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THE RUNDOWN
Tuesday gave us two headlines that pretty much cancel each other out. Consumer confidence hit its highest point of 2026. Amazon also started laying off 2,198 people in Washington state.
Both are true at the same time, and that's basically the entire job market right now. How you're feeling about work depends almost entirely on what industry you're in. We'll get into why AI is wiping out tech jobs while the rest of corporate America barely notices.
Let's get into it.
Quick Signals
Consumers are feeling good again. The Conference Board index rose to 92.8 in April, blowing past the 89 that economists expected. The share of people saying jobs are "hard to get" dropped to 19.8%, down from 21.3% in March. Gas is still expensive, but people are weirdly optimistic anyway.
Amazon's layoffs just went live. The company started cutting 2,198 jobs in Washington on Tuesday, with about a third of them being software engineers. New York, California, and Maryland are also getting hit. That brings Amazon's total since October north of 30,000.
Entry-level hiring is actually up. NACE's Spring Update shows that employers bumped their Class of 2026 hiring projections from a sad 1.6% last fall to 5.6% now. Someone finally decided new grads are worth the onboarding effort.
Powell just chaired his last FOMC meeting. The decision drops today at 2 PM, and rates aren't moving. His term as chair ends May 15, and the Senate Banking Committee is voting on Kevin Warsh's nomination this morning. It's the end of an era, whether you liked the era or not.
Wall Street loves a good layoff. Of the 28 tech companies that announced AI-related cuts this year, 17 saw their stock rise the same day. Block went up 24% after cutting 40% of its workforce. Investors aren't even pretending to be conflicted about this.
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The Big Story
AI is eating up tech jobs. Corporate America is still chewing.
Here's a number worth sitting with: 92,000 tech workers have been cut in 2026 so far, across 95 companies. Nearly half of those cuts cite AI as the primary driver.
But a Fortune piece published this week points out something worth knowing: AI-driven layoffs are still "rare enough to be newsworthy" outside of tech. The broader Fortune 500 just isn't doing this. Not yet.
The reason is pretty simple. Tech workers write code, and code is something AI can check, replicate, and improve on its own. The AI tools doing the replacing were literally built by the same companies doing the firing. That dynamic doesn't exist in healthcare, legal, or professional services, where the work involves people, judgment, and situations that don't fit neatly into a prompt.
Here's what makes this a 12-month story and not just a headline. Every wave of technology-driven restructuring starts inside the industry that builds the technology, then spreads once the tools get cheaper and the playbooks get copied. Cloud computing did this. Offshoring did this. The question isn't whether AI restructuring reaches your industry. It's how fast.
You can already see the next phase starting. When 17 of 28 companies see their stock go up on the day they announce AI layoffs, that's a signal every board in every industry is paying attention to. Block's stock went up 24% after it cut 40% of its workforce. That kind of reward doesn't stay in one industry for long.
Meanwhile, outside of tech, people actually feel better about finding work than they did last month. The Conference Board says "jobs hard to get" dropped to 19.8%. The non-tech labor market is doing fine. It just doesn't make for good headlines.
The thing to watch over the next year is the first non-tech Fortune 500 company that does a big round of layoffs and says "we did this because of AI." That hasn't happened yet. When it does, you'll hear about it here first.
Why it matters: If you're in tech, you already know what's happening. The restructuring is real and it's accelerating. If you're outside tech, you've got a window of probably 12 to 18 months where AI is changing how you work but not whether you work. That's the window where you build the skills and positioning that make you the person they keep, not the role they cut.
Making Moves
The entry-level comeback nobody saw coming.
Six months ago, entry-level was a wasteland. Now Salesforce just said it's hiring 1,000 new grads across sales, product, and operations. NACE tripled its hiring forecast for the Class of 2026, going from 1.6% to 5.6%. IBM tripled entry-level hiring earlier this year. And companies building AI infrastructure are on a 92% year-over-year hiring tear.
The fine print is that Salesforce fired nearly 1,000 people two months ago. These aren't the same roles coming back. Companies are cutting legacy positions and backfilling with AI-adjacent ones like data annotators, AI engineers, and forward-deployed engineers. The job titles that didn't exist three years ago are the ones growing fastest right now.
What this means for you is that the bar for these new roles is AI literacy, not AI expertise. You don't need to build models. You need to know how to work alongside them.
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Try This Out
Is your job safe from AI? Here's how to check.
Copy this into Claude or ChatGPT and swap in your details:
I work as a [YOUR JOB TITLE] in [YOUR INDUSTRY] at a [COMPANY SIZE] company. My core daily tasks include:
1. [TASK 1]
2. [TASK 2]
3. [TASK 3]
4. [TASK 4]
5. [TASK 5]
For each task, rate on a scale of 1-5 how easily an AI tool could handle it today (1 = not possible, 5 = fully automatable). Then give me:
- An overall "AI exposure score" for my role (low / medium / high)
- The 2 tasks I should focus on that AI can't easily replicate
- The 1 skill I should start building now to stay ahead of this curve
- A suggested 30-day plan to shift my work toward the harder-to-automate tasks
Be specific and realistic. Don't sugarcoat it.
It takes about 3 minutes and tells you exactly which parts of your job are most at risk and what to do about it. Worth knowing before your company figures it out for you.
Predict This
Friday's jobs report: what's your call?
The BLS Employment Situation report for April drops this Friday, May 1. Last month came in at 178K jobs added with 4.3% unemployment.
Above 200K (labor market comeback tour)
150K-200K (steady as she goes)
Below 150K (somebody check the engine)
Worth Reading
Chaotic laser light self-organizes into a brain imaging tool - MIT turned messy laser light into a focused beam that images the blood-brain barrier 25 times faster. Physics being physics.
The Atlantic Ocean current is weakening about 51% faster than predicted - Turns out the ocean's conveyor belt is slowing down faster than anyone thought, and this time they used real measurements instead of just models.
Scientists found a hidden "pain switch" in the brain - There's a region that decides whether your pain fades or sticks around for years. Rude of it, honestly.
