#technology

CEO is blind to just how bad tech is and Dil p is the root of the issues. So many issues!! Customers are furious. Tech stack cannot handle spikes. Horrible planning for DNS storms. Always an excuse never a solution.

Billionaires and Their Connection to H-1B Visas

Many of America’s most prominent billionaires have either started their U.S. careers on H-1B visas or now lead companies that are among the largest employers of such visas. The H-1B program, designed to bring in highly skilled foreign workers, has been a key pathway for immigrant entrepreneurs and executives who have gone on to build multi‑billion‑dollar enterprises.

Notable billionaire H-1B holders

Elon Musk – South African-born founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Musk initially came to the U.S. on a J‑1 exchange visa, later switching to H‑1B to remain while building companies that have created billions in value OfficeChai+1.

Satya Nadella – Indian-born Microsoft CEO, who moved to the U.S. in 1988, switched from a green card to H‑1B in 1994, and led Microsoft into a $3 trillion market value OfficeChai.

Sundar Pichai – Indian-born Alphabet/Google CEO, who began in the U.S. on an international student visa before transitioning to H‑1B OfficeChai.

Jeff Skoll – Canadian-born eBay founder and first full-time hire, who used H‑1B to stay during the company’s early growth before later obtaining a green card Forbes+1.

Eric Yuan – Chinese-born Zoom founder, who faced multiple visa rejections before securing an H‑1B in 1997 to join WebEx The Financial Express.

Billionaire-backed companies as top H‑1B employers
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, some of the most prolific H‑1B employers are led by billionaires, including:

Jeff Bezos – Amazon

Bill Gates – Microsoft

Mark Zuckerberg – Meta (Facebook)

Larry Page – Google/Alphabet

Elon Musk – Tesla (now among the top 25 U.S. employers of H‑1Bs) Forbes+1.

Why billionaires support H‑1B visas
Billionaires often cite the H‑1B as essential for filling talent gaps in tech, science, and engineering, where there are not enough U.S. workers to meet demand Forbes+1. They argue it boosts competitiveness and innovation. However, critics note that their support often aligns with corporate interests in accessing lower-cost labor, which can have implications for domestic workers Brightwork

Is it a security tool?

Like Platform X?

You can bring in a person off the street and have them run a prompt to generate code.

The Wall Street Journal evaluates how leading US corps stack up in 6 areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility.

Cisco is one of the clearest winners in the entire table. It ranks #5 overall with an Overall Score of 78.9, and it is #1 out of 21 companies in Technology Hardware & Equipment. The profile is unusually balanced: AI #13, Innovation #13, Talent #20, Financial Fitness #57, Resilience #11, and Agility #37.

This is not a one-factor story. Cisco screens as a balanced infrastructure compounder: strong in AI readiness, strong in innovation, financially sound, resilient, and organizationally agile. The strategic implication is that the market often talks about AI in terms of chips and hyperscalers, but the WSJ model is also rewarding enterprise network infrastructure. Cisco’s ranking suggests it is viewed as a durable enabler of the AI and connectivity cycle, not merely a mature hardware incumbent.

Source:
https://www.wsj.com/rankings/best-companies-for-the-future/full-rankings-2026

The bank needs to rapidly increase Ai investment to stay relevant.

anyone experience changing from company cell phones to the new AWS phone system where they track and record your calls? Why are they doing this? And they want us to connect with Ethernet cables now….are we in 1999?

Over 100 tech companies cut more than 115,000 jobs in the first quarter of 2026. This trend is fueling a new wave of one-person startups. Qu Xiaoyin, founder of HeyBoss.AI, helps individuals build businesses using AI "executives". AI tools now handle tasks like coding, marketing, and customer support. This significantly lowers the cost and team size needed to launch a company.

Redwood City, California

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/ai-linked-layoffs-us-spark-new-wave-one-person-start-ups

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-nvidia-consider-intel-backup-chip-manufacturer

Verizon Replacing Its Customer Service Personnel With AI Has Turned Live Chat Queries Into Low-Quality ChatGPT-Like Replies, Enraging Customers -- Omar Sohail
Jun 5, 2026 at 11:52am EDT.

Companies will eventually replace humans carrying out what they believe to be menial tasks with AI, and U.S. carriers are no exception, with their Live Chat department now being handled with chatbots that are providing less-than-useful replies to customers. In fact, a regular user of ChatGPT likely noticed that Verizon’s own service is providing similar low-quality responses, tarnishing the company’s reputation while also impacting the experience for millions.

Knowing the technical mistakes that AI can make, Verizon should only completely replace its Live Chat service after properly training its models.

The AI’s responses being similar to ChatGPT’s were noticed by Redditor “Hot_Saguaro,” who says that Verizon wasn’t even hiding the fact that the chatbot was providing technical answers similar to OpenAI’s service. After attempting to ask why her iPad wasn’t connecting to the internet, a Verizon representative said it’s because her service address is still her old address. She immediately countered, saying that another customer living in the same block was facing the same problem.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman has previously stated that the company will focus more on customer service to boost the experience than shell out promotions, but it appears that the Chief Executive’s efforts have fallen short.

As expected in the Reddit thread, people were not thrilled with Verizon’s direction of replacing humans with AI, with a former employee saying that “one of our selling points was that we didn’t offshore call centers. It’s gone so downhill from when I used to work there.” It’s only appropriate that Verizon holds off on completely replacing its Live Chat with AI until it has properly trained its model to handle customer queries properly.

Simply integrating its service with ChatGPT won’t win the company any awards, especially when AI can make a boatload of technical mistakes that will be pointed out by users who are even slightly knowledgeable about carriers and their network’s functionality.

https://wccftech.com/verizon-replacing-humans-with-ai-for-live-chat-is-lowering-response-quality/

Be prepared - the customer doesn't care about you or your family.

One of the most surprising things that when Opentext acquired MF it included Novell groupwise. It’s been a secret winner ! It sells more than enterprise cyber

https://youtu.be/IbiKFm5_was

Key takeaways include:
• Workforce Disruption: Schulman acknowledges that Al will inevitably displace a large percentage of traditional customer service roles, particularly those handling routine, repetitive tasks like password resets or billing inquiries (1:10 - 1:29).
• Human-Al Collaboration: Rather than full automation, he envisions a hybrid approach where Al and human agents work in tandem to resolve more complex customer issues, ultimately improving service quality (1:32 - 2:09).
• Future Technological Outlook: Schulman emphasizes that Fortune 100 companies must embrace the ongoing technological revolution. He predicts that society will reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) within the next two to four years, followed by breakthroughs in quantum computing and humanoid robotics shortly thereafter (2:17 - 2:57).
• Corporate Responsibility: He stresses that as these advancements unfold, corporate leaders and society as a whole must be prepared and accept the responsibility that comes with managing these powerful technoloaies (3:00 - 3:13).

Wipe out non technical managers and PM from McDonald, BurgerKing, HomeDepot etc … Need actual certifications from experienced technicians or engineers.

Genuine question.

From collaboration, security, networking, HyperShield, AI Canvas, Cisco Cloud Control, and everything in between, how does this keep working?

Every launch seems to come with a qualifier: “early availability,” “controlled launch,” “limited release,” “regional availability,” “coming soon,” or “customer preview.” Then next quarter the story changes and we’re on to the next announcement.

This has been going on since the G2 days, yet the market keeps rewarding it.

Internally, most of us know the gap between the keynote, the demo, and the actual customer-ready product. Many demos are heavily curated. Many announcements are years ahead of broad deployment. Some things eventually materialize, some never do.

What I’m trying to understand is: does nobody see through it?

Do customers not care? Do analysts not care? Does Wall Street not care?

Because if you look at the earnings, nearly every business was flat or down. The one area showing meaningful growth was traditional networking, largely riding the AI infrastructure wave.

So is the lesson that storytelling matters more than shipping? That perception creates enough momentum to buy time until reality catches up?

Or is this simply how every large technology company operates and I’ve been naive enough to think customers differentiate between what exists today and what might exist someday?

Because isolated C suite (sycophants for slick consulting salesman) clowns have no idea what tech really is, even if they are tech C suite. They are spending million on tech they have never seen, haven't touched, and have only read about or seen a sterile lab environment proof of concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3JHuoLD468

This sums up many people here. Luckily most of the people I work with aren’t into this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism

And everything reflects it. The group is not open to new ideas, or new tech or new methods. And we are supposed to be a "cutting edge" IT group. We have projects that started a decade ago that cant move forward because we have not done our "due diligence". We are using tech from 2015.

10 out of 14 people will retire in next 3 years. Hopefully we can get some smarter people in. Although most likely we will be offshored.

The Existential Threat -- what is Verizon's strategic plan or more importantly an imminent plan to diffuse the potential diminishing of the wireless market share??

The products, service plans, rendered by SpaceX and Amazon -- technologically satellite internet??

Mr. Schulman you are a friend of Elon's so we-ponize to create powerful combinations!!!

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4600557-ibm-google-team-up-to-provide-agentic-ai-solutions-to-enterprises

It certainly looks like IBM is exiting “enterprise cloud solutions”

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/foxconn-announces-strategic-collaboration-with-intel-next-gen-ai-infrastructure-2026-06-04/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBtUgWn-nHs

Wendys, Starbucks, Uber, The Big Mouth Mark Benioff, all quietly removing their foots from their mouths and backtracking on AI due to failures and no ROI. AI cant even handle drive though hamburger orders.

Tech CEOs spent the last two years promising AI would replace workers, cut costs, and transform everything. Now they're quietly cancelling data centers, rehiring humans and admitting the math doesn't work. From Microsoft pulling back on billions in infrastructure to Starbucks ki-ling its AI inventory system after it couldn't count milk, Uber burning through a year of AI budget in four months, and one company accidentally spending $500 million on AI tools in a single month the AI hype is hitting reality. Even Sam Altman now says he was wrong about AI replacing jobs.

So...anyone else connecting the dots on why we are now heavily pushing Copilot (and all of M365)? Check out Microsoft's smart badge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw0HBKJlX-w) introduced at the Build Conference 2026. Scary stuff coming!

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/5g/abdu-mudesir-to-become-verizon-s-top-tech-exec-55594

Heard something that made me laugh out loud. HR talking about not “buying” technology platforms as we can build everything ourselves via Citi Stylus. Citi Stylus is a good tool but is it to the level of building enterprise level AI platforms? Not a chance. Good luck to us all and dealing with these HR muppets who sit in their glass towers having no idea what’s actually going on. Delusional. Watch the layoffs start as a result of poorly built internal AI tools to only go on a hiring spree to try figure out how to fix it. Incompetence at its finest.

Anyone know when they’re getting rid of Harness? Terrible platform

There's growing chatter about people being cut due to less token usage.

If you weren't heavily using your copilot, it's being seen as "you're not growing" and "adapting" to new technology.

To me it's seems mo--nic,
It's another metric of punishing people who are efficient while people who used dev assist for simply changing a label on UI are being rewarded.

I heard some rumours coming out of CIS

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/press-releases/crowdstrike-named-a-leader-in-the-2026-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-endpoint-protection-for-seventh-consecutive-time/

Cisco, nowhere to be found? Who was in charge of SBG products, then and now (G2)

https://techrights.org/n/2026/06/02/Quantum_as_the_Next_Big_Bubble.shtml

Widespread layoff confirmed across technology, finance, modeling units.

Fidelity Investments announced job cuts at its Covington, Kentucky campus. A larger reorganization eliminated approximately 800 jobs globally. The firm will reinvest in technology and recruit early-career engineers. This restructuring follows a financially successful 2025 for the company. The Covington campus expects net growth, but with different job types.

Covington, Kentucky

https://unitewithpriti.co.uk/news/inside-the-fidelity-covington-campus-layoffs-and-why-the-story-is-more-complicated-than-it-looks/

According to this CNBC story, CVX is leading companies like Google and Microsoft in adopting AI. Really?

(https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-meta-walmart-among-top-companies-adopting-ai.html?__source=iosappshare%7Ccom.microsoft.msedge.OpenExtension)

The Wikimedia Foundation disbanded its six-person Community Tech team. This team was responsible for developing moderation tools and bug fixes for Wikipedia. Hundreds of Wikipedia editors are now discussing strike action in response to the layoffs. Editors criticize the foundation's decision despite its nearly $300 million in assets. A strike could significantly increase vandalism and content issues on Wikipedia.

https://cybernews.com/news/wikipedia-editors-threaten-strike-action/

American Express employed 76,800 people globally as of December 31, 2025. This included approximately 29,500 workers in the US and 50,900 internationally. The company added 1,700 employees in 2025, a 2.3% increase. American Express did not announce major company-wide layoffs in 2024, 2025, or early 2026. The company focused hiring on growth areas like technology and operations.

New York City, New York

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/american-express-employees

Existing software to be implemented to track technicians locations onsite. It is already in operation in some sites. Managers will be responsible to track and cross reference with PMs to weed out slackers and site leavers.

All the systems I use that Polaris has touched are worse now. Not user friendly. Takes me longer to complete simple tasks or is no longer possible.

To make the most effective use of AI, you pretty much have to be an expert in the domain you are working so you can write effective prompts AND AI must have enough relevant information in order to provide quality output. There is a lot of info in telecom that cannot reasonably be put into AI (confidential info, or spread across many emails, and across many documents (each containing PPI), etc.). For example, take a cell site design: To use AI you would need to upload many plots from Atoll, upload traffic usage and drive data (if available), upload maps, upload ongoing surrounding project info and their status', etc.. You would also need to tell AI what you want as far as standard equipment (and that is always changing and has dependencies), and on and on it goes. The list of things AI needs in order to provide quality output goes on and on, depending on the domain and the intricacies of the required output. The end user also must be knowledgeable enough to recognize garbage.

If you are a non-tech type (not intending an insult here), and you took some of the AI courses available from Google (and probably other AI vendors), you have seen some pretty powerful stuff. AI can do some amazing things. Yes, AI can summarize data. AI can create graphics, videos and audio output. AI can tie together data and create powerful dashboards. AI can write code. AI does all of this much faster than humans. Those AI courses leave the user thinking AI can do most anything. Those AI courses also inspire users to want to buy the creator's product (AI subscriptions). That is intentional! Google, and other AI vendors want to make money on their products. They are not going to talk much about the pitfalls of their products.

Taking those courses is like watching a very long, well produced commercial. If you are a tech type, you may be familiar with at least some of the inner workings of AI and understand it really is a probability machine (really A LOT of little probability machines). It takes in data, creates relationships amongst that data based on probabilities it "learned" from training data. Some of the magic is taken way, but it is a good thing to understand in order to make better use of the tool.

Dan Schulman's educational background is in economics and he has an MBA. Guessing other C-suiters' educational backgrounds are similar. AI works well for economics. You can upload many disparate spreadsheets and as long as there is some semblance that the data in each sheet can be correlated with data in the other sheets, AI will handle it like the Harlem Globetrotters handle a basketball. I am sure Dan was drooling at the mouth when AI vendors showed him what they could do for VZ. But, give AI a bunch of data without concrete direction, and design requests that could have many tradeoffs that are not seen until design time, it will provide output that is not concrete. There will be a lot of garbage output.

To best use AI, yes, you can use conversational prompts, but, you must be very precise. Think of training your dog or you child:). Dogs and children do not understand the concept of "sometimes." You must think like a programmer and tell AI exactly what you want. The issue with more complex problems is that exactly what we want is not known until we get deeper into the design. We have not seen all of the dependencies and tradeoffs until we get deeper into the analysis. By the time we get that far into it, it is faster to just do the task ourselves rather than try to put all of that info into AI.

After reading another headline article on a big media website, it got me thinking about AI use here at COP. I wanted to take a poll of how or if AI has changed your job in any way. Who is and isn't using AI tools? What is the roadmap for implementing tools to make your day more efficient? Do you foresee any jobs at COP in O&G being lost due to upcoming AI tech?

AI adoption continues to drive layoffs across the technology sector. Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have publicly linked job cuts to AI. Meta reportedly eliminated 8,000 roles in an AI-focused restructuring. Meanwhile, demand for cybersecurity experts has surged significantly. Organizations are bolstering security teams due to AI vulnerability risks.

https://letsdatascience.com/news/cybersecurity-hiring-surges-amid-ai-driven-tech-layoffs-58b7acb5