The real story lies “in collapsing headcount growth expectations, from 6% in 2025 to just 2% in 2026 with just 21% of CFOs planning staff increases of 4% to 9%, down from 31% last year,” Nauman Abbasi, vice president analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in the release. “This marks a structural pivot from labor expansion to optimization driven by automation and AI that deliver productivity gains without proportional increases in headcount.
Posts in "links"
Attention, Autonomy, and AI in the Critical Path - Related to your interests - February 17th, 2026
From “CEO said a thing” journalism and sovereign payments to product teams in code-gen land, Deming vs. OKRs, sex recessions, Neanderthals, fonts, and hype cycles - a tour through power, productivity, and what actually holds systems together.
If OpenAI fails, the most likely mode is the Yahoo path: not a dramatic collapse but a slow fade into irrelevance through a thousand mediocre product extensions. ChatGPT becomes a utility everyone uses but nobody pays premium for. Enterprise goes to companies with better compliance stories. The consumer product goes ad-supported. Revenue grows but margins compress. The valuation becomes unjustifiable. They never die – they just stop mattering.
Proof of value lies in the results. To date, more than 90% of the top 10,000 VMware customers have purchased VCF, including nine of the top 10 Fortune companies. Leading companies such as Audi, ING Bank, Lloyds Banking Group and Walmart are adopting VCF and deepening their partnerships with Broadcom. Broadcom’s own internal IT teams have adopted this technology and a cloud operating model to consolidate datacenters and toolchains while improving overall system reliability, improving time to provision applications and infrastructure, and decreasing costs. Most important, the number of workloads managed by Broadcom IT increased during this private cloud transformation."
🔗 One Platform for All Workloads - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog
Relative to your interests, Friday afternoon
AI money is absurd again - Anthropic at $380B, Waymo at 360x revenue - while software CEOs get a 2026 “grow up” playbook. Meanwhile, enterprise AI reality stays slow and messy, coding hype surges, and burnout + Ballard remind us what the work rhythm used to look like.
Related to your interests, Thursday
Europe doubles down on sovereign cloud, Anthropic shakes markets, and AI seeps into meetings, legislation, and IT services. Plus: Java for AI, portable agent “skills,” ERP disdain, and cultural scale reality checks.
Ask yourself: which lock-in would an enterprise CFO prefer: Being locked into a CRM that holds 15 years of customer data, process customizations, and institutional context that would take two years and $50 million to migrate? Or, being locked into a foundation model that could be swapped for a competitor by changing an API endpoint?
You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more."
🔗 The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most
In its latest set of predictions, First said that this year, the upper bounds of its 90% confidence interval in fact approaches 118,000 CVEs, and according to the data, realistic scenarios suggest 70,000 to 100,000 disclosed vulnerabilities are “entirely possible”. The median figure for 2026, it said, would most likely be around 59,000."
Relative to your interests, Saturday morning
The Draw Boy - Remove a bottleneck (usually humans), and supply can meet demand. New demand is created, people but more, new things are invented, people but those. New roles are often created to handle the new businesses. It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines - Weird. The off-shoring jobs angle is ponderous. The top 1,000 Roblox creators earned an average of $1.