Dow’s AI glow-up means your job gets melted down for efficiency

Dow just looked at the AI boom and decided the best way to innovate was to delete some humans.

They’re calling it “tech shifts” in heavy industry, which is corporate for “we bought shiny new toys and now payroll is the budget we sacrifice to prove we’re serious.”

The AI gold rush has companies cooking up billion-dollar capex plans like it’s Minecraft Creative Mode. New automation, new systems, new vendor decks with enough buzzwords to power a small city. The stock gets a little dopamine hit. Executives get to cosplay as futurists. Somebody gets a bonus for “transformational efficiency.”

Meanwhile the workers become the shock absorber, because in America the only thing allowed to be flexible is labor. Supply chains can’t be flexible. Profit targets can’t be flexible. The CEO’s comp package is forged in the fires of Mount Unbothered. But your job? Origami.

And don’t miss the geometry here: AI is sold as productivity, but the first product is layoffs. The second product is “record margins.” The third product is a LinkedIn post about “hard decisions” written from a house with its own zip code.

If you work anywhere near manufacturing, engineering, ops, or anything that involves the physical world: congrats, you’re now competing with software that doesn’t need health insurance and never asks why the valves are screaming.