaking qualities thanks to its manufacturing process.

Instead of making its pans at a measly 900-degree temperature that other brands use, SharkNinja says it heats up the cookware to a maximum of 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That process, according to SharkNinja, fuses "plasma ceramic particles" to the surface of the pan, "creating a super-hard, textured surface that interlocks with our exclusive coating for a superior bond." But Patricia Brown, the person who filed this lawsuit, isn't buying it. As cited in Brown's lawsuit, NASA recently said the "surface of the Sun is a blisteringly hot 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit," meaning SharkNinja's manufacturing process reaches about three times that temperature.

Netflix said its effort to limit password sharing led to a 10.8% rise in subscriptions in the third quarter, a better-than-expected result that comes as the company plans to increase some prices in the U.S. and other markets. From a report: The streaming giant added 8.8 million subscribers in the third quarter with customer growth in every region, its largest quarterly customer gain since the second quarter of 2020. The company plans to immediately raise prices for its basic plan in the U.S., which is no longer available to new customers, to $11.99 from $9.99 and up the cost of its premium plan to $22.99 from $19.99.

It is also increasing some prices in the U.K. and France, though the cost of its ad-supported and standard ad-free plans are unchanged. The price increases are a sign of streamers' efforts to improve profitability and wean consumers off the low monthly subscription fees that drew users away from pricey cable bundles in the early days of streaming.

LinkedIn plans to lay off more than 660 people across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams, it announced Monday -- representing more than 3% of the company's global workforce. From a report: LinkedIn has now seen two major rounds of layoffs this year following its cutting in May of 716 jobs and shuttering of its Chinese app InCareer. Those cuts were announced alongside a broader restructuring of the firm's Global Business Organization. The job positions are being eliminated as part of broader efforts at the company to optimize around artificial intelligence. LinkedIn released a slew of new AI product features earlier this month, including an AI-assisted candidate discovery for recruiters, and AI-powered coaching for LinkedIn's premium subscribers.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced plans to launch cloud streaming for PlayStation 5 this month. From a report: The feature, which will be available to PlayStation Plus Premium members, will receive a staggered rollout. Sony is targeting an October 17 launch for Japan, October 23 for Europe and October 30 for North America. "Select PS5 games will be available for streaming, and we're planning to have hundreds of PS5 titles to support this new benefit," said Hideaki Nishino, SIE's senior VP of platform experience.

Supported titles will include Game Catalogue offerings like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Mortal Kombat 11 and Saints Row IV. Some PS5 digital titles that players own will be available for streaming too including Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Genshin Impact, Fall Guys and Fortnite. Game Trials for PS5 titles like Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Calisto Protocol will also be available. Sony said DLC and in-game purchases will be available for PS5 game streaming too.

Google has introduced Chromebook Plus, a new certification that's meant to help shoppers identify high-quality Chromebooks to buy. From a report: Much like Intel's Evo program for Windows PCs, the Chromebook Plus branding will be awarded to laptops that meet a set of minimum requirements. The idea is that even a shopper who's not familiar with PC specs can see the "Chromebook Plus" label on a product and be assured that Google thinks it's a good product. Chromebook Plus devices must have:

An Intel Core (i3 or higher) or AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU
An IPS panel with at least 1080p resolution
A 1080p webcam
8GB of RAM
128GB of storage

There's an interesting absence here: battery life. In fact, the phrase "battery life" does not appear once in Google's press release. Curious! I asked Google spokesperson Peter Du about this, and he provided the following statement: "All Chromebooks are required to meet a 10 hours battery life requirement based on internal testing standards. While not a new requirement for Chromebook Plus like the 1080p screen or 8GB of RAM, Chromebook Plus laptops must also adhere to this."

The new iPhone 15 Pro may be too hot for some to handle. Literally. WSJ: Apple's priciest new iPhones are heating up in some scenarios, reaching high temperatures that make them difficult to touch at certain times, according to reviews, tests by The Wall Street Journal and social-media posts from buyers in China, the U.S. and Canada. Some iPhone 14 Pro owners have noticed similar hot temperatures over the past year. The high temperatures in Apple's newest 15 Pro models -- typically when charging and using intensive apps -- are prompting concerns that the company might need to address overheating in software updates that could impact performance. Premium iPhones have long been a critical cash cow for Apple as smartphone demand has slumped globally.

The company is hoping the iPhone 15, especially its Pro models, will return its business to growth. Thomas Galvin, a 23-year-old from Cleveland, says his iPhone 15 Pro Max has been "super hot" and that he is considering returning it. Apple customer support told him the heat was a result of setting up the new phone, but even a few days later, it is still "way worse than the iPhone 13 Pro Max," he said. Other users on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit have had similar complaints about the heat, with some mentioning that the phone had become so warm it is difficult to hold. The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern noted in her review last week that the iPhone 15 Pro Max hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit while charging. In further testing, the phone reached temperatures up to 112 degrees when simultaneously charging and doing processor-intensive tasks, such as gaming.

A company that acquires and sells zero-day exploits -- flaws in software that are unknown to the affected developer -- is now offering to pay researchers $20 million for hacking tools that would allow its customers to hack iPhones and Android devices. From a report: On Wednesday, Operation Zero announced on its Telegram accounts and on its official account on X, formerly Twitter, that it was increasing payments for zero-days in those platforms tenfold, from $200,000 to $20 million. "By increasing the premium and providing competitive plans and bonuses for contract works, we encourage the developer teams to work with our platform," the company wrote.

Operation Zero, which is based in Russia and launched in 2021, also added that "as always, the end user is a non-NATO country." On its official website, the company says that "our clients are Russian private and government organizations only." When asked why they only sell to non-NATO countries, Operation Zero CEO Sergey Zelenyuk declined to say. "No reasons other than obvious ones," he said. Zelenyuk also said that the bounties Operation Zero offer right now may be temporary, and a reflection of a particular time in the market, and the difficulty of hacking iOS and Android.

Several Slashdot readers have shared this report: Folks, what you've heard so far is true. Apple's new FineWoven iPhone cases and accessories are bad. Like, really bad. I've been puzzling over them for the past week, looking at them from different angles. Picking them up, setting them down, petting them. Seven days later, I still can't make sense of them and have no other choice but to say it out loud: FineWoven is very bad. FineWoven is a new fabric option you'll find on iPhone 15 cases, AirTag holders, and MagSafe wallets. Apple calls it a "luxurious and durable microtwill." It's silky, almost slippery to the touch, and costs $59 for any of the phone cases, $35 for an AirTag holder, and $99 for one of the new watch bands -- not the most expensive phone cases you can buy, but pretty darn pricey.

Apple is pitching them as a premium replacement of sorts for the leather accessories it discontinued. The company won't sell leather iPhone cases and straps anymore because making them at Apple's scale "has a significant carbon footprint," according to Lisa Jackson, the company's environmental policy VP. That's fair; as my colleague Justine Calma puts it, "Cattle are a big source of greenhouse gas emissions because cows burp out methane, which is even more potent than CO2 when it comes to its ability to trap heat on the planet." If you want a fancy first-party iPhone case, then your new, more sustainable option would be FineWoven. But FineWoven is very much not the premium material that leather is. When I popped the MagSafe wallet out of its box, I could clearly see some places where it was already showing wear along the edges. Little bits of lint immediately caught on the fabric, too. And then there's the fingernail test.

Cisco agreed to buy Splunk in a deal valued at about $28 billion, representing its biggest acquisition yet and a massive push into software and artificial intelligence-powered data analysis. From a report: Cisco will pay $157 a share in cash, the companies said in a statement Thursday, or a 31% premium to Splunk's previous closing price on Wednesday. Cisco has been expanding its software and services business in an attempt to rely less on its hallmark networking hardware. The Silicon Valley giant has traditionally generated the bulk of its revenue from equipment that forms the backbone of computer networks, but that's been changing. Last month Cisco outlined the headway it's making in artificial intelligence and security technology.

The deal is also arguably just as much a bet on artificial intelligence as it is on the business of software and data security. Earlier this year, Splunk announced a new line of AI offerings that it said would, among other things, allow companies to detect and respond to anomalies in their data faster. The merger offers the companies' AI products "substantial scale" and more visibility into data, they said in Thursday's statement.

Business Insider reports on "a soaring number of Gen Zers who has decided to skip college altogether.

"Four million fewer teenagers enrolled at a college in 2022 than in 2012." For many, the price tag has simply grown too exorbitant to justify the cost. From 2010 to 2022, college tuition rose an average of 12% a year, while overall inflation only increased an average of 2.6% each year. Today it costs at least $104,108 on average to attend four years of public university — and $223,360 for a private university.

At the same time, the salaries students can expect to earn after graduation haven't kept up with the cost of college. A 2019 report from the Pew Research Center found that earnings for young college-educated workers had remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Factor in the average student debt of $33,500 that college graduates owe after they leave school, and many graduates will spend years catching up with their degree-less counterparts. This student-debt-driven financial hole is leaving more young graduates with a lower net worth than previous generations.

The widening gap between the value and the cost of college has started to shift Gen Z's attitude toward higher education. A 2022 survey by Morning Consult found that 41% of Gen Zers said they "tend to trust US colleges and universities," the lowest percentage of any generation. It's a significant shift from when millennials were in their shoes a decade ago: A 2014 Pew Research survey found that 63% of millennials valued a college education or planned to get one. And of those who graduated, 41% of that cohort considered their schooling "very useful" in readying them to enter the workforce — that's compared to 45% of Gen Xers and 47% of boomers who felt the same...

The focus now, especially in the midst of so much uncertainty in the economy, is on using college to prepare for a single, overriding goal: getting a good job.
The article argues this is transforming which classes get emphasized by both students and colleges. For example, in 2014 computer programming was only the 7th most popular major at U.C. Berkeley — but now it's #1. And the data science degree Berkeley created five years ago is now already its third most popular.

And meanwhile, "last year only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities — down from 20% a decade earlier and almost 30% in the 1970s."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader yusing for sharing the article.

Apple might be the king of tech. But in the growing cold economic war between the world's two biggest economies, it is becoming just another game piece -- albeit a big one. WSJ: Still the world's largest public company by market value, Apple has seen that value take a notable hit this week on increasing signs that its business in China might be coming under threat. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Chinese government is banning the iPhone and other foreign-branded devices from use by workers at central government agencies. Bloomberg reported Thursday that such a ban might also be extended to state-owned enterprises and other government-backed entities. That could amount to a significant swath of people in a state-led economy with a population totaling more than 1.4 billion.

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, about 56.3 million urban workers were employed by "state-owned units" in 2021. Those jobs commanded an average wage about 8% above the national urban average -- an attractive segment for a company specializing in premium devices. And because Apple now ships roughly 230 million iPhones globally every year, 56 million would be a notable chunk to take out of the pool of potential buyers -- especially in a mature global smartphone market with low growth prospects. [...] Apple's stock price has thus slumped nearly 7% over the past two days, costing the company about $194 billion in market value. That might seem excessive considering the many unknowns about the reported iPhone bans and how they could ultimately play out. Also, China has at least some interest in not overly harming a major local employer during a time of growing unemployment. One Chinese city alone reportedly has more than one million workers building Apple products or employed in related jobs.

Google is killing off the last vestiges of Google Play Movies & TV, a service that sold premium Hollywood films and TV shows as part of Google's once-cohesive string of Google Play content stores. From a report: The company emailed users of Android TV to say that the "Google Play Movies & TV app will no longer be available on your Android TV device from 05 October 2023. You can continue to buy or rent movies directly through the Shop tab on your Android TV." Play Movies has been going through a slow death as Google shuffles around its media content. The smartphone Play Movies app became "Google TV" in 2022, and that same year, the Play Store app was stripped of movie and TV sales.

On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021. On Android TV, the new "Shop" tab seems to just be an OS-integrated Google TV content store. If you think this sounds confusing, you're not alone. Google's support page reflects the ridiculous state of Google's video apps, instructing users that "in Your Library, you can find content that you bought from: Google Play Movies & TV, YouTube, Android TV, Google TV." How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.

A couple months after Microsoft revealed plans to increase Game Pass subscription prices, Sony is getting in on the act. From a report: The company is bumping up the annual prices of all three PlayStation Plus plans on September 6th. An annual Essential subscription will soon cost $80 per year, up from $60. The Extra plan is going up by $35 to $135 per year, while an annual Premium plan will soon cost $40 more at $160. The price changes won't take effect for current PS Plus users on an annual plan until their next renewal date that's on or after November 6th. If you make any changes to your plan between September 6th and then (such as changing tiers), the new pricing will apply. Sony has not announced changes to the monthly ($10 for Essential, $15 for Extra and $18 for Premium) or quarterly ($25 for Essential, $40 for Extra and $50 for Premium) for the time being. It notes that the annual plan is still less expensive than a monthly or quarterly subscription in the long run.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is discontinuing its Pixel Pass subscription service that allowed people to get a Pixel phone combined with premium services including YouTube Premium, Google Play Pass, and YouTube Premium for a monthly fee. The company said on its support page that it will stop offering purchases or renewals for the Pixel Pass.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Seeking to capitalize on ChatGPT's viral success, OpenAI today announced the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused edition of the company's AI-powered chatbot app. ChatGPT Enterprise, which OpenAI first teased in a blog post earlier this year, can perform the same tasks as ChatGPT, such as writing emails, drafting essays and debugging computer code. But the new offering also adds "enterprise-grade" privacy and data analysis capabilities on top of the vanilla ChatGPT, as well as enhanced performance and customization options. That puts ChatGPT Enterprise on par, feature-wise, with Bing Chat Enterprise, Microsoft's recently launched take on an enterprise-oriented chatbot service.

ChatGPT Enterprise provides a new admin console with tools to manage how employees within an organization use ChatGPT, including integrations for single sign-on, domain verification and a dashboard with usage statistics. Shareable conversation templates allow employees to build internal workflows leveraging ChatGPT, while credits to OpenAI's API platform let companies create fully custom ChatGPT-powered solutions if they choose. ChatGPT Enterprise, in addition, comes with unlimited access to Advanced Data Analysis, the ChatGPT feature formerly known as Code Interpreter, which allows ChatGPT to analyze data, create charts, solve math problems and more, including from uploaded files. For example, given a prompt like "Tell me what's interesting about this data," ChatGPT's Advanced Data Analysis capability can look through the data -- financial, health or location information, for example -- to generate insights.

Advanced Data Analysis was previously available only to subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, the $20-per-month premium tier of the consumer ChatGPT web and mobile apps. To be clear, ChatGPT Plus is sticking around -- OpenAI sees ChatGPT Enterprise as complementary to it, the company says. ChatGPT Enterprise is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI's flagship AI model, as is ChatGPT Plus. But ChatGPT Enterprise customers get priority access to GPT-4, delivering performance that's twice as fast as the standard GPT-4 and with an expanded 32,000-token (~25,000-word) context window. Context window refers to the text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent raw text (e.g. the word "fantastic" would be split into the tokens "fan," "tas" and "tic"). Generally speaking, models with large context windows are less likely to "forget" the content of recent conversations. Crucially, OpenAI said that it "won't train models on business data sent to ChatGPT Enterprise or any usage data and that all conversations with ChatGPT Enterprise are encrypted in transit and at rest," notes TechCrunch.

"OpenAI says that its future plans for ChatGPT Enterprise include a ChatGPT Business offering for smaller teams, allowing companies to connect apps to ChatGPT Enterprise, 'more powerful' and 'enterprise-grade' versions of Advanced Data Analysis and web browsing, and tools designed for data analysts, marketers and customer support."

A blog post introducing ChatGPT Enterprise can be found here.

"The green energy revolution still faces a huge obstacle: a lack of long-term, cost-efficient renewable storage," writes the Washington Post.

But then they check in on a Finnish start-up running the world's first commercial-scale sand battery, which uses solar panels and wind turbines to heat sand-filled vats (up to 1,000 degrees) to back up district heating networks: The sand can hold onto the power for weeks or months at a time — a clear advantage over the lithium ion battery, the giant of today's battery market, which usually can hold energy for only a number of hours.

Unlike fossil fuels, which can be easily transported and stored, solar and wind supplies fluctuate. Most of the renewable power that isn't used immediately is lost. The solution is storage innovation, many industry experts agree. In addition to their limited capacity, lithium ion batteries, which are used to power everything from mobile phones to laptops to electric vehicles, tend to fade with every recharge and are highly flammable, resulting in a growing number of deadly fires across the world. The extraction of cobalt, the lucrative raw material used in lithium ion batteries, also relies on child labor. U.N. agencies have estimated that 40,000 boys and girls work in the industry, with few safety measures and paltry compensation. These serious environmental and human rights challenges pose a problem for the electric vehicle industry, which requires a huge supply of critical minerals.

So investors are now pouring money into even bigger battery ventures. More than $900 million has been invested in clean storage technologies since 2021, up from $360 million the year before, according to the Long Duration Energy Storage Council, an organization launched after that year's U.N. climate conference to oversee the world's decarbonization. The group predicts that by 2040, large-scale, renewable energy storage investments could reach $3 trillion. That includes efforts to turn natural materials into batteries. Once-obscure start-ups, experimenting with once-humble commodities, are suddenly receiving millions in government and private funding. There's the multi-megawatt CO2 battery in Sardinia, a rock-based storage system in Tuscany, and a Swiss company that's moving massive bricks along a 230-foot tall building to store and generate renewable energy. One Danish battery start-up, which stores energy from molten salt, is sketching out plans to deploy power plants in decommissioned coal mines across three continents...

But in order to succeed, natural batteries will need to provide the same kind of steady power as fossil fuels, at scale. Whether that can be achieved remains to be seen, say energy experts. And the industry may be subject to the same pitfalls that loom over the renewables energy sector at large: Projects will need to be constructed from scratch, and they might only be adopted in developed countries that can afford such experimentation. Lovschall-Jensen, the CEO of a Danish molten salt-based storage start-up called Hyme, says the challenge will be maintaining the same standards to which the modern world has become accustomed: receiving power, on demand, with the flip of a switch.

He believes that natural batteries, though still in their infancy, can serve that goal.

The "vast majority of battery-powered and hybrid cars" don't have a spare tire, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Honda told one complaining customer that "if the vehicle is in an accident, the spare tire can cause damage to the electric battery which could cause a failure in the battery." But according to the Times, "car design experts said that explanation was plausible but far-fetched." There's a simpler explanation for the move away from spare tires: They're too big and heavy, and people don't really need them anymore... Car manufacturers have been ridding their sedans and smaller SUVs of full-sized spares for some time. In 2018, Consumer Reports said, 60% of the vehicles it had tested over the previous five years came with small-sized temporary tires ("doughnuts"), and only 10% came with full-sized spares... The best-selling models of electric sedans and SUVs — Teslas, the Chevy Bolt, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the BMW i4 and the Mercedes EQS — have no spare of any kind, even if they come with a premium price tag. Ditto for hybrids; the Toyota Prius, for example, hasn't included a spare since 2016.

That's not because people magically stopped having flat tires. U.S. drivers suffer 94 million flat tires a year, according to LookupAPlate.com, a site that collects reports about bad drivers... Finding space for a spare is particularly challenging for a car powered by something other than gasoline, designers say. "Pushing the range of EVs requires batteries, electrical systems control units or hydrogen tanks to encroach into the traditional places that spare tires are found: under the trunk floor," said Geoff Wardle, executive director of transportation systems and design at the ArtCenter College of Design. The space crunch is worse for hybrids, which require room for both a battery system and an internal combustion engine, said Scott Grasman, dean of the College of Engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich.
The extra weight always made it a little harder to meet fuel efficiency requirements — but spare tires also increase manufacturing costs, the article notes. "And tires for an EV may be more expensive than those for a gas-powered vehicle of the same size. That's because EVs tend to be heavier than their gas-fueled counterparts, so they require sturdier tires. And with comparatively quiet engines, they need tires that don't generate as much road noise."

But Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, also pointed out to the Times that today's tires are just much better and more durable than they used to be: And because federal regulations require new cars to have tire pressure indicators, he said, drivers are alerted as soon as their tires need air. "In most cases, flat tires ... are the outcome of long low-pressure driving," he said. "And if you drive a modern car, it will tell you [that] you have low pressure long before you get into the catastrophic failure" of a flat.
So what are car manufacturers doing now? According to the article...

• Some manufacturers swap in inflatable spares that take up just a third of the space.

• Some cars ship with puncture kits since, the article points out, many people don't know how to change a tire anyways, and will probably just call a tow truck. "For these drivers, carmakers may safely assume that a can of Fix-a-Flat will be more useful..." (Others like Tesla and GM offer roadside assistance programs.)

Some car manufacturers are also using self-sealing or run-flat tires — but Wardle tells the Times these are "good if it is just a puncture from a nail but useless if you hit a pothole and split the rim and sidewall."

IBM's business research organization (the IBM Institute for Business Value), released results from a new global study. Its conclusion? "The world of work has changed compared to even six months ago." Executives surveyed estimate that 40% of their workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years. That could translate to 1.4 billion of the 3.4 billion people in the global workforce, according to World Bank statistics. Respondents also report that building new skills for existing employees is a top talent issue.

Workers at all levels could feel the effects of generative AI, but entry-level employees are expected to see the biggest shift. Seventy-seven percent of executive respondents say entry-level positions are already seeing the effects of generative AI and that will intensify in the next few years. Only 22% of respondents report the same for executive or senior management roles.

AI can open up more possibilities for employees by enhancing their capabilities. In fact, 87% of executives surveyed believe employees are more likely to be augmented than replaced by generative AI. That varies across functions — 97% of executives think employees in procurement are more likely to be augmented than replaced, compared to 93% for employees in risk and compliance, 93% for finance, 77% for customer service and 73% for marketing...

With AI primed to take on more manual and repetitive tasks, employees surveyed report engaging in impactful work is the top factor they care about beyond compensation and job security — more important than flexible work arrangements, growth opportunities and equity. On top of that, nearly half of employees surveyed believe the work they do is far more important than who they work for or who they work with regularly...
ZDNet explains the report's methodology: To find answers to these questions, IBM pulled data from two prior studies, one survey of 3,000 C-level executives across 28 countries and another of 21,000 workers in 22 nations...

According to IBM IBV research, tech adopters who successfully reskill to adapt "technology-driven job changes report a revenue growth rate premium of 15% on average" and those who focus on AI "see a 36% higher revenue growth rate than their peers." "AI won't replace people — but people who use AI will replace people who don't," said IBM in the report.

The new skill paradigm shifts technical skills that were typically prioritized, such as proficiency in STEM, which was the most critical skill in 2016, to the least priority in 2023. The reason is that now tools like ChatGPT allow workers to do more with less knowledge, as noted by the report. Now there is a bigger emphasis on people skills such as team management, the ability to work effectively in team environments, the ability to communicate effectively, and the willingness to be adaptable to change, which all shifted to top the most critical skills required of the workforce in 2023.
The report ultimately suggests HR leaders redesign work and operating models "to shepherd their organizations into the future."