Uber Blew Its AI Budget in Four Months. Your HR Team Is Next
Uber burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, and they're not alone. Enterprise AI bill shock is just getting started.
Perspective
Opinion pieces and thought leadership from across the employer branding community. External voices, bold takes, and new ideas worth debating.
83 Articles
Perspective
The Moral Premium: What Meta's Layoffs Reveal About the Collapse of Purpose-Driven Employer Branding
Meta's May 2026 restructuring eliminated 8,000 jobs and forced a public reckoning with how Big Tech employer brands sell mission to candidates and then revert to transaction at exit. Here is what the moral premium model gets wrong, and the EB playbook leaders should rebuild now.
Perspective
The Rise of the Underemployed: The Labour Crisis Hidden Behind Low Unemployment Rates
Headline unemployment figures still look relatively stable across many economies. Beneath those numbers sits a growing class of underemployed workers patching together income through gigs, freelance work, consulting, and side hustles, while struggling to regain stable employment.
Perspective
The real AI threat at work may be identity, not redundancy
For many people, a career is not just a way to earn. It is also status, structure, belonging, and identity. As AI reshapes skilled work, employer brands may need to offer something more grounded than lofty promises of purpose and authenticity.
Perspective
The Employer Branding Brief: A Modest Request for Basic Competence
Many employer branding briefs often aren’t really briefs at all. They’re shopping lists of activities without a clearly defined problem to solve. The result? Wasted time, diluted budgets and projects that struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Perspective
But AI Will Make Us All More Productive. Won’t It?
AI was meant to cut the drudge work, free up time and make leaner teams look clever. Instead, the evidence so far points to patchy gains, longer hours, shakier quality and a great deal of managerial confidence unsupported by anything so vulgar as proof.