Anthropic examined what might happen when AI and robots are combined.
That could put more hands-on jobs, including gardening, in the path of automation, Anthropic warned.
I'm skeptical that robots can handle the messy reality of pulling weeds.
Remember when Anthropic's AI jobs report suggested gardeners were among the safest workers because AI couldn't pull weeds or tell a rose from a dandelion? I joked about that in AI Insider earlier this year.
This time it asks a bigger question: What happens when you combine AI with robots? That change pushes many hands-on jobs much higher on the disruption scale. On paper, it makes sense. In practice, I'm skeptical.
For instance, anyone who's spent time working in a garden knows how hard it is to identify the right plant, kneel in awkward spots, and pull a weed out properly by the roots without damaging everything around it.
Robots are improving. But if you've ever watched one tackle a messy real-world task, you'll know there's a long road between a research chart and reality.
The chart below illustrates how adding robots could change job-task exposure across selected job categories. Cleaning & maintenance includes gardeners along with janitors and similar roles.
Attendees chat at Anthropic's developer conference in May.
Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic
Anthropic published new surveys comparing its staffers' sentiments to those of US workers.
The AI startup's employees expect the tech to change work and the economy far more dramatically.
Most Anthropic employees guessed that unemployment would top 12% in 2030.
Anthropic employees believe that AI will make their labor obsolete. Most US workers don't see their jobs that way at all.
The AI company published research on Friday that compares surveys with US adults against an internal poll of 1,334 Anthropic employees. Most of the Anthropic staffers said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030, while only about 5% of the US workers felt the same.
The research, titled "The AI expectations gap," shows the chasm between how the employees at the AI startup feel and how other American adults feel. Anthropic workers are far more optimistic about the progress of AI capabilities, how much it's already saving time, and how fast the economy will grow.
The median Anthropic employee said that by the end of 2030, they expect AI to handle 95% of the work of building a new AI model.
Peter McCrory, Anthropic's chief economist, wrote on X that the views might help outsiders prepare for more capable AI systems.
"We're publishing this research because Anthropic runs roughly a year and a half ahead of the economy on AI adoption, so what happens at Anthropic could be a leading indicator for the broader world," he said.
Anthropic workers expect higher unemployment and extreme GDP growth
Anthropic's surveys examined how workers already use AI and how they think it will change.
"US adults and Anthropic staff largely agree about what AI can do today," the researchers wrote. "However, they disagree about how quickly it will improve, how widely it will be used, and how large the productivity gains measured by time saved will be."
There are a few possible explanations for the discrepancies. Anthropic employees have larger budgets for the tools and often get access to unreleased models. US workers, on average, are more likely to work with their hands or in a service industry.
The researchers found that workers in manual trades, production, and transport thought AI would handle the least of their work by 2030, compared with Anthropic staffers, tech workers, and respondents in business and finance.
Most Anthropic employees surveyed said that they expect the unemployment rate to top 12% in 2030. The majority of the US workers thought it would hover around or under 8%. It's currently 4.2%.
So far, researchers have found mixed evidence on AI disrupting the job market — a Yale team recently found it had mainly changed jobs, and had "no connection" to changes in unemployment.
The Anthropic researchers also compiled survey responses to estimate predictions on economic growth. Based on their answers, the median US adult's guess for GDP growth in 2030 was 5.4%, compared with 17.1% among Anthropic employees. The country's GDP grew by 2.2% last year.
Anthropic's staffers are following their leader
Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has become one of the industry's most closely watched voices on labor upheaval. In March of 2025, he said he expected AI to write 90% of code within 6 months, and "essentially all of the code" within the year. He made more headlines that May, telling Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and lift unemployment to 10% or 20%.
Amodei expanded on that claim in a later essay, writing that he expects AI to be different from prior technological changes. He wrote that he expects an "unprecedented" short-term shock to labor, and that the economy will grow dramatically.
"AI isn't a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans," he wrote.
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Nvidia's communications operation has been reshaped as the company became the face of the AI boom.
Roughly 15 staffers have left the lean team since 2025 as Nvidia reorganized its communications org.
Former employees described growing workloads as responsibilities expanded.
Nvidia's communications organization has been reshaped as the company became the face of the AI boom, with multiple teams brought under new leadership and a string of departures.
Business Insider identified roughly 15 communications employees who have left Nvidia since 2025, based on LinkedIn profiles and interviews with former employees.
The organization now numbers roughly 70 to 80 people globally, and has more than doubled in size since Mylene Mangalindan joined as vice president of corporate communications in 2023, according to a person close to the company.
The departures have also included newer hires. Anna Soellner, who was recruited to lead corporate communications, left after roughly four months, Business Insider previously reported.
Nvidia is known for high retention. It reported companywide turnover of 3.7% in fiscal 2026, up from 2.5% the prior year, and well below the tech industry average of 21.9% cited in its latest sustainability report.
Mangalindan succeeded longtime communications chief Bob Sherbin, who retired in 2024. She previously worked at the advisory firm Brunswick Group.
She was brought in to "bring fresh blood" and "upgrade the team" to meet Nvidia's growing profile, one former employee said.
At the end of 2024, Nvidia restructured its communications organization. It brought enterprise public relations under Mangalindan's leadership alongside the corporate communications team she already led, according to two former employees.
Corporate communications focuses on Nvidia's reputation and major media outlets, while enterprise handles product and industry messaging,including for its data center business.
One former employee said the consolidation reflected the growing importance of Nvidia's data center business, which sells chips and systems that power AI and had become its biggest revenue driver.
Analyst relations, social media, and influencer marketing also moved under Mangalindan's remit this year, another former employee said.
Three former employees said Nvidia's communications team had long operated with relatively lean staffing, even as workloads grew alongside the company's public profile, leaving staff juggling multiple responsibilities.
These employees said they experienced long hours, difficulty taking time off, and pressure to respond quickly to emails and Slack messages.
A person close to Nvidia said the company's lean staffing allows employees to move quickly and also requires long hours. The person said Mangalindan encourages staff to take vacation, though the team's small size can make scheduling time off difficult, particularly in the summer.
Nvidia is widely known for its demanding work environment. CEO Jensen Huang has emphasized operating at the "speed of light" and is known for fostering a culture of constant accountability.
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Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro plans to hire employees from Character.AI, where new tech chief Karandeep Anand worked.
Taylor Hill/FilmMagic; Manaure Quintero / AFP via Getty Images
Disney plans to pay $60 million to hire 66 employees from Character.AI, which filed for bankruptcy.
Former Character.AI Karandeep Anand is Disney's new chief technology officer.
CEO Josh D'Amaro's company laid off tech staffers in September in its third round of cuts this year.
Disney is paying up for employees from an AI chatbot startup that filed for bankruptcy, shortly after trimming its own tech workforce.
The Mouse House plans to pay $60 million per year to 66 workers from Character.AI, according to a Chapter 11 filing on Tuesday from its parent company. In mid-September, Disney hired Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand to be its first-ever company-wide tech chief. (The company hasn't yet disclosed how much it's paying Anand.)
These additions are part of Disney's AI strategy under CEO Josh D'Amaro, who's been investing in the media giant's tech platforms to help jumpstart a stagnant stock that's up less than 2% in the last 12 months and is down over 36% in the last five years.
Disney's decision to bring in these Character.AI staffers came two weeks after it laid off several hundred workers — including some tech employees. The late-September cuts were Disney's third major round of layoffs since D'Amaro took over in mid-March.
In addition to the $60 million in compensation, Disney is setting aside an additional $30 million for an "aggregate retention pool" to incentivize Character.AI employees to stay. The company expects to spend $180 million on "total compensation and retention" for these staffers in the next three years, the filing said.
Of the 66 Character.AI staffers who were offered jobs by Disney, 56 have already resigned from the AI startup, while the other 10 are waiting for the US government to update their work visas.
Entertainment lawyer Corey Martin of Granderson Des Rochers, who advises companies on media transactions, said he's not surprised by those pay figures since Character.AI's employees are its biggest asset.
"They're highly compensated employees. The numbers can be eye-popping, but it's not that unusual in this space," said Martin, who didn't work on the deal or with Disney.
Disney also agreed to pay $20 million for Character.AI's key assets, including some of its IP and tech. Other companies can submit competing bids for the assets by November 20. The entire process will be overseen by a bankruptcy court judge. Disney didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.
Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Character.AI last fall, telling it not to create AI chatbots featuring its copyrighted characters without permission. Character.AI complied, removing chatbots with characters from Disney franchises like Star Wars and Marvel.
In its bankruptcy announcement, Character.AI said that it had been facing "significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds."
Anand told Disney employees in a memo last Friday that the Mouse House was "uniquely positioned to win" in a competitive media business that he said was "at an inflection point." The tech chief also said he enjoyed meeting his new colleagues and looked forward to working with them.
"What stands out most is the talent and care this team puts into its work, the craft Disney has perfected, and the strong foundation you've built," Anand said.
Khaby Lame has been pursuing other partnerships as his big payday remains in question.
Simon Galloway/LAT Images
Khaby Lame's splashy $975 million deal is still on ice nine months after it was announced.
Lame's plan to merge his business with a publicly traded firm was celebrated by creator economy insiders.
The public company's stock price has fallen 99% since its January high.
A new financial filing provides fresh details — and more questions — about a mysterious $975 million deal struck by TikTok's top star, Khaby Lame.
On January 9, Lame — who has over 160 million followers — entered into an agreement that would theoretically net him a major payday and take his company public. The mechanism: a merger with the publicly traded Rich Sparkle Holdings, a financial printing firm based in Hong Kong.
Then, in late January, Lame went silent on the merger. Now, we have an update: the deal is still on ice. A Rich Sparkle financial filing on September 30, its first since March, described the deal as conditional on a due diligence process, a minimum valuation of Lame's company, and stock exchange approval. That's the same language that has appeared in previous filings.
While the deal has been in limbo, Rich Sparkle's stock has plummeted 99% from its peak. In the wake of the announcement of the deal with Lame's company in January, the stock shot up to a high of about $180. On Thursday, it closed at $1.93. Several prominent brokerages had restricted or blocked trading in the stock, Business Insider exclusively reported in April.
The original deal announcement was celebrated throughout the creator economy, since such rich valuations are rare among influencer-founded companies, and it would give everyday investors an unusual opportunity to directly bet on a creator. The high profile of Lame, a Senegalese-Italian creator who rose to fame from dialogue-free comedy videos, means the outcome of the deal could impact how investors assess the viability of backing businesses centered on individual creators.
The January deal terms promised Lame's company 75 million shares, which would be worth about $145 million at Thursday's closing share price. The initial agreement had valued that stake at $975 million.
Rich Sparkle and Lame did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
At the time of the original announcement, Rich Sparkle said that it planned to create an AI avatar of Lame to do brand deals and sell products on social media. It projected this business could drive more than $4 billion in annual product sales.
An unusual stock detail
The new filing contains another intriguing detail: Rich Sparkle issued nearly $39 million in stock to its staff as part of their compensation during the six months ended March 31, resulting in an operating loss of almost $40 million. In the year-earlier period, it issued no share-based compensation.
This new share issuance means some employees could have benefited from the stock's massive spike following the Lame deal announcement. The filing doesn't indicate which staffers received shares or exactly when they got them within that six-month period.
Paul Nary, a management professor at Wharton, said the size of the share issuance was unusual relative to the company's valuation and revenue.
If the deal is in motion, we haven't heard a peep from Lame, who removed Rich Sparkle's stock ticker, ANPA, from his social-media bios in late January. The content creator continues to post for brands, recently making a cameo in the James Bond-inspired video game "007 First Light," signing on as a brand ambassador for travel eSIM company Holafly, and promoting the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games.
YouTuber Jake Paul joined President Trump for an Ohio rally ahead of the midterm elections.
Aaron Schwartz/Stringer/Getty; BI
The battle for voters in the 2026 midterm elections is playing out on the TikTok For You Page.
One in four Americans say creator content has influenced who they voted for.
Political candidates are scrambling to connect with more creators in order to reach voters.
Content creators are influencing much more than our coffee orders and skincare routines.
About one in four Americans (26%) say influencer content has affected who they've voted for, according to a survey of around 2,000 US adults conducted by Morning Consult in September, commissioned by Business Insider.
Creator content is an "underestimated avenue" for political campaigns, said Nicole Dunger, a founding partner at the marketing firm People First, which works with candidates and advocacy groups on their creator strategies. "It is a real player and a big player in this space now."
If 2024 was the podcast election, 2026 is shaping up to be the influencer one. Instagram and TikTok creators have joined Fox News hosts and personalities like Joe Rogan as go-to sources of information for voters.
Influencers like Jake Paul and Hasan Piker have emerged as main characters in politics this year.
Paul recently joined President Donald Trump in Ohio for a midterm rally, posting TikTok clips of his Air Force One flight. Piker, meanwhile, has become a campaign ally for progressives like Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed and a negative talking point for Fox News commentators.
As online attention has become a key asset in politics, influencers are helping candidates break through the noise.
A little over half of US adults (56%) told Morning Consult that creator content had affected their views on political or social issues to some degree. That figure jumped among Gen Z respondents, where close to three in four respondents said their views had been swayed by influencer posts.
For campaigns, the challenge is identifying the right creators to work with, particularly when many influencers don't regularly talk about politics.
"You have to have your base of people, your core supporters, and then you have to have a broader cultural space of people who don't always talk about politics," said Parker Butler, a managing partner at the digital strategy firm Luminary Strategies, which works on social strategy with Democratic candidates like James Talarico. "It's worth having different pockets of creators for different purposes."
Reaching creators with smaller followings than Piker (about 3 million Twitch followers), or Paul (around 21 million YouTube subscribers) is a focus in 2026, Butler said.
He said the goal is to shift the creator outreach strategy from "this person has a million followers" to identifying influencers who work in a particular niche a campaign is trying to reach.
Political chatter is moving from TV to YouTube
More and more, political discussions are playing out on digital platforms, whether that's podcasts, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams.
YouTube was the top source for political and election news among US adults in September, narrowly beating out TV, print, and X (formerly Twitter), according to a survey from Syracuse University.
About one in five Democrats and Republicans said podcast appearances could make them "more likely to support a candidate," according to a July through August survey of likely midterm voters from the podcast industry group Sounds Profitable. A smaller share of Independents (11%) said podcasts could make them more likely to back a candidate.
While campaigns see attention moving online, they're still spending the bulk of their ad budgets on TV.
Part of that may be because they're accustomed to buying TV spots. They're also reckoning with the fact that influencer marketing is harder to predict and measure, particularly as social-media feeds become more personalized and algorithmically driven.
"It can be very challenging, but you see the results in the end," Dunger said. "It's the same with door knocking. We know door knocking somehow works and has worked for so long, but it's not like we have those direct measurements."
Creators ranging from Substackers to "SNL" stars are jumping off the screen to in-person events — and marketers can't get enough.
"IRL is the No. 1 brand equity builder of all the channels," said Justin Thomas-Copeland, CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As).
As it becomes harder to reach customers online, in-person events offer a way for brands to connect with their biggest fans — and hopefully inspire a flurry of social content.
One night last month, Snapple turned a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry into a floating comedy club featuring Colin Jost and Pete Davidson.
Lindsay Burstein, a top marketer at Snapple parent Keurig Dr Pepper, said the night resulted in about 200 pieces of user-generated content.
"It is the buzziest thing that the brand has done in a very long time," she said.
Snapple threw a "Snapple Island Ferry" event with comedians Colin Jost and Pete Davidson.
Snapple
Events aren't a new phenomenon, but interest from marketers is surging. In its annual survey of marketers, Linqia found that 53% said they planned to work with influencers on events in 2026, up from 34% in 2025.
"We've seen an uptick in both custom brand pop-up experiences and brand activation at large events," Linqia's chief strategy officer Keith Bendes said.
Influencer marketers are becoming event planners
IRL activations and events can also help brands gauge the depth of a creator's connection with their audience — and how valuable partnering with them might prove.
Substack creators, for instance, have "rabid fans and followers" who are hungry to connect in person, said Rothy's VP Anna Doré.
After Substacker Erika Veurink's article for New York Magazine featuring Rothy's shoes went viral, Rothy's struck a partnership with the writer that included a vintage pop-up experience at a Rothy's in New York City.
The Rothy's pop-up drew over 200 people and grew the store's foot traffic by 75% that day.
There can be category-specific reasons some brands are going all in on events. Flushable wipes maker Goodwipes, for one, leans on IRL experiences, said SVP of marketing Meredith Diehn, "partially because it's an intimate category, but there's a lot of questions around flushability and why should I leave toilet paper for Goodwipes."
Still, it can often be harder to measure success from an IRL event and prove it's an efficient use of marketing dollars.
Beverage brand Poppi is also a fan of IRL events and pop-ups.
Courtesy of Poppi
"Live experiences is not an efficient business," Bilt CMO Zoe Oz said. "It's like the most inefficient, unscalable thing you can possibly do. But we found those to be 10 times more effective than the other ways we used to spend money."
Events also aren't a foolproof strategy, Copeland of 4As said.
There's a lot that goes into an experience, and if one part goes wrong or a creator is involved in an inauthentic way, criticism can spread quickly.
They present practical challenges as well, sometimes forcing marketers to wear yet another hat: event planning.
Burstein said that planning Snapple's comedy event — despite its eventual success — took her "blood, life, sweat, and tears."
Microsoft AI recently announced its latest model MAI-Base-2.
AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman compared the model to a similar offering from OpenAI.
Microsoft trained its model more efficiently than OpenAI, he said in an internal meeting.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told employees an in-house model was better than a similar offering from OpenAI, one of the software giant's biggest customers and partners.
"We now have a stronger pre-trained base model than the model that currently powers GPT 5.6 Sol," Suleyman said during a town hall meeting with employees on Thursday. "And in fact, we used one-quarter of the compute that OpenAI used to train their model."
Pre-training is the first stage of building an AI model, when it learns patterns from huge amounts of text, images, and other information. This takes massive amounts of expensive computing power, so Microsoft could save money if it's worked out a way to do this more efficiently.
Suleyman said Microsoft privately tested this model against OpenAI models, including one nicknamed "Spud" that powers GPT-5.6. He added that Microsoft's model performed better on tests measuring how well AI can understand and predict patterns in information.
The comparisons are based on technical information Microsoft has about OpenAI's models, Suleyman said.
"Privately and confidentially, we've also compared it to the OpenAI models," Suleyman told employees, while suggesting that Microsoft has special access to information on how OpenAI models perform.
It's notable that Suleyman would choose to highlight limitations of OpenAI models, even in private discussions. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and owns a stake in the startup that is likely worth more than $100 billion. Any criticism of OpenAI could potentially dent the value of this huge investment.
The two companies also have a major partnership, with Microsoft offering OpenAI models to its Azure cloud customers. Microsoft has used OpenAI models for its own products such as Copilot, too.
But the relationship between the two companies has frayed in the past year or so. Increasingly, Microsoft has tried to branch out from OpenAI, including by working on its own models.
Suleyman also said Microsoft's new AI model used "12 times less computation than was used for DeepSeek, for example, on compute efficiency."
Suleyman didn't specify which DeepSeek model, but a public blog post described the pre-training of MAI-Base-2 being a lot more efficient than a similar offering from the Chinese lab, called DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base.
Microsoft in March created a new combined team for its commercial and consumer Copilot products and reassigned Suleyman to focus on building AI models in the company's superintelligence unit.
Microsoft declined to comment and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Attendees at OpenAI's DevDay conference on September 29, 2026.
Minh Connors/Bloomberg via Getty Images
OpenAI's Alexander Embiricos said the AI era gives a choice: work more, or work less.
He's in charge of Dots, the company's new always-on work assistant.
AI is often pitched as freeing up time. Embiricos responded to the idea that it might add more work.
As the competitive AI race pushes tech workers into long hours, the head of OpenAI's new Dots product says AI gives people another option: work a whole lot less.
Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product and helms the new Dots agent tool, told a crowd at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference on Thursday that AI's capabilities have created something of a fork in the road for workers. You can grind to meet the moment. Or you can use AI to kick your feet up a little.
"We basically have a lot more choice now," he said.
Embiricos made the comments after a reporter asked about when AI systems will actually deliver more free time. The reporter shared an anecdote where an OpenAI employee used a ChatGPT mobile feature to work in their car and on a plane — not exactly liberated by the new tech.
Embiricos said that the moment has already arrived where a worker can "outsource" tasks to AI and do less work. Then again, some people are so excited about AI's potential that they feel like it's an "interesting, ripe moment" to put in extra hours.
"I think that's why a lot of people are motivated to work very hard right now. That includes myself," he said. "But I think actually there is this choice, and there's totally this other setup where you could delegate a ton more things."
OpenAI is billing its Dots tool as a workplace assistant, always on and capable of proactively handing tasks and sorting to-dos. Embiricos uses his Dot often in Slack, he said, engaging on various threads.
His perspective illustrates how early companies are in their journey to adopt AI tools. Most companies have not yet automated their work tasks, and many workers are still debating how much to use the tools. Early AI adopters, meanwhile, can sprint through some work that used to take days or weeks, especially in software engineering.
Embiricos summed up the situation he feels workers are in: "You either choose: do you expand the ambition of what you can do, or do you do less? I do think we're there."
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Netflix is replacing content chief Bela Bajaria with former Disney TV executive Peter Rice.
Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Netflix; Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Netflix is replacing its content chief after laying off about 1,000 employees.
Former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice will take the role from departing Bela Bajaria.
Netflix has gone through a bruising period as Wall Street questions its long-term direction.
Netflix has hired a new content chief after a stock slump and struggles to grow its viewership.
Peter Rice, a former Fox and Disney executive, will oversee Netflix's $20 billion budget for movies and shows starting on October 26, the company announced on Thursday.
Rice will replace Bela Bajaria, who's leaving the company after almost a decade. Bajaria took the top content job in 2023 and memorably described the ideal Netflix show as a "gourmet cheeseburger."
The exec shake-up came a day after the streaming giant laid off about 1,000 employees, its biggest round of layoffs in four years.
Netflix has had a tough year.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said at a Bloomberg media event last month that Netflix is "not growing as fast as I want us to, and we're working on making that move faster."
Shares are down nearly 40% in the past 12 months as investors increasingly worry about slower viewership growth and the company's long-term direction. Netflix's attempt to buy Warner Bros. — which was ultimately stymied by David Ellison's Paramount — soured the Wall Street narrative about the company's future.
Rice was previously the head of Disney's TV arm, where he ran Hulu and networks like ABC, Disney Channel, and FX. He was fired from the Mouse House in 2022 by former Disney CEO Bob Chapek and replaced by Dana Walden, who's now Disney's creative chief.
"Peter is one of the most effective at-scale operators in the entertainment industry," Sarandos said in a statement. The co-CEO added that Rice's "business acumen is sharp, his talent relationships are exceptionally strong, and his experience across TV and film is deep and broad."
Bajaria "led enormous changes at Netflix," Sarandos said, crediting her for helping the streamer broaden its content mix to live events and sports.
Under Bajaria, Netflix had hits like "KPop Demon Hunters" — its biggest movie ever — as well as breakout shows like "Wednesday" and Emmy Award winner "Adolescence."
However, Netflix's engagement growth was only 2% in the first half of 2026, and the company has faced increased competition from free streamers like YouTube and Tubi. YouTube is now well ahead of Netflix as the most-watched service on US TV screens.
Netflix, which had more than 325 million subscribers as of its last disclosure in January, remains the clear leader among paid streaming services. That said, Rice will have to figure out the right content mix to fend off both its Hollywood rivals and social-media competitors like Instagram and TikTok.
Apollo is delaying recruiting for its 2028 associate class, Business Insider has learned.
This follows last year's delay, which helped slowed down private equity's chaotic recruiting process.
Apollo said it wants young bankers to have more experience before making their next career move.
Apollo is delaying on-cycle recruiting again this year, after a similar move last year helped push back the recruiting timeline across the private equity industry.
The private equity giant told prospective candidates Thursday afternoon that it will not recruit its 2028 associate class this calendar year, according to an email obtained by Business Insider.
The memo, signed by David Sambur, co-head of Private Equity, and Antoine G. Munfakh, deputy global head of Private Equity, said the firm will wait until candidates who started their investment banking careers over the summer are "closer to completing one full year of professional experience."
The hope, the memo said, is that this will convince others in private equity to delay their process so both candidates and employers can make "better decisions." Last year, after Apollo CEO Marc Rowan said the firm would delay on-cycle recruiting, others, such as General Atlantic also decided to pause.
"We were encouraged that others in the industry took similar steps, and we hope more firms will do the same this year," the memo said.
On-cycle recruiting — the controversial process through which private equity firms hire junior investment bankers for associate roles a year or even two before they would start — had crept earlier and earlier in the years following the pandemic.
Competition among private equity firms to lock up top talent pushed recruiting earlier and made the process notoriously intense. It would kick off with little warning, with junior bankers sometimes calling in sick or interviewing in the middle of the night to avoid jeopardizing their day jobs. JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, has been a big critic of the process, calling it "unethical."
In 2025, amid rumblings that on-cycle recruiting could take place before some students even graduated from college, JPMorgan rolled out a policy that incoming analysts could be terminated for accepting future-dated private equity offers.
Questions have swirled if the practice would kick off early again this for the 2028 class, but it appears with this latest move, Apollo is trying to slow down the recruiting timeline across the industry again.
Read the full memo below:
—-
To: Prospective Apollo Associate Candidates, Class of 2028
Subject: Apollo Recruiting, Class of 2028
Congratulations on beginning your career in investment banking. We know how exciting and demanding this period can be, and we hope you are enjoying the experience and learning a great deal.
Last June, we wrote to prospective candidates for our Associate Class of 2027 to explain why Apollo would be delaying its recruiting process. We believed then, as we do now, that young professionals should have the opportunity to develop their skills, gain meaningful experience and better understand their interests before making important decisions about their careers.
We were encouraged that others in the industry took similar steps, and we hope more firms will do the same this year. Young professionals still deserve more time to gather valuable life and work experience before making important career decisions.
We wanted to share with you that for the Associate Class of 2028, we will not participate in on-cycle recruiting this calendar year and intend to wait until candidates are closer to completing one full year of professional experience before engaging in formal recruiting for an Associate position. We believe giving candidates more time and experience before beginning the process leads to better decisions for candidates and employers alike.
In the meantime, we will continue to spend time with many of you, introduce you to our platform and share the diverse array of career opportunities available at Apollo. When our formal recruiting process begins, we intend to approach it thoughtfully and give candidates ample time to prepare, interview and consider their offers.
None of this changes our enthusiasm for meeting and recruiting exceptional young talent. Quite the opposite. Investing in our people has always been central to Apollo's success, and we remain committed to attracting and developing the next generation of investment professionals.
For now, our advice is simple: Focus on the opportunity in front of you. Learn as much as you can. Build relationships, develop your judgment, and take the time to discover what genuinely interests you. There will be plenty of time to make decisions about the next chapter of your career.
We look forward to getting to know you and hope many of you will consider building your careers at Apollo.
Best,
David Sambur
Partner, Co-Head of Private Equity and Head of Equity
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