People Still Matter
Two recent stories—one about a 175-year-old industrial company, the other about a century-old technology giant—push back against the idea that AI diminishes the importance of people.
Betting on People in the Age of AI
According to Bloomberg, IBM plans to triple its entry-level hiring in the U.S. in 2026, even as many companies slow hiring amid uncertainty about what AI can automate.
That decision stands in stark contrast to the prevailing narrative. Across industries, executives are pausing entry-level recruitment, assuming AI will absorb junior-level tasks. IBM is doing the opposite.
This is not accidental, it reflects institutional muscle memory. IBM has long been known for attracting and retaining researchers who spend years—sometimes decades—working on problems with unclear or distant commercial payoffs. The company’s research culture has historically tolerated long gestation periods because, over time, IBM has learned how to convert deep technical exploration into durable businesses.
That long-cycle thinking is part of why IBM Research has produced breakthroughs ranging from mainframe computing to AI systems like Watson to semiconductor advances. Many of those initiatives did not have obvious quarterly returns when they began.
“The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them,” Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s chief human resources officer said at Charter’s Leading With AI Summit. “So, if you’re going to convince your business leaders that you need to make this investment, then you need to be able to show the real value these individuals can bring now. And that has to be through totally different jobs.”
Slashing early-career recruitment may save money in the short run, but it risks creating a scarcity of mid-level managers later on, LaMoreaux said. That could force firms to poach talent from competitors, which tends to be more costly than promoting internally. Those hires also typically take longer to acclimate to the company’s culture and systems than those trained in-house, she said.
IBM appears to understand that automation changes workflows, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for human development. In fact, the more powerful the tools, the more valuable adaptable, well-trained people become.
The “Corning Way”—175 Years of Long-Term Thinking
A separate story in The Wall Street Journal highlighted the resurgence of Corning, a company founded in 1851.
At 175 years old, Corning has reinvented itself repeatedly: from glass for railroads, to television tubes, to fiber optics, to Gorilla Glass for iPhones. Most recently, it has become essential to the AI infrastructure build-out because of its fiber-optic cables, which underpin data centers and hyperscale computing.
The irony is striking. The AI revolution depends on massive physical infrastructure—fiber, materials science, manufacturing precision—built by a company whose competitive advantage rests on deeply embedded processes, tacit knowledge, and long-tenured expertise.
What made Corning’s fiber reinvention possible is that the company outsources almost nothing, Claudio Mazzali, Corning’s head of research. It even designs the machines used to manufacture its optical fiber and cable.
Weeks says this is part of the “Corning Way.” That self-containment also applies to the workforce, says the CEO. When the company shifts direction, it reassigns engineers rather than laying them off, so they accumulate expertise over decades, across different projects. “The things our engineers do, you can’t learn them from a textbook,” says Weeks.
After the onset of the pandemic, Corning endured six consecutive quarters of shrinking revenue, its lengthiest drop since the 2001 telecom crash. Instead of laying off workers and shrinking factories, the company gave employees the option to take some of their compensation in stock.
“We were probably carrying 4,000 to 5,000 more employees than our revenue could support,” says Weeks. Corning currently employs about 56,000 people worldwide.
Now that demand for fiber is booming, the company needs all of those workers and capacity, and more.
The very infrastructure enabling AI is a product of patient investment in people and capabilities.
The Common Thread
Both IBM and Corning illustrate something that short-term cost cutting misses:
- You cannot automate away institutional memory.
- You cannot replace decades of accumulated expertise overnight.
- You cannot build resilient businesses by hollowing out talent pipelines.
Many firms are responding to AI with hiring freezes, layoffs, or short-term margin management. But companies that have endured for a century or more tend to follow a different playbook: invest through cycles, cultivate deep expertise, and trust that talent compounds.
As we turn to board age trends and governance patterns, it’s worth asking:
Are boards encouraging long-term capability building or rewarding short-term labor optimization?
Because if IBM and Corning are any indication, the companies that win in the AI era may be the ones that never stopped betting on people in the first place.
Boards Talk About Diversity. Age Is the Exception.
Over the past five to six years, board diversity discussions centered on gender and race/ethnicity. Representation shifted. Disclosure expanded. Policies changed.
More recently, the language has evolved toward diversity of skills, backgrounds, and perspectives.
But when it comes to generational diversity, the data tell a different story. Across every major index, average director age has increased over the past decade:
The increase is gradual but consistent. More revealing than the averages is the shift in distribution.
The under-50 share has declined. The over-65 share has expanded meaningfully. Boards have refreshed, but not generationally.
Average tenure dipped modestly from 2016 through 2021 and has since stabilized around 7–8 years. The longest-tenured directors (15+ years) declined somewhat, but much of that shift moved into the 5–10 year band, not into younger cohorts. In other words, refreshment largely occurred within the same late-career demographic.
This Isn’t an Outlier, it’s a structural pattern, and recent board data reinforce this trend:
Spencer Stuart reports that new S&P 500 directors in 2025 averaged 59 years old, up from the prior year. Departing directors averaged nearly 69 years old with over a decade of tenure. Even “new blood” is often appointed close to age 60.
AllianceBernstein recently noted that just 5% of directors are under age 50. Generational breadth remains narrow.
Meanwhile, governance advisors send mixed signals. Many large-cap companies have mandatory retirement ages (often 72–75), but proxy advisors such as ISS generally oppose hard age limits, preferring board discretion and evaluation processes. The result: formal refreshment mechanisms exist, yet overall age composition continues to drift upward.
Why This Matters Now
This is not an argument against experience, but rather an argument about alignment. Boards today oversee AI deployment, digital transformation, shifting workforce expectations, and multi-generational consumer bases. They govern companies navigating profound technological and labor-market change. Yet fewer than 1 in 20 directors in some indices are under 50, while more than 40% are over 65.
If diversity of perspective and lived experience matters—and governance frameworks increasingly say it does—generational diversity logically belongs in that conversation.
Age influences risk appetite, technological fluency, labor philosophy, and capital allocation time horizons. It shapes how leaders interpret disruption.
What we’re reading:
- Being Black on Wall Street Has Gotten Tougher as DEI Disappears Getting hired at a leading Wall Street bank typically requires a top-tier education, an outsize effort and a fair bit of luck. Then, to move up the ranks, ambitious employees work grueling hours, relentlessly anticipate their clients’ needs and endlessly worry about rivals competing for the positions they’re eyeing. Being Black in an industry where almost everyone else is White only adds to the hurdles. (Bloomberg)
- Job Hunters Are So Desperate That They’re Paying to Get Recruited Landing a white-collar job is getting so tough that candidates—not companies—are paying recruiters to match them with positions. Through good economic times and bad, recruiters have usually operated the other way around: Companies pay them to find talent for tough-to-fill positions. Now, though, job seekers are hiring a new crop of what are called reverse recruiters to help them crack a competitive market. (Wall Street Journal)
- The great job situationship: Why workers stay in unfulfilling roles Job seekers are redefining their relationship status with their careers, and let’s just say many have wandering eyes. A recent Glassdoor Community poll found that 93% of workers say they’ve stayed in a job they didn’t love because of the stability it provided. In another survey, a combined 63% say their current relationship status with work is “it’s complicated,” or they are “ready to break up.”Welcome to the era of the job situationship, first attributed to Gen Z workers, but expanding across workplace generations, that can best be defined as a professional state where workplace culture and job satisfaction exist in a murky middle ground between commitment and calling it quits. (Glassdoor)
- CEO and C-Suite ESG Priorities for 2026 Drawing on The Conference Board® C-Suite Outlook 2026 global survey of business leaders, this report analyzes how CEOs and CSuite executives in Europe, North America, and globally are recalibrating environmental, social & governance (ESG) priorities for 2026 amid heightened disruption, uncertainty, and execution risk. (Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance)
- Rejection of Texas law blacklisting ‘woke’ BlackRock could challenge anti-ESG laws in other states A Texas judge’s move to strike down a state law blacklisting “woke” financial firms, including BlackRock, opens new tab and HSBC, that used environmental, social or governance factors in investment decisions will likely drive a broader push to repeal so-called “anti-ESG” laws in other states, analysts said. (Reuters)
- Frontline Workers Feel Valued at Work – but Left Behind on Benefits, New Study From Idealis Shows Frontline workers — the estimated 60–80% of the U.S. workforce who interact directly with customers, patients, products, and essential systems, report feeling more respected and a sense of dignity, than office-based employees, according to new research from idealis., a research-backed leadership advisory firm. At the same time however, the study finds frontline workers face substantial gaps in access to benefits, job security, and preparation for technological change. (Idealis)
- AI in the workplace is expanding responsibilities and intensifying work In a new eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a US-based tech company with about 200 employees, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business found that employees’ work intensified in three main ways. Employees multitasked more, took on a broader range of responsibilities, and worked longer hours, often without being asked to do so. (Business Insider)
- Support for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Remains High–but Only 50% of US Employees See Real Impact At a time when diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives face heightened scrutiny, new research from The Conference Board delivers a clear message: Despite broad support, 50% of US workers are unconvinced that current diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts improve their experience at work. (The Conference Board)
- Corporate America continues job cuts in 2026 in efficiency push The start of the year has seen massive layoffs across U.S. companies as they streamline operations amid rising adoption of artificial intelligence tools. (Reuters)
- Big Law’s Diversity Reckoning Fizzles as EEOC Ends Investigation A US agency said Monday it has ended an investigation of possible Big Law discrimination in hiring without action, acknowledging that most firms failed to comply with data requests. (Bloomberg Law) and Popular DEI Rule Paused Due to Federal Scrutiny, Depleted Funds Diversity Lab is pausing one of its core diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for law firms, the Mansfield Rule, amid federal scrutiny. The organization, which creates programs to encourage the hiring and retention of more minorities in the legal profession, is “furloughing most of our small team,” according to a Thursday email from the group’s founder Caren Ulrich Stacy, which was obtained by Bloomberg Law. Ulrich Stacy notified Mansfield Rule participants that Diversity Lab has suffered from the anti-DEI backlash from the Trump administration. (Bloomberg Law)