Thread regarding Optum layoffs

@13c our team too. We did it. Never got to use it. Now everyone forgot. It's a sham that SD , Zmuda and co pulled to show how good their leadership.. they should be fired immediately for wasting millions on a training that was useless for 90%

Yes because this is what the company wants. They are forcing me to do the job of two people (my colleague was RIF’d) so I’ve implemented their ‘solution’ and now providing the AI slop they desire just to survive this nightmare. Praying for a layoff + severance.

@OP, during Q4 2025 my entire team was required to take 50-60 hours of AI training, with no plan on how it was to be used. 8 weeks after rolling out the training, our brilliant director decided everyone should take the lengthier and more complex AI training for developers. Again, with no plan on how we'd use it.

Barely 1 month into 2026 the layoffs began.

The only AI usage I saw before leaving was Copilot, which can fix grammar/spelling about as well as your phone's Auto-Corrupt (er, Auto-Correct) but does a horrible job of distilling audio from meetings into requirements.

I use AI agents to jiggle my mouse and read ny emails. Hrs learnt from the best by meeting superiors in virtual hotel bedrooms, and then throwing people under the bus. May not pass the ERS security org but then again not even the previous CISOs tend to stick around with a moral high ground!

Poster is a boomer trying to get information. Lmao

I use it as much as I can. It truly is amazing in the Microsoft office apps. Huge time saver. And also Teams. Try it once to find all of your messages with specific topics. Helps find messages quickly !!! Don’t fight it. Make it work for you!

AI, the gimmick that we je-k off investors with.

1) Trying to solve problems which doesn’t exist.
2) Create a login page to some open source solution, claim its a world class product.
3) Create a messy framework and then look for problems to justify
….

GPT 5.4 has been the first coding model I trust to do some work for me in agent mode. It is pretty good overall but needs a lot of guidance on how to do things the best way possible and tools to test what it is building. On cr-ppy codebases though it is almost totally useless. If a junior engineer can’t read the code, AI certainly won’t fair much better.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/05/copilot-is-for-entertainment-purposes-only-according-to-microsofts-terms-of-service/

Microsoft has a disclaimer on CoPilot : “It’s for entertainment purposes only….”. Read the ducking Terms n Conditions. I rest my case.

Our AI use cases are solutions to a self-made problem: leaders promoting 8-9 meetings today about nonsense. Even the most critical issues the meeting is 3-4 people talking and 20 on mute.

I am not downplaying its use in other contexts but for my area all I see from AI is summarizing someone's gigantic email chain or endless meetings. Both of which arise from poor discipline and a bad business culture.

Our leadership has made it one of our 2026 goals to include AI in our work. The level of inclusion is up to the individual contributor. It is handy for summarizing meetings. Other than that… your results may vary and may not be accurate.

Sorry to be contrarian but as a project manager Copilot has been really helpful to me. The automated meeting notes still require review but take a lot of work off my plate. Much of my role involves attending or hosting meetings, and having a transcript & summary automatically generated is fantastic - especially when I miss a meeting. I have the licensed version, which means it searches through my years and years of documents & notes on my hard drive to find information I've long forgotten. I can ask it a question about something I worked on 10 years ago and it finds what I'm looking for in less than 30 seconds. It also was incredibly valuable in writing my team's reviews and goals, as my tendency would be to over-think and re-word each review for hours. It doesn't take the place of my job (yet) but definitely makes me able to focus on more important things.

My offshore manager proudly announces to the team that she uses AI to do performance reviews and financial projections. Fun stuff!

When he-l freezes over! So no!

We have used AI populated info as a tool to help us review our work month to month but we are told not to rely on it as a source of truth.

Nope, nada. We have had multiple instances of product managers begging on their knees for the engineering team to come up with ANY AI idea or AI proposal for their slide decks and pitch to leadership though. Made me chuckle. Not my job big dog!

I used to prioritize the human element in all my work because I believed that nuance and personal expertise mattered. However, it has become increasingly clear that my effort is in vain.

When my handcrafted work is lumped into the same category as the generic, copy-pasted output my coworkers generate, the incentive to maintain high standards vanishes. If the organization is content with unrefined "slop" and can't tell the difference between a thoughtful professional and an algorithm, then I see no reason to continue exhausting myself for a level of quality that isn't valued.

They want efficiency over substance, so from now on, that is exactly what they will get.

Is it the future or has it just been marketed as such?

Copilot's definitely helpful, yeah. And best use-cases for AI as we currently have available to us is going to be in that vein. Something that helps you, but isn't making definitive decisions by itself. There will always be a need for human validation because this sh-t hallucinates 50% of the time on anything remotely complex.

Leadership seems convinced if we keep shoving AI agents into projects we will eventually get something ground-breaking out that replaces a bunch of people. I'm sure there's possibilities for this, but with their current direction (or lack thereof) and the bureaucracy within this company, they will never invest heavily in a solution that does what they want.

Leaders in this company don't make the minimal effort to understand tech. Often they are actual lazy re--rds in their place due to connections, or often they are people who are playing office politics to try to elevate their position. The few leaders who would be able to get such an initiative going tend to not have the connections or recognition before they get the boot because good work takes time, people, and money. Which is why all of the teams ham-fi----g AI into everything are playing the game of copy-pasting AI conversational agents into sh-t that will never be used, because that's what you need to do for funding now.

@OP I for one am not. AI is useless to me as a tool, except for as you mention, compiling meeting notes. By the time I go the beating of telling copilot what I want, and ultimately t getting what I asked for, I can just do it myself. AI use in our company is a charade we are trying to pull on ourselves.