Whisper While You Work

On Friday’s jobs report and the new sound of the office.

Friday’s numbers

The April jobs report dropped Friday morning. Nonfarm payrolls grew by 115,000, the unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent, and the gains were concentrated in health care, transportation and warehousing, and retail trade. Federal employment kept declining.

The number worth sitting with isn’t in the gainers list. It’s in the information sector, which lost another 13,000 jobs in April and has now shed 342,000 jobs (11%) since its peak in November 2022. The sub-sectors leading the decline are the ones you’d expect to be most exposed to AI: data processing, web hosting, computing infrastructure. Professional and business services and financial activities held flat.

A lot of organizations are pointing to AI efficiencies as the reason for these cuts. Some of that is real. Some of it is post-pandemic over-hiring catching up with itself, and AI makes a convenient justification for moves that were coming anyway.

We believe that once organizations start genuinely restructuring around what AI can do, white-collar employment grows. New roles will appear that we can’t predict from here. NICH is a small example. We’ve shifted to an agentic agency model, and AI tools have made us way more effective at the work. We’re also busier than we’ve ever been, because we can take on work we couldn’t have handled a year ago.

April 2026 Employment Situation, BLS

Sounds of Our Studio

Over the past year, the sound of the NICH Studio has changed. Known for having killer playlists, we’ve always had the tunes flowing through the Sonos from the minute we walk in until the last person leaves. But then the whispering started.

Now we are careful with our music, no words allowed, hence the popularity of Jackie Gleason (look it up). Why? Because the main thing you hear now is people mostly having one-sided conversations with their laptops. Pauses, half-words, the occasional “no, scratch that.” It’s not Zoom calls, we’re using Wispr Flow, an AI dictation tool that lets you talk instead of type. We’ve been “voicepilled”.

Wispr is faster than typing for almost everything we do: drafting emails, working through ideas, and prompting our other AI tools. It also feels slightly absurd. For most of my working life, voice was the thing you used when you wanted to talk to another person. There was a stint in the early 2000’s when I broke both wrists at the same time, and I got set up with Dragon dictation. It was difficult to use and took up more time correcting than if I just pecked along with one finger. It lasted a week.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on this trend over the weekend, with the headline calling it “way more annoying” than typing. This got us thinking about how this is a glimpse into what offices are going to sound like for the rest of the decade and possibly beyond.

When I started working in corporate America in 1998, the building materials industry ran on fax machines. You’d watch a sheet of paper feed into a machine that screamed dial tones at another machine somewhere across the country, and you’d wait for the confirmation slip to print so you knew it landed. The sound of an office in 1998 was the fax line warming up and the answering machine on someone’s desk blinking red.

It would feel strange now, but it felt very normal at the time. If you described that workflow to someone from 1978, they would have laughed at you. You feed paper into a phone?

Whispering to a laptop would probably feel strange in most workspaces today. But we can assure you, it’s fast, efficient, and addictive. In a couple of years, nobody is going to think twice about it, the same way nobody thinks twice about being on a video call with someone sitting in the same room.

Every team we’re working with is figuring out which work is worth doing the human way and which is worth handing to AI. The voice question is just the most audible version of that conversation.

In 1998, nobody knew the fax machine was about to disappear. Right now, somewhere in your office, someone is figuring out how to talk to their laptop without making everyone else feel weird. That person is telling you something about the 2028 office environment.

Links

Typing Is Being Replaced by Whispering—and It’s Way More Annoying Workspaces are starting to resemble high-end call centers, only these employees are talking to AI; ‘it’s just a little awkward’

CEOs Are Reshaping the C-Suite for the AI Era (IBM) IBM’s research on how CEOs are restructuring executive teams around AI, with examples of new and merged roles.