By Adam Mills
AI Editor
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Editor's note: This is AI Impact, Newsweek's weekly newsletter where each week, we will explore how business leaders are unlocking real value through artificial intelligence.
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Core Intelligence
What Happens When AI Removes the Work From Work?
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AI is compressing how work gets done. Tasks that once took months can now be completed in hours. The more important shift, however, is what happens to the work that remains.
At General Motors, that change is already visible. AI is not replacing the design process so much as collapsing the distance between idea and execution.
“We're really heavily focused on how we can best ride the coming tech wave of AI,” said Bryan Styles, director of design innovation and technology operations at General Motors. Without a clear strategy, he noted, companies risk being “inundated by that coming wave and left behind.”
In practice, the biggest gains are not coming from generating new ideas, but from eliminating the steps that slow them down. Tasks that once required multiple teams working across design, sculpting and visualization can now be handled by a single designer in a matter of hours.
“A year ago, going from a sketch to a short animation like this would have taken multiple teams… several months to do,” said GM designer Dan Shapiro. “And now… a video like this can be done by a single designer in less than a day.”
That kind of compression changes more than timelines. It changes roles.
Designers are no longer just creating assets—they are directing systems. “We've kind of taken on more of the role of art director,” Shapiro said, describing how AI now handles much of the time-intensive production work.
What remains human is not execution, but judgment.
That shift is showing up in how decisions are made. As AI takes on more of the production work, the human role moves toward defining intent, refining outputs and deciding what feels right.
“Changing only a few words in the prompt can shift the entire atmosphere… of the vehicle,” Shapiro said. “That's where human taste and decision making really matter the most.”
For companies, the question is less about adopting AI than about deciding how to use it. Styles emphasized that the goal is not automation for its own sake, but applying AI in ways that create value without losing the human connection at the center of the product.
“We have to keep humans at the center of what we're doing,” he said.
That may be the more important shift. AI is not just making work faster. It is changing where value sits inside the work itself.
For designers at GM, that now means spending less time producing and more time deciding—what a vehicle should look like, how it should feel and whether it reflects the identity of the brand.
“We're still the ones deciding what feels like a Buick, a GMC, a Cadillac and in this case, a Chevy,” Shapiro said.
For business leaders more broadly, the implication is clear. As AI removes friction from workflows, it will also redefine expertise. The advantage will not come from doing the work faster, but from knowing what work is worth doing in the first place.
You can read the full article here: GM Riding the Wave of AI, Focusing on Human-Tech Partnership.
Upcoming Webinars
How Is AI Reshaping Health Care Delivery and Strategy?
Health systems are entering a new phase of transformation as artificial intelligence moves from experimentation into everyday clinical and operational decision-making.
In this edition of Newsweek’s AI Agenda, "How Is AI Reshaping Health Care Delivery and Strategy?", taking place Monday, April 27 at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, Suraj Srinivasan, Harvard Business School professor, sits down with Dr. Tom Mihaljevic, CEO and president of Cleveland Clinic, for a conversation on how one of the world’s leading health organizations is integrating AI into care delivery—and what that shift means for leadership priorities, operational strategy and the future of health care.
Register, for free, right now.
Will Today’s Software Companies Become Tomorrow’s Services Companies?
As artificial intelligence begins to take on more of the tasks traditionally performed by humans, a deeper question is coming into focus: what happens to “work” itself—and who, or what, delivers it?
In this session of Newsweek’s AI Impact Forum, "Will Today’s Software Companies Become Tomorrow’s Services Companies?", taking place April 30 at 11 a.m. Eastern, Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar, host of the series, sits down with Tiger Tyagarajan, former CEO of Genpact and now a senior advisor and board member to technology and services companies, as well as private equity and venture capital firms, for a strategic conversation on how AI is blurring the line between software and services—and what that shift means for business models, competition and the future of work.
Register, for free, right now.
AI Impact Awards & Summit
The Newsweek AI Impact Awards seek to identify and recognize uniquely innovative AI solutions that solve critical business problems in different industry segments, or significantly advance capabilities. Recognition comes not from ideas, but from measurable IMPACT on business operations.
Prompt Injection
What’s one recent insight you’ve learned about AI?
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“AI governance needs to become more nuanced. It will always be important to understand the foundational principles, processes and practices which help to guide the management of AI generally. However, to both maximize the adoption of AI and reduce the potential risk that can come from these systems, it’s important to recognize that AI is not one type of technology. It is a set of technologies applied in many different domains and contexts.
These different applications require more nuanced governance tools to be managed appropriately. This could include domain specific standards and training, adoption of evaluation tools and techniques that are specific to the organization’s use of AI, identifying different roles and organizational functions, etc. Having a more nuanced understanding of how your organization is using AI, and applying context-specific governance techniques will be a significant asset to any organization seeking to deploy AI at scale.
Additionally, given the lack of industry and domain-specific standards, having a skilled professional or team of professionals within your organization to translate general AI governance guidance into an organization’s specific context will become increasingly important.”
Have your own lesson to share? Email us at: ai.newsletter@newsweek.com
Run Log
AI use case of the week
By Adam Mills
The most expensive part of moving freight often happens before it really begins. In the first mile—between ports, factories, trucks and rail yards—cargo can sit idle as systems built for different modes of transport struggle to coordinate with one another.
That bottleneck became the starting point for Glīd Technologies. The company developed a dual approach: Rāden, an autonomous vehicle designed to move between road and rail without relying on terminals, and EZRA-1SIX, an AI platform that coordinates those movements in real time. Instead of analyzing logistics after the fact, the system actively schedules routes, manages handoffs and directs vehicle movement across existing infrastructure as operations unfold.
“AI delivers its highest value not when it analyzes the physical world, but when it commands it,” said Kevin A. Damoa, founder and chief executive officer of Glīd Technologies. “The moment EZRA-1SIX started coordinating real vehicles on real rail, it stopped being software and became operational infrastructure.”
The distinction is operational: the system connects segments of the supply chain directly, rather than optimizing them in isolation. By coordinating vehicles across road and rail, it removes the need for terminals, cranes or manual transfers in the first mile—addressing the handoff problem that has historically limited the use of rail for shorter routes.
According to the company, early deployments point to up to a 40 percent reduction in first-mile logistics costs and as much as a 60 percent increase in throughput. The system is currently advancing toward field pilots in Kansas, California and Texas, where it will operate on live infrastructure with active freight.
In that sense, the system is designed to reduce delays at the point where different parts of the supply chain meet—using real-time coordination to replace processes that have historically relied on manual labor and fixed infrastructure.
Have an AI use case to share with us? Email us at: ai.newsletter@newsweek.com
Context Window
■ Comments by Palantir CEO Alex Karp suggesting that only vocational workers and neurodivergent individuals will thrive in an AI-driven economy have sparked debate online, as workers question how automation will redistribute opportunity across industries. [Newsweek]
■ California is advancing new rules governing how companies can deploy AI in state contracts, signaling how states are continuing to assert control over the technology even as federal officials push for a more centralized approach to regulation. [The Guardian]
■ Oracle is laying off workers while increasing investment in AI infrastructure and data centers, offering a clear example of how companies are reorganizing operations around automation and long-term efficiency gains. [The Wall Street Journal]
■ Rising concern over AI-driven job disruption is emerging as a political flashpoint in the U.S., as policymakers and industry leaders warn that automation could fuel broader economic anxiety and social instability. [The Times]
■ Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is urging younger workers to learn how to use AI tools, framing the technology as a productivity advantage for those who adapt rather than a risk to avoid. [Fortune]
■ Wikipedia has restricted the use of AI-generated content on its platform, allowing it only for limited tasks like copyediting and translation, as editors warn that large language models risk undermining accuracy, sourcing and editorial standards. [Newsweek]
Transfer Protocol
Tracking executive moves across the AI landscape
Lilian Rincon, previously vice president of product management at Google, has been appointed vice president of product marketing for artificial intelligence at Apple, where she will lead product marketing and product management for the company’s AI platforms, including Apple Intelligence and Siri.
Quintus R. Brown, most recently partner development executive at Google Public Sector and previously senior vice president of business development at VERSA Integrated Solutions, has been appointed chief AI officer at VERSA Integrated Solutions, where he will lead the company’s artificial intelligence strategy and development of AI-driven capabilities supporting government clients.
Pierre Houlès, a senior technology leader with experience in global digital transformation and enterprise systems, has been appointed chief digital, AI and IT officer at Kering, where he will join the executive committee and lead the group’s digital and artificial intelligence strategy across its global luxury brands.
Senthil Kumaran, previously chief technology officer at Digital Turbine, has been appointed chief technology officer at CreatorIQ, where he will lead the company’s global engineering organization and expand its AI and data infrastructure as it accelerates its AI-driven product roadmap.
Aman Bhandari, previously vice president of data science and AI at SCAN Health Plan, has been appointed chief artificial intelligence officer at SCAN Group, where he will lead enterprise-wide AI and advanced analytics initiatives as the organization scales responsible AI adoption across healthcare operations and care delivery.
Magic Moment
What’s the most fun or unexpected way you’ve used AI lately?
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"I have always wanted to write more—about women's health, about where medicine is going, about the things my patients ask me that I never have time to fully answer in a 15-minute visit. But finding the right research, the cutting-edge stuff that actually matters, used to take hours I didn’t have.
Now I use AI to help me find it. It surfaces research I would never have stumbled across, connects it to conversations already happening in the field and helps me figure out who is doing work worth paying attention to. I published more in the last few months than I had in the two years before that.
But what really got me was thinking about scale. In women's health, so much depends on whether a patient has a provider who takes her seriously, who knows the latest evidence, who has time to actually listen. Not everyone has access to that. What excites me about this technology is that it starts to close that gap. You bring best-in-class care to people who never had access to it. That is not a feature. That is the whole point."
Experience some AI magic? Tell us about it at ai.newsletter@newsweek.com
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