A key policy goal of President Donald Trump’s administration is bringing jobs back to American factories, though the effort has been mired in a years-long slog despite support from both Democratic and Republican administrations.
But even beyond the challenge of getting large, multinational companies to reroute their complex supply chains, there’s a large and unsolved skills gap problem to address even if these U.S. manufacturing jobs were to proliferate. Peter Koerte, the chief technology officer and chief strategy officer at German technology conglomerate Siemens AG, points to research that shows that the average tenure of a U.S. manufacturing worker has slipped from 20 years in 2019 to just 3 years in 2023.
“Which means that most of the people that you find—and in particular if we want to bring back manufacturing to the United States—they’re unskilled,” says Koerte. “Because nobody wants to have a factory job.”
Official government figures are less dire, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that the median tenure of a manufacturing worker dropped from 5.9 years in 2014 to 4.9 years a decade later. But regardless, manufacturing workers are coming to work each day with a lot less expertise than those who worked similar jobs decades ago.
This led Siemens to launch a pilot program in 2024 for an industrial-focused AI copilot, helping engineering teams to search Siemens manuals in natural language to troubleshoot problems on the factory floor. This year, the company expanded the effort by launching an industrial foundational model that was specifically designed for industrial applications.
As an example, this AI tool can be used by a worker who is trying to figure out what to do when a machine breaks down. The employee can input information about the machine and the error code that’s on display, and then retrieve detailed instructions on how to address the issue. Less downtime for machines saves factories time and money. The use of AI in this manner also democratizes engineering expertise.
“You don’t need to have the very deep domain know-how that prevents you from using those systems,” says Koerte. “It levels the playing field.”
Koerte has had a long career at Siemens, joining the company in 2007 as a corporate strategist and taking on several leadership roles before ascending to the CTO and CSO titles in 2020. He says he’s remained at Siemens for such a large portion of his career because he’s inspired by the company’s ability to continually reinvent itself over its 178-year history.
Siemens began as a telecommunications company that built the infrastructure that made it possible to send a telegram from London to Calcutta in just 28 minutes, a momentous breakthrough in the mid-1800s. Today, Siemens is known for selling machinery and software that support massive industries including the power and gas sectors, healthcare, and building and freight projects, ranging from supporting a 2,000-kilometer high-speed railway that’s being built in Egypt to an automotive Mercedes-Benz plant in Berlin. The advancement of generative AI presents yet another opportunity for reinvention, says Koerte.
Koerte says Siemens was an early adopter of more traditional forms of AI that have been used for many years in manufacturing, including to perform quality inspections or to ensure that buildings are using energy as efficiently as possible. Before the generative AI boom kicked off in late 2022, Siemens had more than 1,500 AI experts on staff.
Along that journey, Siemens has embraced a wide variety of AI partners, including heavy hitters like Nvidia and Amazon Web Services, as well as European-based AI companies and large language model makers in China. Microsoft has been an especially critical partner, Koerte says, offering engineering expertise and insights into how to commercialize the company’s industrial AI offerings.
Software development ranks as a high priority use case for generative AI. The company’s software developer workforce of about 27,000 employees have been using AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and the productivity lift from those tools ranges between 10% to 30%, says Koerte.
Across the broader workforce, there are 460 distinct AI use cases in production today, a figure that excludes the unique AI chatbots that workers can create to perform tasks through a secure system that’s called SiemensGPT. In total, over 15,000 unique bots have been created by Siemens employees since October 2024.
“We have it pretty much everywhere,” says Koerte of AI’s pervasiveness. “The question is, how much have we saved?”
That’s not yet completely resolved and most surveys of CTOs and chief information officers show that the return on investment for generative AI projects isn’t as clear as they’d like it to be. But Siemens has set a north star goal. Before the influence of generative AI, the company had an annual productivity gain target of 3% to 4% across the business. But Koerte says with AI, the hope is to double that aspirational range.
He believes that parts of the economy that have big skills gaps will reap the most benefits of AI. When Siemens launched an AI-enabled assistant tool to help radiologists detect diseases, the greatest adoption came from underdeveloped countries where there were far fewer specialists.
“You always have to look at necessity, where the biggest challenge and necessity is,” says Koerte. “Because then people have to look at it differently. And they have to change.”
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
AI’s expensive talent war heats up. Google, Meta, and OpenAI are among the AI hyperscalers throwing big bucks to lure lucrative AI talent, as highlighted by Google’s $2.4 billion deal to hire the leaders of AI coding tool Windsurf and pay for the nonexclusive license for the startup’s technology. Days later, Cognition swooped in to buy the rest of Windsurf, though terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. OpenAI was also reportedly in talks with Windsurf, discussions that broke down because of concerns about having to share its products with Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor. Separately, OpenAI has lured four top engineers from rivals Tesla, xAI, and Meta; while Bloomberg reports of a $200 million pay package that was given to former Apple engineer Ruoming Pang, who ran the company’s AI models team. Meta has also recently hired more than 10 OpenAI researchers and experts from Anthropic, Google, and other startups, the news outlet reports.
AI has an impact on jobs, but just how much? Over the past week, job cuts continued to be attributed to the gains companies are achieving from their investments in AI, with a report from Bloomberg highlighting internal comments from within Microsoft that says AI has saved the tech giant more than $500 million in its call centers alone. Microsoft has also cut about 15,000 employees this year. Meanwhile, roughly 1,300 jobs were cut at job search and employee review companies Indeed and Glassdoor, as parent company Japan’s Recruit Holdings told employees that AI is “changing the world” and that the company must adapt with the evolution of that technology. But CIO Dive reports that outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ figures for the first half of 2025 found that only 75 out of 20,000 jobs cut by U.S.-based companies were explicitly attributed to AI (though it notes that the cause of many layoffs may be classified in broader terms). The trade outlet reports that companies are using the term “technological update” more frequently, possibly to avoid negative press of replacing workers with AI.
Nvidia hits $4 trillion valuation ahead of CEO’s trip to China. The AI chip maker became the world’s first publicly traded company to hit a $4 trillion market capitalization last week, reflecting an astonishing gain of 1,460% over the past five years. The latest stock market milestone comes as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang finds himself quite a bit in the news over the past several days, culminating with Monday’s news that the U.S. government has lifted restrictions on Nvidia selling its H20 GPUs to China. Huang also recently sat down with CNN, where he was asked about a warning from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white collar jobs within five years. “If the world runs out of ideas, then productivity gains translates to job loss,” says Huang.
Meanwhile, struggling chip maker Intel lays off 4,000. Nvidia’s rival Intel, which has lagged in the AI chips race, announced layoffs across four states affecting engineers, researchers, middle management, and factory workers. Last week, The Oregonianreported that new CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees during an internal broadcast, in response to a question about company culture, that things had gotten so bleak that Intel was “not in the top 10 semiconductor companies.” He added that customers were giving Intel poor marks and cautioned that a turnaround would be a “marathon” that would require some humility. Intel’s market capitalization greatly lags Nvidia at just around $100 billion today.
ADOPTION CURVE
AI agents are proliferating and most companies prefer a mix of internal and off-the-shelf solutions. KPMG’s second-quarter AI pulse survey found that nine out of ten companies are past AI agent experimentation, with 33% fully deploying at least some agents (up from 11% for the past two consecutive quarters), with another 57% of organizations piloting AI agents. “All agents aren’t created equal,” cautions Todd Lohr, head of ecosystems at KPMG, in an interview with Fortune. “You’re seeing a lot of task agents being deployed, which are more simplified use cases.”
With more organizations moving to the piloting or deployment stages, Lohr says the obstacles to make AI agents a reality are becoming more clear, including technical skills gaps (59% surveyed), followed by workforce resistance to change (47%), and system complexity (39%).
When it comes to how companies are actually deploying these agentic workflows—which can perform more complex tasks than prompt-based AI chatbots—the Big Four accounting firm says more leaders are planning to deploy a combination of internally built and off-the-shelf agents (up 51% from 27% in the first quarter). Just 2% plan to only build agents internally.
Courtesy of KPMG
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
– EchoStar is seeking a CIO, based in Englewood, Colorado. Posted salary range: $400K-$500K/year.
– Rothy’s is seeking a CTO, based in San Francisco. Posted salary range: $350K-$425K/year.
– Macon-Bibb County is seeking a CIO, based in Macon, Georgia. Posted salary range: $120K-$180K/year.
– Ahold DelhaizenamedJan Brecht as CTO and a member of the grocery store retailer’s executive committee, effective September 26. He will succeed Ben Wishart, who is leaving the company after 12 years in the CTO role. Brecht most recently served as chief digital information officer at Nissan Motor and previously served as CIO at Mercedes-Benz Group and CIO at Adidas Group.
– QXOappointedEric Nelson as CIO, effective July 14, joining the building products distributor from food giant Kraft Heinz, where he spent a decade in senior technology roles, including most recently as VP and head of IT functional capabilities. Nelson also previously served as CIO of Kraft Heinz North America and global head of analytics. Earlier in his career, he worked for British confectionary company Cadbury.
– SharkNinja announced the appointment of Mike Harris as chief innovation and technology officer, joining the consumer electronics company after most recently serving as chief product officer for Amazon’s Ring and Blink units. Prior to his work at Amazon, Harris’ past experiences include founding Ravisent Technologies, serving as CEO of Zonoff, and leading connected devices at DivX.
– RxLogic namedWilliam Figueroa as chief information and technology officer, joining the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) technology provider after most recently serving as CITO for cancer center operator Integrated Oncology Network, which was acquired by Cardinal Health. Figueroa also previously served as CIO of mortgage lender Nations Lending.
– 66degrees appointedBrian Gregory as CTO, joining the AI, data, and cloud consultancy after eight years at Google Cloud, where he led global strategic partnerships spanning across parent company Alphabet. Previously, he served as a senior director of IT for PBM Express Scripts and held technology leadership roles at Peabody Energy and CenturyLink.
– Blink Charging, an electric vehicle charging equipment operator, announced the acquisition of charging infrastructure firm Zemetric and named that company’s founder, Harmeet Singh, as the new CTO of the combined organization. Prior to founding Zemetric, Singh worked as a head of product for energy company Shell and prior to that, CTO of charging company Greenlots, which Shell acquired in 2019.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the most significant creation from his two years at Harvard University wasn’t the precursor to a global social network, but a prank website that nearly got him expelled.
The Meta CEO said in a 2017 commencement address at his alma mater that the controversial site, Facemash, was “the most important thing I built in my time here” for one simple reason: it led him to his wife, Priscilla Chan.
“Without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life,” Zuckerberg said during the speech.
In 2003, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, created Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s online student directories and using the photos to create a site where users could rank students’ attractiveness. The site went viral, but it was quickly shut down by the university. Zuckerberg was called before Harvard’s Administrative Board, facing accusations of breaching security, violating copyrights, and infringing on individual privacy.
“Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out,” Zuckerberg recalled in his speech. “My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going-away party.”
It was at this party, thrown by friends who believed his expulsion was imminent, where he met Chan, another Harvard undergraduate. “We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: ‘I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly,’” Zuckerberg said.
Chan, who described her now-husband to The New Yorker as “this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” went on the date with him. Zuckerberg did not get expelled from Harvard after all, but he did famously drop out the following year to focus on building Facebook.
While the 2010 film The Social Network portrayed Facemash as a critical stepping stone to the creation of Facebook, Zuckerberg himself has downplayed its technical or conceptual importance.
“And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t,” he said during his commencement speech. But he did confirm that the series of events it set in motion—the administrative hearing, the “going-away” party, the line for the bathroom—ultimately connected him with the mother of his three children.
Chan, for her part, went on to graduate from Harvard in 2007, taught science, and then attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, becoming a pediatrician.
She and Zuckerberg got married in 2012, and in 2015, they co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization focused on leveraging technology to address major world challenges in health, education, and science. Chan serves as co-CEO of the initiative, which has pledged to give away 99% of the couple’s shares in Meta Platforms to fund its work.
You can watch the entirety of Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech below:
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonpartisan watchdog that regularly estimates how much the U.S. Congress is adding to the $38 trillion national debt.
With enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies due to expire within days, some Senate Democrats are scrambling to protect millions of Americans from getting the unpleasant holiday gift of spiking health insurance premiums. The CRFB says there’s just one problem with the plan: It’s not funded.
“With the national debt as large as the economy and interest payments costing $1 trillion annually, it is absurd to suggest adding hundreds of billions more to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas wrote in a statement on Friday afternoon.
The proposal, backed by members of the Senate Democratic caucus, would fully extend the enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, from 2026 through 2028, with no additional income limits on who can qualify. Those subsidies, originally boosted during the pandemic and later renewed, were designed to lower premiums and prevent coverage losses for middle‑ and lower‑income households purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges.
CRFB estimated that even this three‑year extension alone would add roughly $300 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, largely because the federal government would continue to shoulder a larger share of premium costs while enrollment and subsidy amounts remain elevated. If Congress ultimately moves to make the enhanced subsidies permanent—as many advocates have urged—the total cost could swell to nearly $550 billion in additional borrowing over the next decade.
Reversing recent guardrails
MacGuineas called the Senate bill “far worse than even a debt-financed extension” as it would roll back several “program integrity” measures that were enacted as part of a 2025 reconciliation law and were intended to tighten oversight of ACA subsidies. On top of that, it would be funded by borrowing even more. “This is a bad idea made worse,” MacGuineas added.
The watchdog group’s central critique is that the new Senate plan does not attempt to offset its costs through spending cuts or new revenue and, in their view, goes beyond a simple extension by expanding the underlying subsidy structure.
The legislation would permanently repeal restrictions that eliminated subsidies for certain groups enrolling during special enrollment periods and would scrap rules requiring full repayment of excess advance subsidies and stricter verification of eligibility and tax reconciliation. The bill would also nullify portions of a 2025 federal regulation that loosened limits on the actuarial value of exchange plans and altered how subsidies are calculated, effectively reshaping how generous plans can be and how federal support is determined. CRFB warned these reversals would increase costs further while weakening safeguards designed to reduce misuse and error in the subsidy system.
MacGuineas said that any subsidy extension should be paired with broader reforms to curb health spending and reduce overall borrowing. In her view, lawmakers are missing a chance to redesign ACA support in a way that lowers premiums while also improving the long‑term budget outlook.
The debate over ACA subsidies recently contributed to a government funding standoff, and CRFB argued that the new Senate bill reflects a political compromise that prioritizes short‑term relief over long‑term fiscal responsibility.
“After a pointless government shutdown over this issue, it is beyond disappointing that this is the preferred solution to such an important issue,” MacGuineas wrote.
The off-year elections cast the government shutdown and cost-of-living arguments in a different light. Democrats made stunning gains and almost flipped a deep-red district in Tennessee as politicians from the far left and center coalesced around “affordability.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly smelling blood in the water and doubling down on the theme heading into the pivotal midterm elections of 2026. President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania soon to discuss pocketbook anxieties. But he is repeating predecessor Joe Biden’s habit of dismissing inflation, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.
“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting, in which he also dismissed affordability as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle now face a politically fraught choice: allow premiums to jump sharply—including in swing states like Pennsylvania where ACA enrollees face double‑digit increases—or pass an expensive subsidy extension that would, as CRFB calculates, explode the deficit without addressing underlying health care costs.
Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market.
The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.
That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.
“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”
By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump.
Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.
The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.
The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.
“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”
European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.
The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.
Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.
Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.
Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation.
“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.
Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.
The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.
Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.
Politics8 years ago