Millions More Could Get Overtime, ChatGPT For Business And Mental Health Spending Skyrockets

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This week saw big generative AI news for corporations, as Walmart announced its own AI feature for employees, My Assistant, which will be trained on its corporate information. The GenAI-powered desktop and mobile app is aimed at helping 50,000 employees write faster drafts, summarize documents and generate ideas. Meanwhile, OpenAI launched an enterprise tool for businesses; with the company behind ChatGPT noting that corporations “own and control [their] business data in ChatGPT Enterprise.”

But AI isn’t just disrupting the professional world—it’s also upending education and the edtech market. My colleague Emmy Lucas had a profile this week of entrepreneur Andrew Grauer, who founded Course Hero, an online library of class notes, essays and exam answers, and is now building out parent company Learneo through acquisitions. One of the companies he’s added, AI-powered writing tool QuillBot, has a user base that’s 30% professionals and non-students, “a really huge unlocking moment for us,’’ Grauer told Lucas. For more on what he’s building as well as AI’s impact, check out Emmy’s story here. Hope it’s a great long weekend.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Five-year-old Intenseye, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze workplace images and videos to identify safety issues, is raising new funding that is expected to triple the company’s valuation, Forbes’ David Jeans reported. The venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the Series B round, valuing the workplace safety AI company at approximately $300 million, Jeans reports.

As more companies add positions based on artificial intelligence—including Chief AI Officers—the debate continues on whether AI will create or kill more jobs. Contributor David Armano argues that many of these trendy job titles could also go away, pointing to executives who’ve moved on from jobs leading metaverse projects to those leading generative AI.

POLICY + PRACTICE

On Wednesday, the Department of Labor announced a new rule proposal that would extend overtime protections to millions of salaried workers who make around $55,000 or less, extending the number of people who are eligible due to “outdated and out-of-sync rules,” the department said in a press release.

The IRS, responding to employer pleas, has postponed a new rule requiring older, higher paid 401(k) participants to make their catch-up contributions into after-tax Roth accounts instead of pre-tax traditional accounts. The IRS has postponed that until 2026, Kelly Phillips Erb reports.

HYBRID WORK

The war over work from home versus return to office plans seems like it will never end. But one approach—“flexibility with intentionality”—should end the debate over remote work, writes contributor Sander van ‘t Noordende, the CEO of Randstad.

FACTS + COMMENT

A new study by RAND Corp. and the healthcare company Castlight Health found that Americans’ spending on mental health services during the early years of the pandemic grew significantly.

50%: The percentage by which spending on mental health services leapt in the pandemic’s early years, according to the study.
53.7%: The percentage by which spending on mental health services grew among adults who have private insurance during the same period.
“High levels of psychological distress”: Forty-one percent of U.S. adults said they’d experienced this at some point during the pandemic, a Pew Research Center survey found separately, in March.

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STRATEGIES + ADVICE

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QUIZ

U.S. private employers added far fewer jobs than expected in August, according to an ADP report released Wednesday morning, showing cracks in the labor market. As tracked by ADP, job growth slowed by more than 40% month-over month. How many jobs were added in August?