Business

There are 3 key reasons why remote work is actually bringing you down, according to top management experts

Published

4 months ago

October 1, 2025

“It just seems kind of nutty,” Peter Cappelli tells Fortune, on a Zoom call, as he and his co-author, Ranya Nehmeh, discuss their new, aptly titled book, “In Praise of the Office.” The last five years have been quite a journey from fully remote work to an uneasy hybrid truce to a battle by many big companies to bring workers back five days a week, to wherever we are now. “People were starting to see this just as a kind of Marxist [thing], they were never saying that, but that’s the way they were thinking about it, right? Class battle, capital versus labor stuff, you know?”

Cappelli insists he and Nehmeh, both college professors and management scholars with expertise in human resources, were clear-eyed about what they’d find when they began researching their new book. Cappelli is a long-tenured management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Nehmeh is an adjunct professor at Vienna’s University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication. “We both work remote,” Cappelli acknowledged, but he also pointed out he’s racked up four decades of experience.

“I don’t need to be in the office … but I can also see how much worse the place is, because people like me are not in the office, and because we’re not in, the junior people aren’t there either, and so nobody’s there, right?”

Cappelli said it’s just obvious to him how much worse it is for his own organization. “Fine for me!” he said, “but bad for everybody else.”

Fears for the future

What he and Nehmeh found, they told Fortune, is that remote work has only become “increasingly problematic over time.” It’s understandable that it’s proved sticky, since it succeeded remarkably during the pandemic. “We expected nothing [out of it], and it was enormously better than that,” he added. Their book reads as a tacit endorsement behind the bold actions of some CEOs such as Amazon’s Andy Jassy, who has mandated five days back in the office for all employees, but it’s really about management principles and, Cappelli added, his fears over the future of the workplace: that workers will conclude they don’t need to learn from each other anymore.

Nehmeh said you can see the hazards of mismanaged hybrid work in the behavior of Gen Z, which she called “very transactional … I show up, I do my job, I get out. I don’t want to be part of anything else.” Not even the social aspect, work environment, organization, or culture, she added.

Cappelli agreed, saying what he saw out of so many students who were used to being hybrid and remote was stunning, particularly soon after the pandemic. “They just didn’t come to class,” he said, “and they were surprised that they were supposed to.”

When they did show up, they were not prepared, and didn’t think they were supposed to contribute beyond turning in assignments. His solution: He failed a bunch of people, and that got the message across.

Nehmeh agrees something has gone missing in the age of remote work, noting reports of some companies offering etiquette classes to Gen Z on how to act in meetings, dress for work, and talk to clients. These are all things that you used to learn when you joined an organization, she added.

Still, Cappelli and Nehmeh didn’t blame Gen Z for their lack of preparation, or the world of work that they emerged into. Both agreed their research indicated a failure higher up the chain. Nehmeh said she saw staff surveys showing that prior problems with poor communication, lack of recognition, unclear priorities and burnout “have only been magnified.” When organizations ignore survey feedback in a remote environment, she added, “the gap between what leaders think is happening and what employees are actually experiencing becomes even wider. The result is disengagement, frustration, and a sense that the organization isn’t listening.”

Cappelli was more blunt. At least in the U.S., he argued, the problems boil down to one simple thing: “Management’s just gotten worse.” They highlighted three main reasons that it’s time to call it a night for the remote workday.

1) Culture clash

A recurring theme for Cappelli and Nehmeh was the erosion of organizational culture and community. The authors described how, in a hybrid world, newer employees in particular struggle to learn by observation or build relationships—key aspects of professional growth that depended on physical proximity.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, or the top of the waterfall. They described a cascading effect downwards onto mid-level and senior-level employees, who become increasingly detached from their jobs as work gets defined down to something that happens on a screen, not in real life.

Nehmeh said new hires suffer in this hybrid environment, because they cannot really learn by example and they don’t get the guidance or support that facilitates professional growth. They both described the horror of the “ping” familiar to any remote worker.

Consider the entry-level worker who needs help, Nehmeh adds: “You have to schedule a call, you have to ping somebody, they may not respond back if they don’t know you … there’s so many issues there.”

2) Everything is a transaction

A less obvious outcome of the cultural erosion, Cappelli added, is that remote work leads people to think about their job more narrowly. Work has been boiled down to key performance indicators, or KPIs, blurring the line between the letter of the law and spirit of the law, so to speak. He said this started during the pandemic, when supervisors were told to hold people accountable, and with everyone working remotely, the easiest solution was to emphasize KPIs.

Cappelli conjured a world of strict KPIs and constant pings, but the problem is the people you’re pinging have their own KPIs, too. “If you want help from somebody, you have to ping them, and you ping, and, you know, they get the message, but it goes to the bottom of their stack.”

He said they conducted 38 separate focus groups, 760 people in all, and many responded that they would get to their “pings” after they finished their own work.

Cappelli said this might seem small but he thinks it’s a huge change that really affects performance management. The office involved social relationships, while the world of pings and KPIs is reducing everything to a transaction.

3) The productivity-sapping meetings problem

None of this should diminish the breakthrough of remote work in 2020, they argue, but that was a solution to an emergency, and cracks in the system are now more visible after several years.

The authors argued that Zoom meetings, which seem more efficient, actually make workers less productive while adding to the length of their average work day, meaning that productivity per hour is actually down. Cappelli said he thinks there are too many of these meetings, they go on for too long, and too many people tune out, turning off their cameras when they are likely doing other things.

Cappelli urged managers to rethink meetings that take up too much of people’s time, full of awkwardness that seems normal now but would have seemed bizarre five years ago. He said that more recently, he has heard of people skipping meetings and sending their AI agent to take notes in their stead. “They’re not even pretending to listen!”

Cappelli said that as meetings get bigger and less gets done, some people are even turning to post-meeting meetings to make sure they’re still on track. “It’s a mess. Those things could be fixed, right? But they’re not being fixed.”

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Business

Palantir CEO says AI “will destroy” humanities jobs but there will be “more than enough jobs” for people with vocational training

Published

30 minutes ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Some economists and experts say that critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), when a robot can do much of the heavy lifting on coding or research. Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune that a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, the Palantir founder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices.

“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “You went to an elite school and you studied philosophy — I’ll use myself as an example — hopefully you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”

Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.

Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking about his own career, “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.”

The answer echoed past comments Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.

“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp said in an interview with Axios in November.

Not every CEO agrees with Karp’s assessment that humanities degrees are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein told Fortune in 2024 that the company was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”

McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,” to break out of AI’s linear problem-solving.

Karp has long been an advocate for vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with a chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months.

The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and having “opaque” admissions that “displaced meritocracy and excellence,” in their announcement of the fellowship.

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during a Q2 earnings call last year.

“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to the former police officer who attended a junior college, who now manages the US Army’s MAVEN system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.

“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said.

Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”

He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then, I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.”

Karp’s comments come as more employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December and is growing among college graduates. Karp isn’t too worried.

“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said.

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Business

AI is boosting productivity. Here’s why some workers feel a sense of loss

Published

1 hour ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…Why some workers feel a sense of loss while AI boosts productivity…Anthropic raising fresh $10 Billion at $350 billion valuation…Musk’s xAI closed $20 billion funding with Nvidia backing…Can AI do your job? See the results from hundreds of tests.

For months, software developers have been giddy with excitement over “vibe coding”– prompting desired software functions or features in natural language—with the latest AI code generation tools. Anthropic’s Claude Code is the darling of the moment, but OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor and other tools have also led engineers to flood social media with examples of tasks that used to take days and are now finished in minutes.

Even veteran software design leaders have marvelled at the shift. “In just a few months, Claude Code has pushed the state of the art in software engineering further than 75 years of academic research,” said Erik Meijer, a former senior engineering leader at Meta.

Skills honed seem less essential

However, that same delight has turned disorienting for many developers, who are grappling with a sense of loss as skills honed over a lifetime suddenly seem less essential. The feeling of flow—of being “in the zone”—seems to have vanished as building software becomes an exercise in supervising AI tools rather than writing code.

In a blog post this week titled “The Grief When AI Writes All the Code,” Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer, wrote that he is “coming to terms with the high probability that AI will write most of my code which I ship to production.” It already does it faster, he explained, and for languages and frameworks he is less familiar with, it does a better job.

“It feels like something valuable is being taken away, and suddenly,” he wrote. “It took a lot of effort to get good at coding and to learn how to write code that works, to read and understand complex code, and to debug and fix when code doesn’t work as it should.”

Andrew Duca, founder of tax software Awaken Tax, wrote a similar post this week that went viral, saying that he was feeling “kinda depressed” even though he finds using Claude Code “incredible” and has “never found coding more fun.”

He can now solve customer problems faster, and ship more features, but at the same time “the skill I spent 10,000s of hours getting good at…is becoming a full commodity extremely quickly,” he wrote. “There’s something disheartening about the thing you spent most of your life getting good at now being mostly useless.”

Software development has long been on the front lines of the AI shift, partly because there are decades of code, documentation and public problem-solving (from sites like GitHub) available online for AI models to train on. Coding also has clear rules and fast feedback – it runs or it doesn’t – so AI systems can easily learn how to generate useful responses. That means programming has become one of the first white-collar professions to feel AI’s impact so directly.

These tensions will affect many professions

These tensions, however, won’t be confined to software developers. White-collar workers across industries will ultimately have to grapple with them in one way or another. Media headlines often focus on the possibility of mass layoffs driven by AI; the more immediate issue may be how AI reshapes how people feel about their work. AI tools can move us past the hardest parts of our jobs more quickly—but what if that struggle is part of what allows us to take pride in what we do? What if the most human elements of work—thinking, strategizing, working through problems—are quietly sidelined by tools that prize speed and efficiency over experience?

Of course, there are plenty of jobs and workflows where most people are very happy to use AI to say buh-bye to repetitive grunt work that they never wanted to do in the first place. And as Duca said, we can marvel at the incredible power of the latest AI models and leap to use the newest features even while we feel unmoored.

Many white-collar workers will likely face a philosophical reckoning about what AI means for their profession—one that goes beyond fears of layoffs. It may resemble the familiar stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, eventually, acceptance. That acceptance could mean learning how to be the best manager or steerer of AI possible. Or it could mean deliberately carving out space for work done without AI at all. After all, few people want to lose their thinking self entirely.

Or it could mean doing what Erik Meijer is doing. Now that coding increasingly feels like management, he said, he has turned back to making music—using real instruments—as a hobby, simply “to experience that flow.”

With that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

FORTUNE ON AI

As Utah gives the AI power to prescribe some drugs, physicians warn of patient risks – by Beatrice Nolan

Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides linked to AI chatbots – by Beatrice Nolan

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health in a push to become a hub for personal health data – by Sharon Goldman

Google takes first steps toward an AI product that can actually tackle your email inbox – by Jacqueline Munis

Fusion power nearly ready for prime time as Commonwealth builds first pilot for limitless, clean energy with AI help from Siemens, Nvidia – by Jordan Blum

AI IN THE NEWS

Anthropic raising fresh $10 Billion at $350 billion valuation. According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI rival Anthropic is planning to raise $10 billion at a roughly $350 billion valuation, nearly doubling its worth from just four months ago. The round is expected to be led by GIC and Coatue Management, following a $13 billion raise in September that valued the company at $183 billion. The financing underscores the continued boom in AI funding—AI startups raised a record $222 billion in 2025, per PitchBook—and comes as Anthropic is also preparing for a potential IPO this year. Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has become a major OpenAI rival, buoyed by Claude’s popularity with business users, major backing from Nvidia and Microsoft, and expectations that it will reach break-even by 2028—potentially faster than OpenAI, which is itself reportedly seeking to raise up to $100 billion at a $750 billion valuation.

Musk’s xAI closed $20 billion funding with Nvidia backing. Bloomberg reported that xAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, has completed a $20 billion funding round backed by investors including Nvidia, Valor Equity Partners, and the Qatar Investment Authority, underscoring the continued flood of capital into AI infrastructure. Other backers include Fidelity Management & Research, StepStone Group, MGX, Baron Capital Group, and Cisco’s investment arm. The financing—months in the making—will fund xAI’s rapid infrastructure buildout and product development, the company said, and includes a novel structure in which a large portion of the capital is tied to a special-purpose vehicle used to buy Nvidia GPUs that are then rented out, allowing investors to recoup returns over time. The deal comes as xAI has been under fire for its chatbot Grok producing non-consensual “undressing” images of real people.

Can AI do your job? See the results from hundreds of tests. I wanted to shout-out this fascinating new interactive feature in the Washington Post, which presented a new study that found that despite fears of mass job displacement, today’s AI systems are still far from being able to replace humans on real-world work. Researchers from Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety tested leading models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on hundreds of actual freelance projects—from graphic design and creating dashboards to 3D modeling and games—and found that the best AI systems successfully completed just 2.5% of tasks on their own. While AI often produced outputs that looked plausible at first glance, closer inspection revealed missing details, visual errors, incomplete work, or basic technical failures, highlighting gaps in areas like visual reasoning, long-term memory, and the ability to evaluate subjective outcomes. The findings challenge predictions that AI is poised to automate large swaths of human labor anytime soon, even as newer models show incremental improvement and the economics of cheaper, semi-autonomous AI work continue to put pressure on remote and contract workers.

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

91.8%

That’s the percentage of Meta employees who admitted to not using the company’s AI chatbot, Meta AI, in their day-to-day work, according to new data from Blind, a popular anonymous professional social network.

According to a survey of 400 Meta employees, only 8.2% said they use Meta AI. The most popular chatbot was Anthropic’s Claude, used by more than half (50.7%) of Meta employees surveyed. 17.7% said they use Google’s Gemini and 13.7% said they used OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

When approached for comment, Meta spokesperson pointed out that the number (400 of 77,000+ employees) is “not even a half percent of our total employee population.”

AI CALENDAR

Jan. 19-23: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland.

Jan. 20-27: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Singapore.

Feb. 10-11: AI Action Summit, New Delhi, India.

March 2-5: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain.

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose, Calif.

April 6-9: HumanX, San Francisco.

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Business

Trust has become the crisis CEOs can’t ignore at Davos, as new data show 70% of people turning more ‘insular’

Published

2 hours ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Everywhere you turn in Davos this year, people are talking about trust. And there’s no one who knows trust better than Richard Edelman. Back in 1999, Edelman was on the cusp of taking over the PR firm founded by his father Daniel. Spurred by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, he decided to try and measure the level of trust in NGOs compared with business, government and media, Edelman surveyed 1,300 thought leaders in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia, and the Edelman Trust Barometer was born.

While the survey sample long ago expanded beyond elites to include about 34,000 respondents in 28 nations, its results are still unveiled and debated every year at the ultimate gathering of elites: the World Economic Forum. This year’s findings are grim: About 70% of respondents now have an “insular” mindset: they don’t want to talk to, work for, or even be in the same space with anyone who doesn’t share their world view. And “a sense of grievance” permeates the business world, Edelman finds. At Davos, debating such findings have spawned a series of dinners, panels, cocktails and media briefings on site. What better place to bring people together than the world’s most potent village green?

I moderated a CEO salon dinner with about three dozen leaders last night to discuss what they’re seeing and doing when it comes to building trust. Before the dinner, I asked Edelman what he’d like to see this year, after 26 winters of highlighting the erosion of trust. “Urgency,” he said. “A sense that time is running out.”

Because the gathering itself was held under the Chatham House rule, I won’t share names and direct quotes. But the focus was on how attendees are trying to address the problem through what Edelman calls “trust brokering,” or finding common ground through practices from nonjudgemental communications to “polynational’ business models that invest in long-term local relationships. (See the report for more information.) There were some success stories from the front lines of college campuses, politics and industries caught in a crossfire of misinformation.

Still, the mood was somewhat subdued, with a sense that there’s no easy fix to building trust. As one CEO pointed out, rarely have leaders faced such a confluence of geopolitical crises, tech shifts, economic divides, disinformation, job disruption and wicked problems. And as much as Davos is a great gathering ground to talk through all of these problems, the fact is the problems will all still be waiting once these CEOs return from the mountains.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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