54% of CEOs are hiring for AI roles

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Friday.

Here’s a quick reality check for the rest of the year: Whatever field you’re in, you’re going to hear a lot more about “retraining” and “reskilling”.

I didn’t invent those words. Don’t shoot the messenger.

The rest of this IBM post is full of stats about what CEOs are doing, but here’s the one that stands out:

“54% of CEOs said they’re hiring for roles related to AI that did not exist a year ago.”

Translation: If you know AI, you will be in high demand…very high demand.

OK let’s keep going ↓

Here’s what you should know:

• Amazon debuts AI-powered 'Enhance My Listing' for sellers

  AI tool designed to help sellers maintain and optimize product listings.

• IBM replaced hundreds of HR workers with AI

  Its AskHR agent now automates 94% of simple, routine HR tasks, including vacation requests and pay statements.

• KPMG launches AI Trust services to transform AI governance

  82% of leaders expect risk management to be their biggest challenge in 2025.

• Red Hat CEO Hicks calls AI costs “the competition”

  “This is a game of pennies and fractions of pennies…as impactful as training is to show that something can work, the ability to ask those models questions at volume and do that cheaper than your competition–that really, I think, is a core differentiator in technology going forward.”

• Alibaba's ZeroSearch lets AI self-train, cutting costs 88%

  Alibaba researchers developed a new approach that dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of training AI systems for information search, eliminating the need for expensive commercial search engine APIs.

• Get ready for Google I/O on May 20-21

  Expected announcements include updates to Gemini (Ultra model), Android 16, and their agents (Astra and Mariner). There’s also talk of a "Video Overviews" feature, where AI-generated videos could appear in search results, similar to the existing AI-generated text summaries.

The numbers:

• Doubleword raises $12M Series A led by Dawn Capital for a self-hosted AI inference platform.

• CueZen raises $5M seed round led by Point72 Ventures for an AI-powered health personalization engine.

• Una Software raises $4.4M seed round from Staircase Ventures and Emerald Development Managers for AI-powered FP&A planning.

• Jozu raises $4M seed round led by HalfCourt Capital for AI application orchestration tools.

Thought starters:

Something for you to think about this weekend…

SoundCloud clarified it “has never used artist content to train AI models” following backlash over terms of service changes.

But artists aren’t just worried about platforms, they’re worried about everyone else.

Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa are among those urging the UK government to protect creative work from being used by AI without permission.

But it raises a bigger question: Even if platforms promise not to use your work for AI, what’s stopping someone else from uploading it?

Does sharing anything online now mean it could end up in the hands of AI?

Meme of the day:

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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