If you’re a US worker, it’s possibly the most wonderful nerve-racking time of the year.

Corporate America is actively slimming down its workforce, leaving many IT pros wondering how they can prepare for layoffs.

In October, Amazon announced it planned to cut its workforce by 14,000 roles. Other tech companies that have pared back workers over the last several months include Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Salesforce, Dropbox, and a variety of startups.

Wolfgang Bauriedel, a senior partner at organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry, told IT Brew that employees are anxious about their job security—and rightfully so, as investors continue to assess companies’ ability to integrate AI and debloat their businesses.

“When I talk to CEOs in the sectors, they have strong mandates to reduce the overall workforce,” Bauriedel said, recalling a conversation with one life sciences company CEO who said they planned to downsize their 55,000-strong organization by 35,000 positions in the next 3–5 years.

How IT pros can prepare for the worst.—BM

If a piece of technology wants to stay relevant for decades, it needs to constantly evolve. The 43-year-old Bloomberg Terminal, which feeds a constant stream of real-time financial data to Wall Street traders and others, is a prime example of this—especially as Bloomberg integrates AI into its feature set.

AI isn’t that new to the Bloomberg Terminal, which released a machine learning-based market sentiment model in 2009. Over the past two years, the company has begun to invest more in generative AI and large language models for production. Amanda Stent, the head of AI strategy and research for Bloomberg, described AI as a way to help financial professionals who are overloaded with information.

“The volume of information that users have to stay on top of is really overwhelming, and so we need to give tools to help them adapt to that reality, to allow them to think and respond faster,” said Suzanne Szur, the research product manager at Bloomberg. “It’s really about transforming hours or days of manual information gathering and synthesis into minutes.”

The Bloomberg Terminal vs. AI hallucinations.—CN

When it comes to software tools listed first alphabetically, OpenAI isn’t messing around.

Just a day after founder Sam Altman said OpenAI aims to become “a true platform” for app builders, the company introduced a new agentic coding tool dubbed “Aardvark.” Although still in beta, Aardvark is intended to help software developers automate the difficult task of finding and fixing codebase vulnerabilities.

The Aardist’s way. During the Oct. 30 unveiling, OpenAI announced that Aardvark (which it termed an “agentic security researcher”) is powered by GPT-5, its latest large language model (LLM).

Read more about Aardvark’s functions here.—BH

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