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Its been a rough week for the tech industry. First, Salesforce announced it would lay off more than 1,000 employees, and now another enterprise software maker has announced even deeper job cuts. Yesterday, Workday, Inc. (Nasdaq: WDAY), maker of cloud-based human resources software, announced that it would lay off 1,750 employeesor roughly 8.5% of its global workforce. These layoffs add to a rough start for the tech industry in 2025, which has seen major tech giants, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, trim their workforces. Heres what you need to know about Workdays layoffs. Roughly 8% of Workday’s employees are impacted Workday yesterday announced that it was eliminating 1,750 roles at the company. That equates to about 8.5% of its total workforce, which stood at about 18,000 employees as of January 2024, as Reuters notes. Workday was founded in 2005 and is based in Pleasanton, California. The company makes enterprise software for HR management. Workday announced the layoffs in a memo from CEO Carl Eschenbach. In the memo, Eschenbach said the company would realign its resources in fiscal 2025 in light of the increasing demand for artificial intelligence and its potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday. This realignment means that Workday will invest strategically, helping teams work better together, bringing innovations to market faster, and making it easier for our customers and partners to work with us, Eschenbach said. But in order to achieve this realignment, he continued, job cuts would be necessary. Announcing the layoffs yesterday, Eschenbach encouraged employees to work from home or, for those already in the office, to head home. He said Workdays goal was to inform as many impacted employees as possible on that day. Workdays restructuring plan The layoffs are part of a larger restructuring plan for the company, which includes prioritizing investments in strategic areas, including AI and the development of its platform. However, while the plan includes cutting around 8.5% of its workforce, the company expects to continue to hire in key strategic areas and locations throughout its fiscal year ending January 31, 2026, according to a FORM 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That filing also revealed that Workday expects to exit certain owned office space as part of the restructuring. Workday says it expects its restructuring plan to cost the company between $230 million to $270 million, with roughly $145 million to $175 million related to severance payments, employee benefits, and other related costs. As for the employees getting laid off, Eschenbach said those in the U.S. will be offered a minimum of 12 weeks of severance pay with additional weeks of pay based on tenure. WDAY stock rises on news of layoffs While layoffs are devastating for the individuals affected, investors generally see things differently. The company’s stock price jumped after Workday announced its layoffs yesterday. WDAY shares closed trading yesterday over 6.3% higher than they opened. With yesterdays post-layoffs stock price jump, WDAY stock is now up just over 7% year-to-date. However, looking back a full 12 months, WDAY shares are negative for the period, having declined 5.3% over the past year. As of the time of this writing, in premarket trading, WDAY shares are currently up 0.3% to around $277 per share. According to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, 42 tech companies have now laid off over 10,800 workers since the beginning of 2025.
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Human skills fall into three major buckets: physical, intellectual, and emotional. Of these, the last two are critical differentiators of talent across all knowledge economy jobs. When it comes to intellectual skills, such as learning ability, a century of scientific evidence reveals that this trait is the most consistent predictor of job performance and career success across all occupations. Why? Because it predicts how fast and well you can learn, reason, and solve problems, which basically matters in every job. That said, intellectual skills are clearly not enough to do well in your job or career. In fact, most jobs will also require you to understand, influence, and manage yourself and other people, and these intrapersonal and interpersonal skills are typically encapsulated under the label of emotional intelligence (EQ). How can you assess the EQ of artificial intelligence? Just like with humans, AIs potential can also be assessed in terms of its intellectual and emotional skills or capabilities. Intellectual skills include the ability to solve problems, retrieve knowledge, and translate expertise into the creation or generation of new content (e.g., poems, jokes, code, music, images, and a new corporate strategy). When people assess how intelligent AI is, they generally focus on these types of problems and pitch AI against human expertise or intelligence. Emotional skills, though far less discussed, are perhaps even more impressive. While it seems counterintuitive to think of AI as capable of displaying EQ, a simple examination of any generative AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude) will show that AI is already better than many humans at both managing itself and others, which includes the ability to understand humans, and help us boost our own EQ. 4 ways AIs emotional intelligence can help human managers This is how AI could help managers to improve their ability to manage themselves and others, thereby improving their managerial and leadership effectiveness, and helping their teams to be happier and more productive: 1. Real-Time Sentiment Analysis in Communication AI tools can analyze the tone, sentiment, and emotional content of emails, chat messages, and meeting transcripts. Managers can receive insights on whether their communication comes across as empathetic, assertive, or dismissive. Since the choice of words has a big impact on others evaluations and inferences of our emotional states and intentions, AI can decode and predict how our communicational patterns influence others and help us fine-tune our message, especially when we are managing people. For example, AI can flag overly harsh phrasing or suggest more empathetic alternatives, helping managers improve their interactions, which effectively makes them seem more emotionally intelligent with others. 2. Employee Mood and Engagement Monitoring AI can analyze a managers behavior, such as feedback given during meetings or decision-making patterns, and provide tailored coaching tips. Soon, such tools will be embedded in most videoconferencing platforms, providing managers real feedback about their teams’ emotional and psychological states, helping them to run more engaging meetings. Algorithmic readings of employees reactions to managers comments may provide managers with real-time markers of their employees energy, engagement, interest, curiosity, or indeed boredom levels. AI might suggest practicing active listening techniques if the manager frequently interrupts or advise on better conflict resolution strategies based on observed patterns. 3. Role-Playing and Virtual EQ Training AI-powered virtual reality (VR) simulations or chatbots can help managers practice challenging conversations, such as delivering critical feedback or resolving team conflicts, something most managers struggle with. Even using simple large language platforms can help managers treat AI as their personal digital coach and sounding board, asking uncomfortable personal questions about how best to handle emotionally charged or socially challenging situations. These tools create safe environments for managers to build empathy and develop skills like de-escalating tension, reading nonverbal cues, and handling emotional reactions. 4. Diversity and Inclusion Insights AI can detect unconscious biases in decision-making, hiring, or team dynamics by analyzing historical patterns or behaviors. For example, managers may inadvertently use derogatory language when speaking to outgroup or lower status candidates, or respond faster to employees who belong to their same group or tribe. By identifying areas where a manager may unintentionally favor certain employees or overlook others, AI can guide them to foster a more inclusive and equitable workplace, reducing bias, increasing fairness, and strengthening their empathy and interpersonal skills. These examples show how AI can be a valuable tool for managers looking to build stronger connections, communicate more effectively, and lead with empathy. To be sure, many managers may feel they dont need AIor any human coachto improve their emotional and social competence, which may itself signal deficits around EQ, a trait that is critical for self-awareness; and, the certainty that AI will never be able to replace you because your skills are never going to be rivaled by AI is mostly indicative of arrogance, delusional grandiosity, and overconfidence, all of which are common in lower EQ individuals. Likewise, it is feasible to think that those who already display higher levels of EQ will leverage emotional AI to refine and upgrade their social and emotional skills even furthera decision that would signal higher levels of IQ or intelligence, too.
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The generative AI revolution has turned into a global race, with mixtures of models from private companies and open-source initiatives all competing to become the most popular and powerful. Many choose to promote their prowess by demonstrating their performance on common tests and levels within regular rankings. But the legitimacy of those rankings has been thrown into question as new research published in Cornell Universitys preprint server arXiv shows its possible to rig a models results with just a few hundred votes. When we talk about large language models, their performance on benchmarks is very important, says study author Tianyu Pang, a researcher at Sea AI Lab, a Singapore-based research group. It helps promote startups looking to tout the abilities of their models, which makes some startups motivated to get or manipulate the benchmark, he says. To test whether manipulation of the rankings was possible, Pang and his colleagues looked at Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced AI benchmarking platform developed by researchers at the University of California Berkeley and LMArena. On Chatbot Arena, users can state their preference for one chatbots output over the other when put through a battery of tests. The results of those votes feed into the wider rankings that the platform shares publicly, and which are often regarded as definitive. But Pang and his colleagues identified that its possible to sway the ranking position of models with just a few hundred votes. We just need to take hundreds of new votes to improve a single ranking position, he says. The technique is very simple. While Chatbot Arena keeps the identities of its models secret when theyre pitted against one another, Pang and his colleagues trained a classifier to identify which model is being used based on its outputs, with a high accuracy level. Then we can utilize the rating system to more efficiently improve the model ranking with the least number of new votes, he explains. The vote-rigging experiment was not tested on the live version of Chatbot Arena so as not to poison the results of the real website, but instead on historical data from the ranking platform. Despite this, Pang says that itd be possible to do so in real life with the proper version of Chatbot Arena. The team behind the ranking platform did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment. Pang says his last contact with Chatbot Arena came in September 2024 (before he conducted the experiment), when he flagged the potential technique to manipulate the results. According to Pang, the Chatbot Arena team responded by recommending the researchers sandbox test the principle in the historical data. Pang says that Chatbot Arena does have multiple anti-cheating mechanisms in place to avoid flooding voting, but that they dont mitigate against his teams technique. From the user side, for now, we cannot make sure the rankings are reliable, says Pang. Its the responsibility of the Chatbot Arena team to implement some anti-cheating mechanism to make sure the benchmark is the real level.
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