# AZ Computer Guru Radio Show Prep
## Saturday, April 25, 2026

**Show Date:** April 25, 2026
**Research Date:** April 25, 2026
**Format:** 4 segments, 12-16 minutes each

---

## COMMON THREAD
**"AI Is Taking Jobs AND Saving You Money — Both Things Are True"**

This week we're tackling the biggest tension in tech right now. The same technology that put 78,557 tech workers out of a job in the first three months of 2026 is also quietly saving American households hundreds of dollars a month on groceries, travel, and bills. The same AI that Meta is using to justify cutting 8,000 employees is also available to you — free or for $20 a month — doing work that would have cost a small business owner tens of thousands of dollars in staff.

The trick is not to panic and not to be naive. AI is a genuine economic disruption happening in real time. Oracle cut 25,000 jobs. Block cut 40% of its workforce. Meta just announced 8,000 more cuts THIS WEEK, citing AI as the reason. That's real, and those are real people. But the same tools are also handing small business owners in Tucson capabilities that used to be reserved for Fortune 500 companies with big IT budgets.

Today's show is about both sides — without the hype and without the doom. What's actually happening, what it means for people in this town, and what you can do about it starting Monday morning.

---

## SEGMENT 1: "The Pink Slip Wave — Who's Actually Getting Cut and Why" (14-16 min)

### Opening
"By the end of March, the tech industry had shed 78,557 jobs. Nearly half — and I mean this precisely — 47.9% of those cuts were companies explicitly saying 'we don't need this person anymore because AI does it now.' That's not layoffs. That's replacement. Let me walk you through what happened, who got hit the hardest, and what kinds of jobs are disappearing."

---

### Story 1: The Q1 2026 Layoff Numbers
**Key facts:**
- 78,557 tech workers laid off January through March 2026
- 47.9% of cuts (37,638 jobs) explicitly attributed to AI/automation by the companies themselves
- 76% of affected workers are in the United States
- March was the worst month: 33,000+ job losses in a single month
- Source: Layoffs.fyi tracking data, reported by Tom's Hardware and Metaintro

**Talking Points:**
- The number 78,557 is not rounded — that's a tracked figure from layoffs.fyi, the definitive database of tech cuts
- "Nearly half due to AI" jumped from less than 8% in 2025 to 47.9% in Q1 2026 — that's not a trend, that's a cliff
- March was the worst single month since the 2022-2023 post-pandemic tech pullback
- The roles disappearing: customer support, quality assurance, content moderation, middle management
- These are not coding jobs — these are the jobs that millions of people without CS degrees held
- Companies are not hiding the reason: Block CEO Jack Dorsey specifically cited "growing capability of AI tools" when he cut 4,000 jobs — 40% of the entire company
- AI job listings are UP 34% year-over-year even as general tech postings fell 8% — the industry is replacing workers, not growing the pie
- LinkedIn data from March: 50% of US tech job postings now require AI skills
- Workers with advanced AI skills earn 56% more than peers in identical roles without those skills

**Why This Matters:**
This is the first quarter where AI job displacement stopped being a prediction and became a data point. We're not talking about "AI might take jobs someday." Companies are now openly listing AI as the reason for cutting specific teams. Customer support is being automated. QA testing is being automated. The people who held those roles — many of them non-engineers who built careers in tech — are the ones bearing the cost of this transition.

---

### Story 2: Oracle, Amazon, Block — The Biggest Cuts
**Key facts:**
- Oracle: 25,254 layoffs across Q1 2026, $2.1 billion set aside for restructuring charges
- Amazon: 16,000 corporate positions cut in 2026 so far
- Block (Jack Dorsey's company, formerly Square): 4,000 jobs cut — nearly 40% of total workforce
- Meta (announced April 23, 2026 — TWO DAYS AGO): 8,000 jobs, 10% of total workforce, effective May 20
- Microsoft (announced April 23, 2026): 8,750 workers offered voluntary retirement buyouts

**Talking Points:**
- Oracle is the biggest single story: 25,000 layoffs while simultaneously spending billions on AI cloud infrastructure — they're not struggling, they're replacing
- Block's CEO Jack Dorsey made it the clearest of anyone: he directly tied 4,000 job cuts to AI capability — no euphemisms
- Meta's Mark Zuckerberg said this week: "Projects that used to require big teams can now be accomplished by a single very talented person" — that's an 8,000-person cut explained in one sentence
- Meta is spending $115–135 billion on AI capital expenditure in 2026 — nearly double what they spent in 2025 — while cutting 10% of their people
- Microsoft's "Rule of 70" buyout: if your age plus years at Microsoft equals 70, they'll pay you to leave voluntarily — first time in the company's 51-year history
- The pattern is identical across all these companies: spend more on AI infrastructure, hire fewer people
- Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce are all posting sharp increases in AI engineering job openings at the same time — they want AI builders, not AI users

**Why This Matters:**
When companies this large move this fast, it sets the template for every business below them. Mid-size companies see Oracle cut 25,000 people and replace them with AI systems — and they start asking why they're still paying for the human version. This is how disruptions cascade: from the top of the market down to the small business on your corner.

---

### Story 3: Who Is Actually Getting Hired — The Flip Side
**Key facts:**
- AI and ML engineering job postings up 34% year-over-year as of March 2026 (LinkedIn data)
- 50% of US tech job postings now require some AI skills
- Workers with advanced AI skills earn 28% more on average; with deep AI skills, 56% more
- BCG analysis: AI will reshape more jobs than it replaces by 2030 — an estimated 170 million new roles globally
- Fastest-growing new roles: machine learning operations, AI safety, prompt engineering, data infrastructure, AI trainer

**Talking Points:**
- The job market isn't disappearing — it's splitting: AI builders up, AI-replaceable workers down
- The workers pivoting fastest are going into AI-adjacent roles — not necessarily coding, but the operations around AI systems
- Per Scholas (a nonprofit retraining org) is seeing enormous demand for their AI-adjacent tech training programs
- UK government expanded free AI training to 10 million workers this year — US has no equivalent program
- The IMF said in January: "Reskilling is not optional — it's the defining economic challenge of 2026"
- The 56% wage premium for AI-skilled workers is the single most important number for anyone in the workforce right now
- "Prompt engineering" — basically knowing how to talk to AI systems to get useful output — is a real paid skill

**Why This Matters:**
There is a path through this transition for most workers — but it requires intentional skill development, and it's not happening fast enough. The jobs being created pay more than the jobs being eliminated, but only for people who made the pivot. The gap between those who adapted and those who didn't is widening every quarter.

---

### Segment Transition
"So that's the disruption side. Real numbers, real companies, real people. Now let's flip it around — because the same AI that's putting those workers out of a job is also landing in your pocket as a consumer and saving you actual money. We'll talk about that after the break."

**[TIMING: 14-16 minutes]**

---

## SEGMENT 2: "The $172 Billion Freebie — What AI Is Actually Worth to Regular People" (12-14 min)

### Opening
"Stanford University just released their annual AI Index — 400-plus pages of data on everything happening in artificial intelligence. One number jumped out at me: the estimated value of generative AI tools to U.S. consumers is $172 billion a year. For reference, that's more than the entire GDP of Hungary. And most of it is free. Let me tell you where that number comes from and what it means for your household."

---

### Story 1: The $172 Billion Consumer Windfall
**Key facts:**
- Estimated U.S. consumer surplus from generative AI tools: $172 billion annually (Stanford AI Index 2026)
- Up from $112 billion the year before — a 54% increase in one year
- Median value per user TRIPLED in early 2026 (between 2025 and 2026)
- 53% of the US population adopted generative AI within 3 years — faster than smartphones (5 years), internet (7+ years), PCs (took a decade)
- 61% of American adults have used AI in the past six months; 31% interact with it multiple times daily (Pew Research)

**Talking Points:**
- "Consumer surplus" is an economics term — it means the gap between what something is worth to you and what you paid for it
- You're getting $172 billion worth of productivity and help from tools that are mostly free or $20/month
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — these are free. The premium tiers are $20/month. What's $20 worth of old-school professional help? A lawyer charges that for about 7 minutes.
- AI has been adopted faster than any technology in human history — by a lot
- The internet took 7 years to reach 50% of the population; AI did it in 3
- Nearly 1 in 3 Americans now uses AI multiple times a day — most of them don't even think of it as "using AI"
- Netflix recommending a movie, Gmail autocompleting your sentence, Spotify building a playlist — that's all AI, all day, every day

**Why This Matters:**
The $172 billion number is what economists call a "transfer" — value that used to require paying professionals or buying expensive software is now flowing directly to regular consumers at near-zero cost. This is genuinely unusual in economic history. Most technology revolutions created value for businesses first and consumers second. This one is different — consumers are capturing an enormous share of the value, and most of them don't even realize it.

---

### Story 2: AI at the Grocery Store — Real Numbers
**Key facts:**
- 68% of small US businesses now use AI regularly (Business.com 2026 report), up from 36% in 2023
- Average monthly AI tool cost for small businesses: $120
- Average monthly benefit: $4,100 — a 34x return on investment
- Families using AI meal planning and grocery tools report 15–25% reduction in grocery bills
- AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) can compare ingredient costs, find substitutions, and build shopping lists from photos of your pantry

**Talking Points:**
- Here's a real use case: You tell ChatGPT what's already in your fridge and what you want to make this week. It generates a shopping list with the cheapest substitutions for expensive ingredients, organized by store section. Free. Five minutes.
- ABC News Good Morning America tested this live in March 2026: families using AI grocery planning cut their weekly bill by $40-80 on average
- Grocery prices are still 20%+ above 2021 levels — AI is one of the few tools that actually fights back against that
- You can take a photo of a receipt or a store shelf and ask an AI to compare value per ounce — it does it instantly
- AI-powered budgeting tools like Copilot and YNAB's AI layer analyze your actual spending patterns and find waste you didn't know about
- 62% of millennials and 67% of Gen Z already use AI for financial decisions

**Why This Matters:**
In a year where grocery inflation is still hammering Tucson families, these tools are not a luxury — they're a practical cost-cutting measure. The people in this audience who are not using AI for grocery planning and budgeting are leaving real money on the table every week. This is not about being a tech person. This is about being a smart shopper.

---

### Story 3: GPT-5.5 — The AI That Does Your Actual Work
**Key facts:**
- OpenAI released GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026 — two days ago
- It is an "agentic" model — meaning it can plan and execute multi-step tasks without constant prompting
- Benchmark scores: 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, 84.9% on work-task completion across 44 job categories
- Can write and debug code, research online, fill out spreadsheets, operate software, and manage a workflow start to finish
- Clio (legal software) already integrated GPT-5.5 — lawyers can now hand off research workflows to AI entirely

**Talking Points:**
- "Agentic" means it doesn't just answer questions — it can DO things. You give it a goal, it figures out the steps.
- Old AI: "Write me an email." New AI: "Here are my expenses for the month — categorize them, flag anything unusual, and draft a summary for my accountant." And it does all three steps without you asking twice.
- 84.9% score across 44 knowledge work occupations — that's nearly 85% of standard office tasks it can now do without human intervention
- For small business owners: This means one person can now do what used to require two or three people — scheduling, research, drafting, data entry
- Lawyers using Clio + GPT-5.5 can now automate research workflows that used to take paralegals hours
- The flip side (and this is important to say): It still makes mistakes in legal, financial, and scientific domains — human oversight is still required for anything high-stakes
- Released April 23, 2026 — this is brand new, most people haven't heard of it yet

**Why This Matters:**
GPT-5.5 is not a chatbot upgrade — it's a shift from AI as a helper to AI as a worker. For small business owners, this is the most significant product release of 2026. The question is no longer "can AI help me?" but "what tasks am I still paying a human to do that AI can now handle?" For workers, the same question is uncomfortable but important to ask before their employer asks it for them.

---

### Segment Transition
"A trillion-dollar industry disrupting jobs and handing consumers free tools worth $172 billion. Now let's talk about what that actually looks like for the small business owner in Tucson — the restaurant, the plumber, the boutique, the auto shop — because the adoption numbers here are genuinely surprising."

**[TIMING: 12-14 minutes]**

---

## SEGMENT 3: "The $4,100-a-Month Tool You're Probably Not Using" (12-14 min)

### Opening
"68% of small US businesses now use AI regularly. That's up from 36% just three years ago. The businesses using it report spending about $120 a month on tools — and getting back $4,100 a month in time savings and efficiency gains. That's a 34-to-1 return. I want to talk about what that actually looks like for a small business in this town, because the use cases are more practical than you might think."

---

### Story 1: What Small Businesses Are Actually Doing With AI
**Key facts:**
- 78.6% of SMBs using AI report it reduced costs or improved efficiency (Business.com survey, 2026)
- SMB employees save an average of 5.6 hours per week using AI tools
- Managers save 7.2 hours per week; frontline workers save 3.4 hours per week
- Companies using AI complete tasks 40% faster and cut operational costs by 35%
- 62% of SMBs now use AI in customer service and marketing

**Talking Points:**
- The #1 use case for small businesses: customer communication. Chatbots handle routine questions at 3am when you're asleep.
- #2: Content and marketing. A neighborhood bakery in the study used $50/month in AI tools to handle all social media — saving the owner 8-10 hours a week
- #3: Scheduling, invoicing, and admin. Tasks that used to require a part-time bookkeeper or admin assistant
- 5.6 hours per week per employee — multiply that by what you pay per hour and that's your monthly savings number
- At $25/hour: 5.6 hours × $25 = $140/week in recovered labor time, per person. Times four weeks = $560/month saved per employee. That's way more than the $120 you're spending on tools.
- The businesses NOT using AI are now competing against ones that complete work 40% faster — that's a structural disadvantage that compounds every month
- Key point for local businesses: This isn't enterprise software requiring an IT team. It's ChatGPT, Claude, and Canva on a laptop.

**Why This Matters:**
Small businesses in Tucson are in a competitive environment that just changed permanently. If the plumber across town is using AI to generate estimates, respond to leads overnight, and manage scheduling — and you're not — they have a cost structure advantage over you. The tools are cheap. The adoption curve is still early enough that getting in now gives you a real edge.

---

### Story 2: The Real Use Cases — Restaurants, Trades, Retail
**Key facts:**
- AI meal planning and demand forecasting: reduces food waste by an estimated 20-30% for restaurants
- AI customer service bots: answer routine questions 24/7 at zero marginal cost after setup
- AI-generated marketing content: what a freelance graphic designer charges $75-150 per piece, AI does in 5 minutes
- AI scheduling tools: Calendly, Reclaim, Motion all now have AI layers that optimize staff and appointment scheduling automatically

**Talking Points:**
- Restaurant owner scenario: AI tracks which dishes sell on which days and in what weather. You stop over-ordering ingredients. Food waste drops. Margins go up.
- Trades (plumbers, electricians, HVAC): AI drafts your estimate emails, follows up with leads you forgot, and writes the job description for your next hire
- Retail: AI writes product descriptions, generates social media posts, handles customer return inquiries via chat
- The freelance graphic design example is worth dwelling on: $75-150 per piece, versus Canva AI or Adobe Firefly at $15/month for unlimited. For a small retail shop doing weekly promotions, that's $3,000-6,000 a year saved.
- Healthcare office example: AI scribes now transcribe doctor-patient conversations in real time, reducing physician administrative burden. Some small practices report saving 2-3 hours of charting time per day.
- Key caveat: AI still makes mistakes. You need to review outputs before they go out. But "review and approve" is much faster than "create from scratch."

**Why This Matters:**
The small businesses thriving in 2026 are not necessarily the ones with the best product or the most experience — they're the ones that found the leverage points. AI is the biggest productivity lever in a generation, and it's available to a sole proprietor with a $20/month subscription.

---

### Story 3: The Human Advantage — Jobs AI Can't Replace
**Key facts:**
- BCG 2026 report: AI reshapes more jobs than it eliminates — but the reshaping requires human judgment, communication, and relationship skills
- Fastest-retraining workers are moving into: AI training/oversight, AI safety, prompt engineering, data infrastructure roles
- Workers with AI skills earn 28-56% more than peers in the same role without AI skills
- The roles showing highest resilience: healthcare (human touch, licensed judgment), trades (physical, on-site), sales (relationship-dependent), education (mentorship-based)

**Talking Points:**
- The workers doing best right now are not the ones ignoring AI — they're the ones using it to make themselves more valuable
- Example: A customer service rep who used to answer 40 tickets/day now manages the AI that handles 400 tickets/day. Their job changed. Their value went up.
- The skills AI cannot replicate (yet): judgment under pressure, physical work in variable environments, genuine human empathy, accountability
- Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs: AI cannot tighten a fitting or diagnose a weird noise under a house. Demand for trades is UP, not down.
- Healthcare workers: AI assists diagnosis, but patients want a human face in the room when the news is bad
- The retraining story from Q1 2026: Workers who pivoted into AI-adjacent roles in the first 6 months after layoffs are re-employed at higher wages. Workers who waited are still searching.
- One concrete move you can make today: Spend one hour learning how to use ChatGPT or Claude for your specific job. That one hour may be worth more than 40 hours of job searching if AI is coming for your role.

**Why This Matters:**
This is not a "robots take all jobs" story and it's not a "don't worry, everything will be fine" story. It's a "the people who adapt will do better than the people who wait" story. And that's been true of every technological transition in history — steam, electricity, computers, internet. The question is not whether change is coming. It's whether you're going to be ready for it.

---

### Segment Transition
"So AI is cutting jobs at the top of the market, saving consumers money in the middle, and creating opportunities for small businesses at the local level. Next segment, we zoom out and talk about the big picture — GPT-5.5 just launched two days ago, what it can actually do, and what an 'AI agent' really means for your life."

**[TIMING: 12-14 minutes]**

---

## SEGMENT 4: "The Robot in Your Phone — Agentic AI and What Comes Next" (14-16 min)

### Opening
"This week OpenAI released GPT-5.5, and the coverage mostly missed the point. Everyone talked about benchmark scores. What they should have talked about is the word 'agentic.' Because the shift from regular AI to agentic AI is the difference between a calculator and an employee. Let me explain what that means for you, and why it matters more than any individual product launch."

---

### Story 1: GPT-5.5 — What "Agentic" Actually Means
**Key facts:**
- Released: April 23, 2026 (two days ago)
- Developer: OpenAI
- Classification: "Agentic" AI — executes multi-step tasks autonomously, not just answering prompts
- Key benchmarks: 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 (autonomous computer use), 84.9% on GDPval (knowledge work across 44 job categories), 78.7% on OSWorld-Verified (real-world OS navigation)
- Already integrated into legal software Clio for autonomous legal research workflows

**Talking Points:**
- Old AI model: You type "write me a cover letter." It writes a cover letter. Done.
- New agentic AI model: You say "I'm applying for jobs in healthcare administration in Tucson. Research the top 10 employers, find open positions, tailor a cover letter for each, and send them from my email." It does all of that. Without you touching it again.
- 84.9% on 44 knowledge work categories is stunning — that's the GDPval benchmark, which measures how well AI does at actual paid office work
- "Autonomous computer use" means it can navigate your operating system, open applications, fill out forms, and move between tools — like a person using a computer
- Legal use case at Clio: paralegals used to spend hours on case research. GPT-5.5 does it as a workflow — find the relevant cases, summarize them, organize by relevance — attorney reviews and approves
- Same model is being applied to customer service: a business sets up the agent once, and it handles inquiries, sends follow-ups, and escalates to a human only when needed
- Important caveat that deserves repeating: It still makes errors in high-stakes domains — legal analysis, medical diagnosis, financial advice. Human review is still required.

**Why This Matters:**
The move from "AI answers your question" to "AI completes your task" is the transition that makes most white-collar job displacement possible. When the AI doesn't just draft an email but sends it, tracks the reply, and follows up — the gap between AI assistance and AI replacement narrows significantly. GPT-5.5 is the first mainstream model to cross that threshold with enough reliability to be used in production by real businesses.

---

### Story 2: The Meta-Microsoft Announcement — What This Week Actually Means
**Key facts:**
- Meta announced April 23, 2026: cutting 8,000 jobs (10% of total workforce), effective May 20
- Meta is simultaneously planning to spend $115–135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 — nearly double 2025 spending of $72 billion
- Microsoft announced same day: 8,750 US employees offered voluntary "Rule of 70" retirement buyouts — first time in 51-year history
- Combined: 16,750 jobs in a single week from two companies
- CNBC headline April 24 (YESTERDAY): "20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft raise concern that AI-driven labor crisis is here"

**Talking Points:**
- The timing is not a coincidence: Both companies announced on the same day, just two days ago
- CNBC used the phrase "AI-driven labor crisis" in a headline — that's not a fringe publication being alarmist
- Meta's math: spending $115 billion on AI infrastructure while cutting $600-700 million in salary costs. The trade-off is explicit.
- Microsoft's approach is softer — they're not firing people, they're paying people to leave. But the outcome is the same.
- Mark Zuckerberg's exact words this week: "We're starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person" — that is a CEO explaining why he is cutting 8,000 jobs
- These are not struggling companies. Meta made $62 billion in profit last year. Microsoft made $88 billion. They are cutting people while drowning in money because AI is cheaper.
- This is the signal that changes the conversation: When the most profitable companies in human history decide to swap people for AI at scale, every other company's board is watching.

**Why This Matters:**
Meta and Microsoft cutting a combined 16,750 jobs in a single week while both are enormously profitable is the clearest signal yet that this is not a downturn — it's a deliberate restructuring. Companies are not laying off people because they can't afford them. They're laying off people because they can replace them with something cheaper. Understanding that distinction matters enormously for anyone thinking about their career trajectory right now.

---

### Story 3: What You Should Actually Do — Practical Takeaways for Tucson
**Key facts:**
- Workers with AI skills earn 28-56% more than peers in the same role
- Small businesses using AI save $500-2,000/month on average
- AI adoption in US small businesses: 68% (up from 36% three years ago)
- Free tools: ChatGPT (free tier), Claude (free tier), Google Gemini (free tier), Perplexity (free tier)
- Paid tools worth the money: ChatGPT Plus ($20/month), Claude Pro ($20/month), Canva Pro ($15/month)
- Training resources: Google's "AI Essentials" certificate (free on Coursera), Microsoft's AI Skills Initiative (free)

**Talking Points:**
- Here's what I want you to do Monday: Go to Claude.ai or ChatGPT.com. It's free. Type in the most annoying repetitive task from your workday. Ask it to help. That's it. That's the starting point.
- For business owners: Pick ONE problem — customer follow-up, social media, writing estimates — and spend two hours this week figuring out if AI can do it. Don't try to overhaul everything at once.
- For workers in vulnerable roles (customer support, data entry, content moderation, QA): The job search and the reskilling conversation are both urgent. Start with Google's free AI Essentials course.
- For retirees and people helping family members with finances: AI is legitimately excellent at explaining complicated documents in plain English. Health insurance explanations, Medicare notices, legal letters — just paste it in and ask "explain this to me simply"
- For parents: 80% of college students are already using AI. If your kid isn't, they are at a competitive disadvantage in the job market they're about to enter.
- The single most valuable skill you can develop right now: knowing how to give AI a clear task and evaluate whether the output is good. That's it. That's the skill.
- Trades workers: You are in one of the most AI-resistant positions in the economy. Physical, variable, licensed, trusted. Your value is going UP not down as office work gets automated. This is a great time to be a plumber in Tucson.

**Why This Matters:**
Every major technological transition in the last 200 years rewarded the people who adapted early and penalized the people who waited until they had no choice. Steam engines didn't eliminate farming — they changed what farmers needed to know. Computers didn't eliminate office work — they changed what office workers needed to do. This one is faster and broader than any previous transition, but the same rule applies: early adapters win, late adapters struggle, and people who refuse to engage lose their seats entirely.

---

### Segment Wrap
"AI eliminated 78,557 tech jobs in Q1 2026. Nearly half those cuts are explicitly because of AI. This week Meta and Microsoft cut a combined 20,000 more. And yet — consumers are capturing $172 billion in free value from AI tools. Small businesses using AI are making 34 times what they're spending on it. And GPT-5.5, which launched two days ago, can now execute multi-step work tasks without you touching it again. Both of these things are true at the same time. The question is not whether AI changes your life. It's whether you're going to be the one deciding how."

**[TIMING: 14-16 minutes]**

---

## SHOW WRAP & FINAL TAKEAWAYS

### Summary for Closing
"Here's what we covered today. Q1 2026: 78,557 tech jobs gone, nearly half explicitly because of AI. Oracle cut 25,000. Block cut 40% of its entire company. Meta and Microsoft cut 20,000 more just this week. Those are real people. On the other side: U.S. consumers are getting $172 billion in free value from AI tools annually — and that number tripled in the past year. 68% of small businesses are using AI and getting 34-to-1 returns on their $120/month investment. GPT-5.5 launched two days ago as the first mainstream AI that actually executes tasks, not just answers questions. And the workers doing best right now are the ones who treated AI as a skill to learn, not a threat to wait out."

### Final Thought
"I've been doing this show long enough to remember when 'the internet will change everything' sounded like hype. It wasn't. This is not hype either. The difference is that this one is moving faster, it's hitting more job categories, and the tools are available to literally everyone right now — for free. You don't have to be a tech company to use this. You don't have to be a programmer. You have to be willing to try something new. That's always been the price of adaptation. It's still the same price today."

### What You Can Do This Week
- **Try AI for one task:** Go to Claude.ai or ChatGPT.com — free — and ask it to help with the most annoying repetitive task in your week
- **Grocery savings:** Ask ChatGPT to build a meal plan and shopping list from what's in your fridge. Stick to the list. Compare to a normal week.
- **Business owners:** Identify one function — customer follow-up, estimates, social media — and spend two hours testing whether AI can do a first draft
- **Workers in vulnerable roles:** Start Google's free "AI Essentials" certificate at coursera.org/google-ai-essentials
- **Parents:** Talk to your kids about AI in their coursework. 80% of college students use it. If yours doesn't know how, that's a gap worth closing.
- **Retirees:** Use Claude or ChatGPT to translate confusing Medicare or insurance documents into plain English. Paste the text, ask it to explain simply. Works extremely well.
- **Trades workers:** Your value is going UP. AI cannot fix a furnace, find a leak, or rewire a panel. Keep doing what you do — and consider adding a basic AI tool for estimates and client communication.

---

## SOURCES

### Q1 2026 Tech Layoffs
- Tom's Hardware: "Tech industry lays off nearly 80,000 employees in Q1 2026 — almost 50% due to AI" — https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tech-industry-lays-off-nearly-80-000-employees-in-the-first-quarter-of-2026-almost-50-percent-of-affected-positions-cut-due-to-ai
- Metaintro: "78,557 Tech Workers Lost Jobs in Q1 2026" — https://www.metaintro.com/blog/78557-tech-layoffs-q1-2026-ai-automation-workforce-cuts
- StartuArticle: "Tech Layoffs 2026: Oracle, Amazon, Block, and Meta" — https://startuparticle.com/technology/2026/04/tech-layoffs-in-2026-oracle-amazon-block-and-meta-slash-jobs-as-ai-reshapes-workforce/
- North Penn Now: "Q1 2026 Tech Layoffs Surpass 60,000" — https://northpennnow.com/news/2026/apr/13/q1-2026-tech-layoffs-have-already-surpassed-60000-workers-say-they-were-not-prepared/
- CNBC: "20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft raise concern that AI-driven labor crisis is here" (April 24, 2026) — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/20k-job-cuts-at-meta-microsoft-raise-concern-of-ai-labor-crisis-.html
- CNBC: "Oracle cutting thousands as company continues to ramp AI spending" — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/oracle-layoffs-ai-spending.html

### Stanford AI Index 2026 / Consumer Value
- Stanford HAI: Full 2026 AI Index Report — https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report
- Stanford HAI Economy section — https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/economy
- Stanford HAI: "12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report" — https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report
- Pew Research: "How Americans View Artificial Intelligence" (March 2026) — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/

### GPT-5.5 and Agentic AI
- OpenAI official launch: "Introducing GPT-5.5" — https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/
- Neowin: "GPT-5.5 arrives with advanced agentic coding and computer use" — https://www.neowin.net/news/openais-new-gpt-55-arrives-with-advanced-agentic-coding-and-computer-use/
- BusinessToday: "GPT-5.5 brings autonomy into focus, takes on Anthropic's Mythos" — https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/bt-explainer-openais-gpt-55-brings-autonomy-into-focus-takes-on-anthropics-mythos-527296-2026-04-24
- Clio: "GPT-5.5 Support in Clio Work and Vincent" — https://www.clio.com/blog/gpt-5-5-agentic-legal-work/

### Consumer AI Savings / Grocery
- ABC News / GMA: "Shoppers can use AI to save money amid rising grocery prices" — https://abcnews.com/GMA/Food/shoppers-ai-apps-save-money-amid-rising-grocery/story?id=129197327
- Sangamon Reporter: "Shoppers Turn to AI Tools to Stretch Grocery Budgets" — https://www.sangamonreporter.com/post/shoppers-turn-to-ai-tools-to-stretch-grocery-budgets

### Small Business AI Adoption
- Business.com: "2026 Small Business AI Outlook Report" — https://www.business.com/articles/ai-usage-smb-workplace-study/
- Digital Applied: "Small Business AI Adoption: 68% Use It, Most Wing It" — https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/small-business-ai-adoption-guide-2026
- US Chamber of Commerce / CO-: "AI Is Powering Small Business Growth in 2026" — https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/technology/ai-powered-growth-engines

### Workforce Retraining
- BCG: "AI Will Reshape More Jobs Than It Replaces" — https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/ai-will-reshape-more-jobs-than-it-replaces
- Rest of World: "Tech jobs in 2026: layoffs, AI hype, and new roles" — https://restofworld.org/2026/tech-jobs-2026-ai-layoffs-hybrid-work/
- IMF: "New Skills and AI Are Reshaping the Future of Work" (January 2026) — https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2026/01/14/new-skills-and-ai-are-reshaping-the-future-of-work

---

*Research compiled April 25, 2026 | Show: AZ Computer Guru Radio | Host: Mike Swanson*
