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Hey
I think the tech ecosystem has that summer feeling too given how slow the news has been this week😅
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Check out the AI Podcast version of this newsletter.
This newsletter is free, but if you do want to get us a ray of spring sunshine dressed up as a treat to celebrate 250 + editions of this for our effort, an grab us one here🎁
Oh and if you missed an edition, you can find it here or this platform, here |
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🗞️Diversity and inclusion news🗞️ |
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🎯 Is “Performance-First” the Future of DEI?🎯
In an era where formal DEI programmes are under political fire and budgets are shrinking, a new piece in Harvard Business Review makes the case that you might not need a “DEI department” to achieve better diversity. The trick? Bake equity into how you manage everyone — not just the “high potentials.”
👉 Read the full piece (Harvard Business Review)
📈 What’s the big idea?
Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev crunched data from 800 firms and found that classic “high-performance” management tools — like skills training, predictable schedules, or structured mentoring — quietly deliver stronger diversity results than many box-ticking DEI trainings do.
Why? Because they reach all employees, not just the ones you’re worried about “fixing.”
🗝️ Five proof points:
✔️ Oracle: Adding formal referral programmes boosted diversity because they empowered non-white staff to bring in their networks. Result: a 5% bump in Black, Hispanic, and Asian managers — even more when paired with employee groups.
✔️ Walmart: Its retail training “Academy” gave frontline workers clear career paths. People of colour in management rose from 31% to 43% in eight years — and women execs increased too, despite a shrinking overall female workforce.
✔️ IBM: Massive mentoring schemes — from “Dear Mentor” apps to cross-site cafes — kept women and people of colour in the talent pipeline. Mentoring raised management diversity in high-skill sectors by 15%+ over time.
✔️ Gap: Predictable, flexible schedules gave workers stability. Retail sales jumped 7% — and the percentage of store managers of colour nearly doubled, from 25% to 49% in five years.
✔️ Amazon: Its “performance-first” layoffs avoided the classic “last in, first out” bias that wipes out diverse new hires. Instead, performance-based cuts kept the workforce — and its diversity — intact during mass redundancies.
⚡️ So what?
For companies scared of a political or legal DEI backlash — or just tired of programmes with zero impact — this is real talk: fix management systems, not just people.
Key lesson: Equity that’s embedded in how you hire, train, mentor, schedule, and promote is harder to kill off when budgets or politics shift.
📚 If you’re a founder, people leader or VC wondering how to build resilience into your inclusion work — these models show what to do.
👉 Read the HBR deep-dive for the full stats, or try the book: Getting to Diversity by Dobbin & Kalev. |
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🧠Things that make you go hmmm🧠 |
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💼 Microsoft Cuts 9,000 More Jobs — And Suggests Using AI to Cope 😬
Another week, another brutal big tech layoff: Microsoft is axing around 9,000 jobs globally, targeting teams from gaming (Xbox) to country ops — its biggest round since the 10,000 cuts back in 2023.
The official line? “Organisational changes” and “positioning the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.” Translation: leaner teams, more offshoring, and an ever-bigger bet on AI. Just last month Microsoft said it would spend $80 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone.
But what really raised eyebrows was the advice to sacked workers. An Xbox exec, in a now-deleted LinkedIn post, suggested that people who’d just lost their jobs should lean on Microsoft’s own AI tools — like CoPilot or ChatGPT — for emotional clarity, job hunting prompts and, yes, “grief counselling”.
“No AI tool is a replacement for your voice or your lived experience… but these tools can help get you unstuck faster, calmer, and with more clarity.”
— Matt Turnbull, Xbox exec (Aftermath screenshot)
The irony wasn’t lost on gaming fans, with posts calling the advice “one of the most tone-deaf and cruelest things” they’d ever read. It’s a reminder that behind every glossy AI pitch, there are real people facing the fallout — and a very human cost.
🔍 So What?
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Microsoft’s total workforce is down by thousands this year alone, even as its AI spend skyrockets (The Independent).
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The gaming division is one of the hardest hit — despite record profits from the sector (Mashable).
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The push to automate and streamline isn’t unique to Microsoft — it’s the same playbook across big tech.
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For laid-off talent, there’s something pretty dystopian about being told: “We replaced you with AI. Now go talk to AI about your feelings.”
🤖 The bigger question:
As AI investments balloon and mass layoffs become the “new normal”, who’s really picking up the pieces for workers? And are these tools helping people bounce back — or just helping companies dodge anything to do for the human side of “efficiency”?
👉 Read more:
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📰The internet is changing📰
A new Similarweb report shows the uncomfortable truth about AI’s impact on the news business: yes, referrals from ChatGPT to news sites have grown 25x since early 2024 — but it’s nowhere near enough to offset the huge loss in organic search traffic as people get their news straight from AI.
👉 Read the full TechCrunch piece
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In May 2024, 56% of news searches resulted in zero clicks to publishers. By May 2025, that jumped to 69% — thanks to AI Overviews and chat-style answers.
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Organic news traffic has fallen from 2.3 billion visits at its peak to under 1.7 billion.
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ChatGPT news-related prompts are up 212%, but the extra 25M clicks it’s sending out is a drop in the bucket compared to what publishers are losing.
🚦 Who’s winning & losing?
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Reuters, NY Post, and Business Insider have seen ChatGPT referrals grow 6–9%, but even that doesn’t fully replace lost SEO clicks.
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The New York Times — which is suing OpenAI for scraping — is in the top 10 for ChatGPT referrals but saw only a 3% bump.
Topics seeing the biggest AI boost: stocks, finance, sports — but “deeper issue-driven” queries like politics and the economy are rising too.
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Visibility ≠ clicks: Classic SEO tactics matter less if Google’s AI answers or ChatGPT just “tell you the gist” instead of sending you to the source.
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Micropayments & offerwalls: Google’s scrambling to help publishers monetise with new experiments like Offerwall — letting you sell pay-per-article access or push sign-ups. But it’s early days.
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Layoffs & shutdowns: Many smaller outlets can’t adapt fast enough. Altman himself admitted recently: “Some jobs, maybe whole categories, will go away. It’s going to be real pain.”
📉 So what?
Its actually deep.
The birth and boom of the internet saw the democratization of news and information. You didn't just need access to a newspaper editor anymore; suddenly, anyone could be a publisher. And with social media, anyone could be a journalist.
Now, though, in this new AI-driven world, we're seeing that vision shift. Access to information is retreating back towards a few channels and pipes. If you can only find news and information from GPT, Grok, Gemini, and the like, smaller publishers get squeezed out. They get even fewer levels of organic traffic, and with that, advertising dollars. You end up with fewer outlets and independent sources as these big players sweep up what's left of the market share in a shrinking market. Then, you have access to information controlled by an ever-smaller, dwindling elite.
For newsrooms — and honestly, any business relying on search — AI is the new aggregator. The “zero-click” internet is here, whether we like it or not.
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If you’re building AI tools: you’re now part of the value chain and the drain.
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If you’re a brand: you’ll want to know exactly where and how you show up in AI answers —
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If you’re a reader: you might think you’re getting the “news” in a chat, but someone still needs to write it. Who pays for that when the clicks dry up?
👉 Dig into Similarweb’s full report for the data.
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📰The 0.001%📰
Big Tech’s AI pay bubble is turning the talent gap into a talent canyon — and it matters for anyone who cares about access, inclusion, and the next generation of diverse builders.
📈 What’s happening?
Meta is reportedly offering up to $300 million over four years to a handful of top OpenAI and DeepMind researchers for its new “Superintelligence Lab.”
Meanwhile, Sam Altman says some OpenAI folks have been offered $100 million signing bonuses to defect.
Insiders say these “Shohei Ohtani salaries” are creating an elite AI class — while the rest of the industry trims costs and cuts thousands of roles.
🪓 Who’s paying the price?
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Microsoft just laid off another 9,000 people, bringing its total cuts to 15,000 this year alone — part of a wave that’s seen 600,000 tech workers lose jobs since 2022.
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Rank-and-file engineers are being told to “do more with less” as billions are poured into compute, GPUs and superstar salaries.
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New grads and entry-level talent are being squeezed out, with some worried this “elite poaching” leaves no clear path to grow the next generation of senior engineers.
⚖️ Why does this matter for equity?
When the career ladder collapses behind these big AI bets, underrepresented talent — women, Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, disabled, working-class — will feel it first.
Don't say you weren't warned
🔗 Read more: Business Insider: Silicon Valley’s winner-take-all era
📉 So what?
When companies throw nine-figure offers at the top 0.1% of AI researchers, they’re betting the farm on breakthroughs that only a handful of people can deliver. But if the rest of the workforce — especially early-career, diverse talent — can’t get meaningful pathways to grow into those roles, we risk ending up with an AI economy that’s powerful, but built by the same small circle over and over again.
The real danger isn’t the giant salaries — it’s that they paper over the fact that the next generation of AI builders, founders and policymakers can’t get in the room to shape what this technology does.
“AI literacy” is probably not enough. Real investment in skills, apprenticeships, and equitable ladders that don’t vanish the moment Big Tech tightens its belt needs to be on the table
We need early-career and diverse talent to see AI as a viable path — not a locked clubhouse.
And we need the AI boom to spark a broad, sustainable ecosystem — not another bubble that leaves most people on the outside looking in.
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📈 The tools behind the tech📉
📦Product📦
📏Design📏
👩🏿💻Code👩🏿💻
🏢The business behind the tech🏢
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🌐Partner Events & Opportunties 🌐 |
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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.
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🙌Summer time!🙌
Interested in a night of career insights, rooftop networking, and games with the Colorintech Community
On Thursday 24th July, Colorintech is teaming up with Samsara for a night of insightful conversations on careers and progression at companies of all sizes, live music and even a ping pong tournament!
In our last two community surveys, we've seen an increasing desire for talks about what it’s like to work at startups and scaleups as well as corporates…
Now we’re making it happen.
Our beachside chat aims to tackle this topic by asking:
What's it like to adapt and thrive in different company phases;
What are the benefits and challenges to a career focused on any of these stages;
How do you know which option may be a good choice for you.
To answer these topics, we have an inspiring set of panellists including:
Adnan Omar: Chief Content Officer at PRYNTD
Munaaf Ghumran: Enterprise Sales Engineering EMEA @ Samsara
Nyasha Duri: AI Security Researcher at Apart Research
Pearlé Nwaezeigwe: Strategic Marketing Consultant @ Wae Collective
As it’s the start of summer, we plan to bring the good summer vibes on Samsara's wonderful rooftop - let's hope the weather is warm and bright! So we’ve planned:
Live Music,
Activities like a Ping Pong tournament,
Rooftop drinks!
Whether you’re a seasoned professional, early in your career, or a founder thinking about hiring, this is a fantastic opportunity to connect with our wonderful Colorintech community, including our friends at Samsara!
Check out the key details below:
Date: 24th July 2025
Time: 18:00 - 21:30 BST
Where: London, E1
As this event has limited spaces, we'll need you to sign up using our Luma Link below:
https://lu.ma/Ascent-of-Work
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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!
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🙌🏾The latest from the Colorintech team🙌🏾 |
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