POLICY

How California plans to counteract AI job losses

While lawmakers are still navigating how to regulate AI effectively, California is seeking to rein in some of the tech’s potential economic impacts. 

On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the state to prepare workers and businesses for the “economic disruption” that AI is poised to have on the workforce. The order enlists the help of state agencies, labor experts, economists, universities, and AI leaders to develop policies and identify warning signs of workforce impacts.  

“We have taken the lead on advancing innovation, safety, and transparency. But we must think bigger,” Newsom said in a press release. “This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future.” 

The order calls for a number of measures to get ahead of the potential job displacement that could result from AI, including: 

• Preparing workers to better grapple with and understand AI, including AI and job training at small businesses and higher education institutions, as well as enhancing “worker ownership models” and collective bargaining agreements. 

• Providing more information to the public on AI’s impact on the workforce, such as a report with recommendations and best practices and a dashboard showing AI’s impact.

• More robust responses to workforce disruption, such as considering worker safety net policies, increasing awareness of “employment stability payments,” and creating an “AI playbook” to modernize job training programs. 

• Developing stronger public policies to ensure AI advances the public good by working with academics and private sector experts on recommendations. 

Newsom’s order represents one of the first pieces of state AI regulation that seeks to confront the potential for widespread economic impact that the tech could have on the workforce. It comes as reports and studies continue mounting that AI could completely upend the way we work, even rendering some white-collar job categories extinct. The doom-and-gloom forecasts have stoked broad fear among workers, particularly among young people who are new to or entering the workforce. 

But these predictions aren’t the only thing creating an anxious workforce. Tech companies have largely used AI as a scapegoat for their own layoffs, with companies such as Meta, Block, Atlassian, Oracle, Amazon and more cutting thousands of jobs as they pour billions into centering their organizations around AI.

California has always led the pack when it comes to tech regulation. The state has introduced a number of laws related to AI safety and privacy as federal regulators largely drag their feet. But regulation has long lagged behind the actual impacts of the tech itself. With the pace at which AI is moving and companies’ fervent desire to be leaders, even the most aggressive lawmaking bodies may struggle to keep up with the sheer pace of innovation. And despite the fact that the nexus of AI’s most bleeding-edge innovation lives in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Newsom’s executive order might not be enough to stop the onrushing tide. Rather, it may simply serve as triage to help salve the wounds.

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CULTURE

Airbnb’s AI move rejects the usual hype

In covering AI full-time, there are days when I can't stomach one more hyperbole about AI curing all diseases or solving for human abundance.

Those aggrandized promises are tough to swallow when I walk down the streets of San Francisco, the AI capital of the world, and see homelessness, a mental health crisis, and extreme poverty existing right next to extreme wealth. I also find it difficult to process when I talk with my friends in the city who are teachers, artists, and nurses. To them, this mythical future of abundance doesn’t mean a whole lot. 

So I’m pleasantly surprised, even relieved, when I hear anyone talking about AI solving real problems, even if they're less ambitious or more incremental. I was especially astonished to experience it on Wednesday, when Airbnb announced the next steps in its journey to become more than a home rental app. 

"We believe in technology that can get you off your phone so you can be with the people around you," said Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, an app that runs primarily on your phone.

At the company's 2026 Summer Release event at its San Francisco headquarters, Chesky shared a barrage of updates that will make its app easier to use for travelers and hosts alike. He also talked about several ways Airbnb is expanding its offerings to make travel less stressful by taking care of your bags and your rides, and more enjoyable by connecting you with experts who can guide you to unique experiences.

But of course, being an AI journalist, I honed in on the few small updates that involve AI:

• AI-powered customer support: Most of us try to avoid customer service chatbots and automated phone systems because they rarely work. So we try to reach a human as quickly as possible to get our problem solved. Airbnb says its AI customer service is now solving people's problems 40% of the time. In most things in life, a 40% success rate is a dismal failure. In customer service, it's close to a miracle. Airbnb is doing it by creating cards that pop up in chat to handle simple requests, like changing your reservation dates. That way, you don't have to sit on hold for 20 minutes to talk to a person to change something that takes 30 seconds.

• Personalized listings: Today, every searcher in the Airbnb app sees the same algorithmic "Listing highlights" (three bullet points) at the top of each rental property listing. The new AI-powered version will customize these three bullets for the factors you're looking for.

• Personalized comparisons: Based on your search criteria, such as "a one-bedroom near the beach with a washer and dryer," Airbnb will now quickly display three to four properties in a table view to match your main criteria. That will save you from having to scan 15 to 20 properties and remember the details from each one, like I had to do recently when scanning for exactly the criteria I mentioned above. It will also save the die-hard Airbnb enthusiasts from having to create spreadsheets to compare the best rentals.

• AI-curated reviews for your searches: There are over a billion customer reviews on Airbnb. Even scanning 20-30 reviews of a single property is daunting. So now the company is using AI to surface the reviews that match the criteria you're looking for. It will highlight in bold the parts of the review that relate to what you're looking for. 

Hat tip to Chesky and Airbnb for not talking about all the magical ways AI will revolutionize the future of travel.

The next time you hear a CEO waxing poetic about AI solving the world's hardest problems in a podcast interview or a conference keynote, I'd like you to go back and re-read our article The race for power behind AI’s utopian story. And remember, we don't need AI to solve the future's problems. We need AI to solve today's problems. I'm always ready to hear more about the people working on that, because we're going to accomplish that one step at a time. The future's problems will be solved by good intentions and difficult sacrifices made today, and not by grandiose hyperbole. 

Disclosure: Jason Hiner's travel to the 2026 Summer Release event was paid for by Airbnb. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.

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ENTERTAINMENT

Can Spotify launch AI and hold onto artists?

As the music and entertainment industry continues to figure out where it stands on AI, Spotify is trying to make everyone happy. 

On Thursday, the company announced new AI initiatives aimed at putting generative tools in the hands of its users. It follows the company taking a mixed stance on AI on its platform, rallying against AI-generated slop and verifying real creators while also using the tech in features such as playlist generation and recommendations. 

Here’s what’s coming down the pipe for the streaming platform:

• Personal Podcasts: This new experience lets users generate short audio episodes  such as daily briefs or deep dives on topics they choose. Spotify creates a tailored audio summary "while linking you to relevant episodes, shows, and creators where you can explore more."

• Studio by Spotify Labs: This standalone desktop app takes information from users' web browsers and personal apps to create audio “shaped around your life,” similar to Google’s NotebookLM. Spotify sees this as a way to open up "new possibilities for experimental and creative formats."

• UMG partnership: Spotify is partnering with Universal Music Group, one of the biggest labels in the industry, on a new feature that lets users create “responsible” AI-generated covers and remixes of songs. Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström said the product is “grounded in consent, credit, and compensation for the artist.” 

Spotify walks a fine line with its AI approach. Like all software companies, it is under pressure to appear innovative and AI-first to placate investor appetite for the technology. The company has repeatedly promised to undertake AI in responsible ways that center on creator credit and compensation, releasing spam filters to identify AI slop and clarifying rules around unauthorized AI voice cloning late last year. 

But given that Spotify’s core business sits squarely in a creative industry, it’s already prone to backlash for engaging with technology that potentially threatens the livelihood of musicians, podcasters and creators. The company has already been the subject of scrutiny as it relates to AI, with a number of artists abandoning the platform over CEO Daniel Ek’s support of German AI defense firm, Helsing.

Spotify is being pulled in two opposing directions as it seeks to appease both stakeholders and artists. But it’s just one example of an entertainment industry institution walking the tightrope. Major music labels like Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have similarly sought to make inroads into AI, partnering with audio AI companies such as Suno and Udio. But creators are nothing if not rebels, and in the face of such industry-altering technology, many have already started to push back, with musicians creating protest albums and podcasters joining class-action lawsuits against major AI companies for allegedly “stealing” their voices to train models. What these platforms and labels need to remember is that there is no entertainment business without the entertainers. Without them, companies would have nothing to sell, and AI models would have nothing to feed on. 

LINKS

• Grok is reportedly underutilized by government, trailing ChatGPT, Gemini

• AI device startup Hark raises $700 million Series A at $6 billion valuation

• A 95-minute AI-generated film, called Hell Grind, debuted at Cannes 

• Amazon’s Bezos dismisses fears of AI job displacement in CNBC interview

• OpenAI reportedly generated nearly $6 billion in revenue in first quarter 

• AI cloud platform Modal Labs raises $355 million at $4.65 billion valuation

• Capcut with Gemini: The popular video editing tool is partnering with Google to allow users to create and edit images in the Gemini app. 

• LoRAs for Krea 2: A new fine-tuning system to train the company’s foundation AI image model to specific styles. 

• ElevenLabs Speech Engine: Turn your existing chat agents into full voice agents with natural language prompts. 

• Cohere Command A+: The AI lab’s “most powerful LLM yet,” open source and optimized to run on as little hardware as possible.

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