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Tag: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

  • This 26-year-old was laid off from his ‘dream job’ at PwC building AI agents. He’s worried the tech he built has led to more job cuts | Fortune

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    Titans of industry like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Intel have all been slashing staff, and employees are hand-wringing about being next on the chopping block. Donald King, a 26-year-old who built AI agents for PwC, never thought he’d be the next one out the door—but he soon realized why consultants are called “hatchet-men.”

    After graduating with a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, King landed a job at one of the “Big Four” consulting giants: PwC. He packed his bags and moved to New York to start his role as an associate in technology consulting, working with major clients, including Oracle, during his first year. But everything changed when PwC announced a $1 billion investment in AI; King was already intrigued by the tech, so he pitched himself to join the company’s AI factory team. Working 60 to 80 hours a week, he immersed himself in the tech, even throwing knowledge-sharing AI agent block parties within the firm that drew up to 250 participants. King logged a ton of hours—sometimes at the expense of his weekends—but was confident he was excelling in his role as a product manager and data scientist.

    “I was coding and managing a team onshore and offshore. It was crazy, it’s like, ‘Give this 24-year-old millions of dollars of salary spent per month to build AI agents for Fortune 500 [companies],’” King tells Fortune. “[It was] my dream job…I won first place in this OpenAI hackathon across the entire firm.”

    Although King was proving himself as a key AI talent for PwC, he did begin to question the impact of his work. The AI agents King was building for major corporations could undoubtedly automate swaths of human roles—perhaps even entire job departments. One Microsoft Teams agent his group created mimicked an actual person, and King was a little spooked. 

    “We had a late night call with all the boys that are building this thing, like, ‘What the hell are we building right now?’” King says. “Just saying ‘Treat them like humans’ is probably not the best way to think about it.”

    Behind the scenes, a layoff was brewing—but this time, for King. In October 2024, just eight months into his final role at PwC, the Gen Zer presented his winning project from the OpenAI hackathon: a fleet of AI agents that automated manual tasks. King was proud and felt confident in his place at the firm, but two hours later, PwC called King to inform him he was being laid off. The 26-year-old recorded the meeting and posted it on TikTok, raking up more than 75,000 likes and 2.1 million views. Commenters under his videos expressed shock that King would be let go after winning the hackathon.

    “I thought I was safe, especially after I won first place,” King says. “I just got a little blindsided.”

    King clarifies he doesn’t think there were any “nefarious” intentions behind his layoff, reasoning he was likely a random staffer dismissed after the firm had overhired in previous years. However, he does connect the dots between the AI agents he built for PwC customers and the layoffs that soon ensued at those client companies. 

    Fortune reached out to PwC for comment. 

    King believes his AI agents may have been connected to layoffs 

    While King doesn’t believe his former role at PwC was automated, he recognizes that the AI agents he built likely had an impact on others. The year after his layoff, King observed that some of the Fortune 500 clients he served were implementing staffing cuts. Those AI agents he helped create may have had a hand in the layoffs. 

    “It’s 100% connected,” King says. “I knew that consulting was a hatchet-man type job, I knew you’re going in to potentially lay people off, but I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

    While King believes AI agents are akin to the reasoning power of a five-year-old, they still know “all the corpus of information in the world” and can automate mundane tasks. Oftentimes, that means entry-level jobs are most at risk of being disrupted. 

    “It’s automating tasks, 100%, those are gone,” King says. “If your job is doing those menial types of things, if you’re just emailing a spreadsheet back and forth, you can kiss your job goodbye.”

    Pivoting to his new life purpose: founding a marketing agency 

    While being on PwC’s AI team may have once been his dream job, the layoff didn’t crush his spirit. 

    “I’m grateful for it happening…It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but then it turned into the best thing,” King says. “Overall, [I’m] very grateful that I got laid off.”

    In the aftermath of being let go, King says he was inundated with job offers from major tech companies to join their AI operations. However, the scrappy young entrepreneur sidelined the idea of returning to a nine-to-five gig; instead, King started his own marketing agency, AMDK. The business officially launched in December last year, less than two months after being laid off from PwC. 

    So far, King says AMDK has roped in clients ranging from small companies to billion-dollar enterprises, many of whom are looking for AI agents of their own. His end goal is to build a swarm of agents that help companies with their back ends—but after his experience on PwC’s AI team, he says he’s being cautious about the ramifications of his creations. He’s still learning the ropes of entrepreneurship, but wouldn’t trade the highs and lows for a salaried corporate job.

    “This is my purpose in life, versus this is someone else’s purpose,” King says. “[I’m] way happier.”

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    Emma Burleigh

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  • A Great Resignation 2.0 is simmering as employees feel overworked and underpaid, forcing them to look for greener pastures

    A Great Resignation 2.0 is simmering as employees feel overworked and underpaid, forcing them to look for greener pastures

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    More people are now mulling their options as they increasingly feel overworked and underpaid amid relentless cost pressures. 

    Employees feel so bogged down by work that far more people are considering resigning now than during the mass resignations we saw in 2022, auditor PwC found in its Global Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey published Tuesday, covering over 56,000 workers worldwide.

    The report, with nearly half of its respondents being Millennial, followed by Gen X and Gen Z employees, found a staggering increase of 28% in the number of people who plan to change jobs, compared to 19% during the Great Resignation in 2022.

    Their reasons? Higher workload, career ambitions and new technology wriggling into the workplace. 

    Nearly half of those surveyed said their workload had increased “significantly” in the last 12 months. Workers are also nervous about how much they are being paid, with 43% keen to ask for a pay rise. That’s not all—62% of employees feel like the pace of change in the workplace has also ramped up during the same period, especially as they’ve had to adapt to new tech tools in their jobs and increased financial pressure. 

    To add to the mix, employees’ personal goals to expand their skill set and further their careers are also prompting them to consider jumping ship.

    Overall, more workers feel better off moving to a new role, hoping to find some respite. 

    “Workers around the world are increasingly prioritising long-term skills growth and looking to organisations that can help them facilitate this,” Carol Stubbings, PwC U.K.’s global markets and tax & legal services leader, told Fortune, adding that emerging technologies like generative AI and its applications at work remain front and center for employees.

    “Ultimately, employees may be looking to switch for a variety of reasons, many of which will depend on their unique circumstances and the broader trends facing their geography, industry, and role.”

    Other studies on the subject have also indicated similar results—for instance, a LinkedIn and Microsoft survey published earlier this year covering 31,000 people worldwide revealed that an even higher proportion of people were inclined to quit their jobs in the year ahead than during the pandemic.

    Europe and its growing pool of quitters

    The Great Resignation may have taken off in the U.S., but Europeans haven’t been spared. Countries like France and Germany have also faced dilemmas surrounding their job, pay and benefits in the last few years.

    Even in the U.K., more workers have considered quitting their jobs following the pandemic than during it. Worker dissatisfaction has come at a time of elevated interest rates and living costs, pushing more of them to consider looking for greener pastures. It doesn’t help that employees are also giving up on their jobs by quietly quitting from the workplace, impacting their productivity. 

    “It’s essential that leaders prioritise well-being as a core value and critical enabler of performance within their organisation. Overstressed and distracted workers are less likely to perform well,” the PwC report said.

    These trends point to a continuation of the Great Resignation. The only difference? We’ve moved from a period marred by lockdowns and remote working to one that’s relatively “normal” but still facing new challenges. 

    AI is one them, PwC’s report found. Such platforms can help increase efficiency, making them invaluable in the future workplace.

    Most CEOs think tech is the reason for new changes at work, but very few employees use generative AI-powered tools regularly. That doesn’t mean they aren’t optimistic about AI, Stubbings said.

    The study found that 72% of the infrequent AI users among the respondents think the tech will improve the quality of their work, while half of them believe it will lead to higher salaries.

    The catch for employees shifting their gaze elsewhere is that most of those who quit their jobs eventually regret their decision, data suggests.  

    But will that stop the burgeoning pool of workers considering quitting? Maybe not. However, PwC suggests managers step up in helping employees navigate the tricky balance between all the changes at the workplace and not feeling swamped while at it. 

    “Companies need to create guidance and mentoring about the types of skills employees need to build. It’s also important to create a culture of learning, where freeing up opportunities for learning is part of the organisation’s DNA,” PwC said in its report.

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    Prarthana Prakash

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