Built In

After years of decline, software-development postings have started to recover. In the United States and the United Kingdom, software developer vacancies have seen the most growth, showing signs of a “two-speed” market, where some sectors have climbed, others stalled, and almost all of the demand is centered around senior and AI-linked roles.

The arrival of quantum advantage, the point at which a quantum computer outperforms classical systems at commercially useful tasks, is imminent. Estimates indicate that quantum technology represents a potential $2 trillion market opportunity, with 90 percent of that value projected to accrue to early movers. As a result, more than half of major companies expect to integrate quantum capabilities into their workflows within the next two years.

Confession: I overestimated how much AI would simplify the software stack. AI arrived with a familiar promise. Work would become cheaper, faster and simpler. For a while, it felt true. One tool could draft copy, answer questions, summarize meetings or take repetitive admin tasks off someone’s desk. Then came a second model for analysis, a meeting bot, an agent layer, a connector platform and an AI upgrade inside more and more of the software already on the bill.

One in six people with a legal problem are now turning to AI for advice. Entrepreneurs and businesses are likewise becoming increasingly obsessed with legalAI, asking it to help with everything from contracts and compliance policies to licensing requirements. And why wouldn’t they? AI can scan thousands of pages of regulations, compare jurisdictions and produce an answer almost instantly. But what if the answer is technically correct — and still wrong for your business?

A layoff notice hits fast and hard. Most people focus on the severance package, but the equity section is where real surprises tend to happen. And equity decisions come with a hard deadline. Here’s what happens to your stock options and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) when you are laid off, and what you need to do before the window closes. What Happens to Stock Options and RSUs During a Layoff?

Saying something like “I’m a product manager” used to tell people a lot about what you did at work. They would understand that you probably talked to customers, wrote requirements, prioritized a roadmap and coordinated a team. Increasingly, though, your job title is a less complete description of what you do. Today, two people with the same title, like product manager, might have very different skills. One may be great at customer discovery and using AI to speed up research and prototyping.

Something unusual happened in artificial intelligence recently. The people racing hardest to build the world's most powerful AI systems started publicly talking about slowing down — and talking to each other about safety. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for deliberately pacing frontier AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supported stronger independent evaluation, while major AI companies have begun discussing greater coordination around safety standards.

What happens when artificial intelligence systems designed for continuous improvement start to think for themselves, make themselves more powerful and escape human control in their quest to achieve superintelligence? Recursive self-improvement. Recursive self-improvement — the ability of AI systems to build better versions of themselves —has become a growing concern in the AI community since July 2026, when OpenAI’s agents broke out of an isolated testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face.

Every company is becoming a data company, and foundation model labs are the most aggressive buyers. An entirely new, hybrid role for knowledge workers has emerged: the special project lead (SPL). That title is a catch-all for a person who drives and orchestrates experts at scale, ensuring they produce the right kinds of data assets that models train on. Ironically, the process of corralling experts remains bottlenecked by human effort. What Is a Special Project Lead?

A sales leader asks, “What were our top-selling products in the Midwest last quarter?”An AI system translates the question into SQL, queries governed data and returns a chart. The experience feels intelligent, but it is not necessarily agentic. It may simply be a well-designed prompt connected to trusted data and tools.