Achieving “career peace,” is deeply rooted in the concept of self-leadership. It’s about proactively steering one’s professional journey rather than merely reacting to external forces. This involves gaining a profound understanding of one’s strengths, passions, and long-term aspirations, akin to a firm defining its mission. By actively managing one’s career trajectory – seeking continuous learning, adapting to market shifts, and cultivating relevant skills – individuals can foster a sense of control and purpose, mitigating the anxiety often associated with professional uncertainty and fostering inner calm.

Self-leadership in a career context also emphasizes strategic navigation and personal resilience.  This proactive approach to career management, including seeking mentorship and building robust networks, transforms potential challenges into opportunities for advancement. Ultimately, career peace emerges not from the absence of challenges, but from the empowered ability to lead oneself through them, creating a fulfilling and sustainable professional life.

That was my take on the topic of “Career Peace through self-leadership”. An expert in this domain will be at Tekedia Mini-MBA today to teach on this. Vera Ng’oma is a leadership, personal and career development enabler and a passionate advocate for tangible excellence. She is founder of Excellica verangoma.com, an institute that helps build stronger workplaces, enables more women advance into leadership and young people to transition well into the world of work. At Tekedia Institute, she will explain physics of Career Peace and how to attend professional equilibrium through Self-Leadership.

Sat, Jun 28 | 7pm-8pm WAT | Career Peace through self-leadership – Vera Ng’oma, Excellica Leadership | Zoom link in class board.

Tekedia Institute will webcast this lecture here today here

As AI continues to redefine how economies function, Silicon Valley has largely focused on the upside—new markets, supercharged productivity, and the rise of solo entrepreneurs running billion-dollar startups. But with that optimism has come mounting anxiety over a future where machines could replace swathes of the global workforce, especially in entry-level and white-collar sectors. Now, one of AI’s key players is trying to meet that tension head-on.

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude, on Friday launched its Economic Futures Program, a new initiative that aims to understand and prepare for the seismic labor and economic shifts that generative AI is expected to trigger. Unlike many industry efforts that focus on showcasing innovation, Anthropic’s program is explicitly focused on researching the real-world impact of AI on jobs, productivity, fiscal policy, and inequality.

“Everybody’s asking questions about what are the economic impacts [of AI], both positive and negative,” Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s Head of Policy Programs and Partnerships, told TechCrunch. “It’s really important to root these conversations in evidence and not have predetermined outcomes or views on what’s going to [happen].”

The program follows remarks by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned in May that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years, potentially pushing unemployment rates as high as 20%. That projection shared more candidly than most industry leaders are willing to admit, casts a shadow over the glowing productivity statistics that AI developers are touting to investors and governments.

Anthropic’s new initiative is part of a small but growing movement among AI firms to position themselves not just as builders of disruptive technologies but as stewards of social stability in the aftermath. The Economic Futures Program will:

• Fund empirical research on AI’s effect on labor markets and value creation.
• Convene policy symposiums in Washington, D.C. and Europe.
• Partner with academic institutions and nonprofits to build datasets tracking AI’s impact on economic systems.

Anthropic is kicking off the program with rapid grants of up to $50,000, available to individuals and teams who can deliver data-driven insights within six months. Unlike traditional research funding, peer review isn’t a requirement—what matters is speed and relevance. The company will also offer Claude API credits to assist researchers in analyzing and prototyping.

“We want to understand the transitions,” Heck said. “How are new jobs being created that nobody ever contemplated before? How are certain skills remaining valuable while others are not?”

While many policy efforts today focus narrowly on job displacement, Anthropic wants to broaden the aperture, including investigations into:

• Workflow redesign in AI-enhanced industries.
• Shifts in fiscal policy and tax structure as companies adopt AI.
• How governments should invest in education and training to build new value pipelines.

Heck emphasized that this is not a lobbying effort. Instead, the company is trying to inject real data into policy conversations that are currently filled with speculation and polarization.

Contrasts with OpenAI’s Blueprint

The move comes months after Anthropic’s chief competitor, OpenAI, released its Economic Blueprint in January. That document largely promotes adoption, infrastructure, and regional development—outlining frameworks for AI literacy, building AI economic zones, and scaling access to cloud computing. But it sidesteps the direct question of job loss, focusing instead on skilling up the workforce and creating new hubs for AI investment.

In contrast, Anthropic’s approach is more grounded in economic risk assessment. Its internal Economic Index, launched earlier this year, aggregates anonymized data to study labor shifts in real time—offering a level of transparency that few tech companies currently match.

While OpenAI’s Stargate project—a $100 billion plan to build cutting-edge data centers in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank—promises tens of thousands of construction jobs, it doesn’t directly address the fact that many of the same systems may soon automate entire departments across industries ranging from finance to marketing.

Anthropic’s Economic Futures Program also comes as part of a larger reputational recalibration happening across the tech sector. With governments from the U.S. to the EU scrutinizing AI’s social consequences, companies are increasingly trying to show that they’re not just disruptors, but also responsible stakeholders.

Earlier this week, Lyft launched a forum to gather input from drivers as it begins to roll out robotaxis—a rare case of a platform actually engaging workers likely to be displaced by automation.

Anthropic appears to be taking a similar stance, admitting that while AI might boost GDP, those gains won’t be equally distributed unless the consequences are managed intentionally and transparently.

“If there is job loss, then we should convene a collective group of thinkers to talk about mitigation,” Heck said. “If there will be huge GDP expansion, great. We should also convene policymakers to figure out what to do with that.”

With this initiative, Anthropic is betting that responsible AI will not just be an ethical imperative, but also a long-term strategic advantage—especially in an industry whose economic impact could rival the scale of the industrial revolution.

Microsoft is taking a harder stance on employee AI adoption, instructing some managers to factor the use of internal AI tools—particularly GitHub Copilot—into employee performance reviews.

The push, first reported by Business Insider, is part of a broader effort to drive internal uptake of the company’s flagship AI products amid growing signs that even Microsoft’s own employees are opting for alternatives like ChatGPT.

In a memo seen by BI, Julia Liuson, President of Microsoft’s Developer Division, told managers that AI usage should now be considered a “fundamental part of how we work,” equating it with key performance traits such as collaboration, data-driven decision-making, and communication.

“Using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level,” Liuson wrote.

Managers were instructed to evaluate how effectively employees integrate internal AI tools, such as GitHub Copilot, into their daily work as part of “holistic” performance evaluations.

Growing Internal Discontent with Copilot

The policy comes amid increasing signs of dissatisfaction with GitHub Copilot, even across parts of Microsoft’s own workforce. Despite being the company’s signature AI coding assistant, Copilot is reportedly being shunned by some employees, who prefer using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which they consider to be more versatile and accurate.

Internal feedback, according to people familiar with the matter, shows that developers often find ChatGPT more effective for writing, debugging, and explaining code—despite Copilot being tailored specifically for those tasks. Some developers have also raised concerns about Copilot’s inconsistent performance, limited context handling, and integration issues with certain programming environments.

The situation is awkward for Microsoft, which has invested billions into OpenAI and co-developed Copilot as a commercial application of GPT technology. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is OpenAI’s direct-to-consumer product—and it’s pulling users away from Microsoft’s own platform.

The problem is compounded by rising competition in the AI developer tool space. Rivals like Cursor, which builds on top of GPT-4 and offers deeper integration for code workflows, have gained traction among professional developers. A recent Barclays note cited data suggesting Cursor had surpassed Copilot in usage among some developer groups.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has allowed employees to use some approved third-party tools such as Replit, which has gained popularity for its ease of use and real-time feedback features. Yet even with this flexibility, internal preference for ChatGPT remains strong.

The growing reliance on OpenAI’s flagship chatbot rather than Microsoft’s branded tools adds complexity to the companies’ evolving partnership. Microsoft is reportedly renegotiating its deal with OpenAI, and internal documents show that disagreements have emerged around intellectual property and access rights—especially as OpenAI weighs acquiring Cursor competitor Windsurf.

According to sources, OpenAI and Windsurf want to block Microsoft from inheriting IP access rights through its OpenAI agreement. These discussions highlight how Microsoft’s aggressive Copilot strategy and internal adoption struggles are intersecting with broader tensions in the AI industry.

A Cultural Shift with Potential Blowback

Microsoft’s effort to mandate AI usage reflects a cultural shift within the company, aiming to align its workforce with the same AI-first vision it sells to enterprise clients. But turning AI use into a performance metric also risks internal pushback, especially if employees feel forced to adopt tools they view as less effective than third-party alternatives.

However, Microsoft seems determined to push forward. While some teams are informally integrating AI-use metrics into reviews, others are considering formalizing the requirement starting in the next fiscal year.

The company’s leadership sees this as vital not just for productivity, but also for product refinement—believing that widespread internal use of tools like Copilot will help close feature gaps and improve competitiveness.