AI eliminates entry-level jobs

So this story has a DEI element of focus because it doesn't take you 252 editions of this newsletter to work our who is most likely to be adversely impacted disproportionately because of this.

Data from salary benchmarking platform Ravio showed us that European tech companies are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to handle the tasks of entry-level roles.

Shockingly, hiring rates for those entry level jobs in the field are down 73.4% compared to 2024 levels against a 7.4% overall hiring slowdown. The trend is not limited to Europe or the tech industry. Employment prospects for graduates in the US have "deteriorated noticeably", writes The New York Times, with unemployment among recent graduates particularly acute in finance and computer science. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, recently warned that the technology could soon eliminate half of all entry-level office jobs.

You can read more above but the wave isn't just coming, its here

🏳️‍🌈 Corporate Allyship Gets... Quieter?

For those wondering if the US administrations Anti DEI stance has an impact here, well the Telegraph helpd inform us 

It’s Pride Month—but you might not know it if you’re scrolling through LinkedIn.

A number of the UK’s biggest law firms—Ashurst, Baker McKenzie, DLA Piper, Freshfields and Linklaters—have quietly ditched the rainbow logos this year. These same firms had previously gone big on Pride branding, but this time around, the rainbow has mysteriously vanished from both LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter).

What’s changed? Well, all of these firms have major US operations, and with the political winds shifting across the Atlantic, some suspect a ripple effect—one where “celebration” is replaced with caution.

They’re not alone. PwC also skipped the Pride logo update this year, having participated last year. KPMG only updated their profile pic after being asked about it by The Telegraph (we’ve all been there). Meanwhile, EY and Deloitte didn’t touch theirs at all.

In fairness, a few firms did do something: Freshfields went with rainbow stairs in their LinkedIn banner (subtle!), and Linklaters is apparently lighting up its London HQ in rainbow colours—like a skyscraper-sized .... (You fill in that gap)

Baker McKenzie insists they’re spotlighting inclusion in other ways. Slaughter & May is currently the only Magic Circle firm still flying the rainbow flag visibly on social.

But the broader trend is clear: Pride is starting to feel like a riskier brand association for some. As global politics shift, so too does the volume on corporate allyship.

🔍 Something to think about: Is visible support only safe when it’s easy?

Thanks to the telegraph from which this was sourced 

👀Whatsapp ads 👀 

In a move that would have the platform’s founders rolling in their (encrypted) graves (They're not dead though), Meta is finally slapping ads on WhatsApp — starting with its Stories-esque “Status” tab. That’s right: the last clean, relatively unmonetised corner of the Meta empire is getting its own little billboard😅

Meta promises it won’t touch your chats, but it will use your location, language, followed channels, and how you interact with its ad empire to “tailor” what you see. Very reassuring.

The company insists this won’t “interrupt your personal chats” — because nothing says privacy-first like being softly profiled based on which meme channel you follow😑

After years of resisting the ad model (remember “No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”?), WhatsApp is now rolling out sponsored content in its “Status” feature — the Stories-like tab used by over 1.5 billion people daily. 📲

Meta is pitching this as a win for small businesses. But it’s also about economics: with WhatsApp still largely ad-free, it’s one of the last untapped surfaces for Meta’s $160B-a-year ad machine. The company wants to monetise the 200 million businesses using the platform — and make the world’s most popular messaging app pay its way🏧

Read more here

💡 So What?

Privacy: Meta says it won’t read your messages — but it’s appears that it is quietly inching toward the same “Pay or Okay” model it uses on Facebook and Instagram in the EU, where “free” means handing over your data and saying no to tracking might cost you a tenner a month. 

Of course that is dependent on regulators actually doing something   Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act and GDPR, consent for personalised ads must be freely given — not extorted via a subscription fee. So far, enforcement has been minimal, and given the geopolitics we're doubtful it will ramp up anytime soon.

And While the EU umms about enforcement, the UK seems barely involved in the conversation although they may look to the US government's favourite,  Signal,  (remember that from such leaks as, "it was only me telling war plans to my my wife and my brother", and "somehow a journalist entered the chat") runs a global encrypted messaging service on $50M a year from a donation model with — no ads, or targeting.

👷🏿Blame the hotels👷🏿

Airbnb wants you to know it’s not to blame for Europe’s overtourism problem. It’s the hotels, it claims😂

That’s the latest from Airbnb’s public policy VP, Theo Yedinsky, who insisted in the Financial Times that his platform is the victim of unfair scapegoating from protestors, politicians, and entire southern European cities where angry locals are (literally) spraying tourists with water guns. Airbnb, he argues, accounts for just a slice of overnight stays, and it’s hotels that are the true culprits clogging cities and inflating rents.

🧮 The data:

• Airbnb-style short lets surged by 57 million nights year-on-year in 2024 — almost double the growth rate of hotels. There are around 10% more tourist than 2019

• 63% of overnight visitors may still stay in hotels, but Airbnb’s footprint is woven into residential neighbourhoods — not confined to hotel zones.

• Meanwhile, in cities like Barcelona, rents are up 60% in a decade. Airbnb claims listings are down, but officials just ordered 66,000 illegal listings removed from its platform. That’s not exactly negligible.

🌍 Across Europe, a backlash is brewing:

• Lisbon: paused new short-let licences

• Greece: banned Airbnb registrations in Athens for a year

• Barcelona: protests with signs like “Tourists go home” and “Your holiday, my misery”

• Venice, Palma, Amsterdam: similar chaos brewing in narrow alleyways and inflated rental markets

📣 Airbnb’s C-suite, including CEO Brian Chesky, insists this is all the result of “bad housing policy” and cities not building enough. He even called Airbnb “a convenient scapegoat” for the housing crisis — conveniently forgetting that short lets often outbid locals and reduce housing stock. Try telling a family in Naples that it’s just a zoning issue when their rent doubles overnight because their landlord discovered tourists will pay 3x more for a weekend.

🛎️ Meanwhile, rivals like Tui and hotel lobbies have hit back:

“The issue is not tourism per se – it’s unbalanced tourism,” says Europe’s hotel industry.
“It’s not scapegoating. It’s basic math,” adds Tui.
“Short-term lets drive up prices. Full stop.”

📉 So what?

• This isn’t just a Mediterranean drama. UK cities like London, Manchester, and Edinburgh face eerily similar tensions: rising rents, hollowed-out neighbourhoods, and local councils struggling to regulate.

• Airbnb is pushing “modern regulations”, but when nearly every southern European capital starts capping your listings, maybe the model is part of the problem.

• The platform wants to be both a tech disruptor and a community partner. But it can’t cherry-pick its responsibilities — not when even the Spanish Minister for Consumer Affairs is invoking the constitutional right to housing.

🧵 What’s next? A regulatory showdown seems inevitable. EU regulators are starting to align, and UK councils may follow suit — particularly with a general election looming and housing affordability top of the agenda.

👷🏿Meta's big buy👷🏿

Meta bets $15 billion on Scale AI to secure data, talent and relevance in the post-LLM gold rush. Yep

Meta is shelling out $15 billion in cash — yes, cash — for a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI, a company you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re deep in the AI supply chain. But you have used its outputs: Scale manages a global army of over 100,000 contractors labelling data that fuels AI models across the entire industry. That includes Meta’s rivals. Or at least, it did💸

To put this deal in context:

• Meta bought WhatsApp for ~$20B in 2014 — a winner-takes-all play on social messaging.

• This? It’s under 1% of Meta’s current market cap and more about insurance than ambition.

• Meta’s also burning $65B this year on data centres and spent ~$100B on VR since buying Oculus, with not much to show for it.

Meta was early in waving the open-source flag for LLMs, Enter: Scale AI — and its 28-year-old wunderkind CEO Alexandr Wang, who’s joining Meta’s new mystery lab.😯

If Meta has the data LLMs are the new data centres, Scale is the pipeline, tagging, refining and preparing the datasets that train everyone’s models — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and yes, Meta.👀

Which raises… a lot of questions:

• Will Google and OpenAI still be happy buying labelled data from a Meta-backed company?

• Will Scale slowly pivot to become Meta’s in-house engine (and if so, what’s the point of not just acquiring it)?

• And how long before regulators raise eyebrows over one of the world’s biggest platforms embedding itself this deep into the AI stack?

Meta says Scale will remain “independent” and serve everyone. But let’s be honest — that kind of corporate polyamory rarely ends well. We have an interesting entanglement between Microsoft and Open AI remember😅

📎 More on the deal via Axios
📎 The Official statement

Oh and this comes in the week where Some of Meta's Execs are joining the US reserve army (curiously not long after Meta won some big Defence contracts). We wouldn't dare speculate, but some may posit there is more than meets the eye than pure patriotism🇺🇸 

📉 So what?

This isn’t a moonshot — it’s a hedge. A way to lock in a crucial upstream AI partner, scoop up talent, and stop falling behind. Scale gives Meta:

• Access to cleaner training data, as web data quality plummets.

• First dibs on a critical bottleneck in AI development.

• A founder-operator (Wang) with credibility in both enterprise and ML research.

But it also suggests Meta is struggling to win on product alone. Perhaps there is no moat in models. So in that case it appears to do wha any Big Tech firm does when moats are shallow — buy the tools everyone else needs.

And for Scale? It gets Meta’s money, clout, and maybe long-term survivability in an increasingly consolidated AI economy. The deal may mean fewer customers and more political heat, but also a war chest and a guaranteed seat at the big table.

🧠 AI for the Many, Not the Few? Big Tech Joins UK’s Ambitious Upskilling Plan

The UK’s tech giants and ministers launch an AI upskilling plan — but the timeline’s slow, the details are fuzzy, and the real workforce transformation remains TBD.😥

This week, the UK government brought Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and others around the table to announce that 7.5 million workers will be trained in AI skills by 2030. That’s roughly a fifth of the UK workforce, in a push to boost productivity, prep people for the AI revolution, and help the PM’s Plan for Change finally start looking like a plan.

The headlines are splashy. Microsoft’s pledged to upskill 1 million workers by year-end, IBM and Sage are rolling out learning platforms, and Salesforce is tossing in a $2.35 million digital literacy fund💰

💬 Peter Kyle, new Tech Secretary, says:

“AI is the new economic frontier… we want to get Brits ready for the jobs of the future.”

🧑‍🏫 So what’s the plan?

• Microsoft’s already pledged to upskill 1 million UK workers in 2024.

• Amazon and Salesforce are pushing their free training platforms and funding AI literacy orgs.

• IBM and Sage are chipping in with tailored AI training resources.

• The goal: create a digitally fluent, AI-literate workforce ready to drive productivity, prosperity, and — let’s not forget — profits.

🚩 The small print they’d rather you skip:

• 2030? ChatGPT didn’t even exist 5 years ago. Entire job categories are being reshaped in real time — and we’re giving ourselves five more years just to get basic training in place? That's not transformation. That’s delay-as-strategy.

• What does “AI skills” actually mean? There’s a lot of language like “confidence with AI” and “targeted modules,” but is this prompt engineering? Data literacy? Or another LinkedIn learning badge? The curriculum is still a mystery.

• Who’s being trained? Is it baristas and warehouse workers? Or just middle managers and digital teams who were always going to get training anyway? No clarity and the stats look like 4/5ths of people aren't even getting it

• What’s the ROI? There are vague projections — “£400bn economic boost,” “double growth” — but no real breakdown of how or where this actually benefits workers, especially those at risk of AI displacement.

Despite the PR fanfare, some of the biggest names in AI were nowhere to be seen. Meta? Nvidia? Apple? Tesla? All absent from the sign-on sheet. That’s a bit like planning a moon landing without inviting NASA😣

And let’s be honest — this was also a win for corporate affairs teams. Everyone gets a government-endorsed press quote, a warm PR glow, and photo ops with Peter Kyle. Actual delivery? To be confirmed.😒

🔗 Gov press release here, if you fancy the official spin

💡 So What?

This could be a positive step if it’s urgent, inclusive, and outcomes-driven. But right now, it reads like a white-collar AI charm offensive with a suspiciously long lead time.

If the government is serious about building an AI-skilled workforce, it needs to move faster, go deeper, and be a lot clearer on who’s getting what — before this all becomes another comms-led strategy with no backend.

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

• Mistral's reasoning model

📏Design📏 

• Apple's new software design

• CSS only glitch effect
  

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

• How I code with AI agents

• A look at CloudFlare’s AI-coded OAuth library
  

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• LLM's are cheap?

DOJO!

Tap into tech with our In-Person Recruitment Event in London with Dojo

On Jul 16th, Dojo is collaborating with Colorintech to host an exciting in-person recruitment event, Tap into Tech: Discover your next Technical Role with Dojo.

They’re currently focused on hiring for a range of technical mid-level and above roles (3+ years experience). This includes: 

Software Engineers

Product Managers

Data Engineers

This is your opportunity to meet and network with the wonderful team at Dojo including the recruitment team who are happy to answer your questions, whilst enjoying some tasty food and drink. 

Check out the key details below: 

Date: Wednesday 16th July

Time: 18:30 - 21:30

Where: London

As this event has limited spaces, we'll need you to register your interest to attend using our application form below: 

https://form.typeform.com/to/nj2FU475 

After applying, I will reach out to you if Dojo has chosen you to attend the event and will provide you with the next steps! Please note, filling out the form does not guarantee you a space at the event.

Canva

Design company Canva are launching Rise, specifically for start ups and scale ups. It's designed to help ambitious high-growth companies rise through smarter branding, engaging content and sharper communication. All sessions will be hosted in our London office, in Shoreditch. 

Here is the link as you are one of the first to know

HSBC opportunities 

HSBC is partnering with Project Nemo to launch a training programme designed to embed accessibility into every stage of product development, from UX to QA and everything in between.

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all webinar. It’s role-based, hands-on, and led by digital accessibility experts who understand your day-to-day.

Whether you’re a web developer, content author, QA tester, or product manager, you’ll leave with practical skills to build better, more inclusive digital experiences, without the guesswork.

Find out more about each of the sessions and sign up here: https://grp.hsbc/6048NpEOE

A case study

In April 2024, Colorintech and Captify joined forces to collaborate on a fantastic event where we gathered a group of Colorintech community members to network and provide insights on careers in sales, engineering, data and product! It was truly a great evening!

Now, we're pleased to celebrate that one of our wonderful community member's Robert Onuma has joined the Captify Insights team as a Junior Insights Analyst and has successfully passed probation.  
This just goes to show the power of networking and connecting at events! 
Shout out to the awesome Captify team involved in making the event happen Sabrina, Abbie, Baltej, Roksolana and our Community and Events Lead, Catherine, for supporting them along the way!

Natwest are engaging

NatWest is committed to breaking down barriers to enterprise for Ethnic Minority owned businesses. As part of this, they're hosting a series of exclusive roundtables to mark Windrush Anniversary and South Asian Heritage Month.

These roundtables aim to foster honest conversations about building an equitable environment for businesses and individuals across the UK to thrive. Each event will bring together 10-15 NatWest colleagues, business support organizations, and community representatives to build bridges and explore collaboration opportunities.

Windrush roundtables

Join the conversation if you are of Caribbean heritage, an entrepreneur, or represent an organization supporting Caribbean business communities.

• London: 25th June 2025, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM at NatWest 250 Bishopsgate
• Bristol: 26th June 2025, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM at NatWest Bristol, Temple Quay

South Asian Heritage Month Roundtable

This session is for individuals of South Asian heritage, entrepreneurs, or organizations supporting South Asian business communities.

• Manchester: 17th July 2025, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM at a venue in Manchester (TBC)

To register your attendance for any of these events, please Send Blessing an email to this email by 5:00 PM on 20th June 2025!

😃What we are consuming😃

📲Bluesky backlash

🪖Silicon Valley Execs join the army

🎬Disney and Universal sue AI firm Midjourney over images

🧬23&me's Founder and former CEO buys it back

💸UK Black Founded Legal tech platform Definely raises $30M Series B to make contract reviewing more efficient