The Boss Has a Message: Use AI or You're Fired (www.wsj.com)

A growing number of employers are making generative AI tools mandatory and tying employees’ willingness and ability to use them to performance reviews and, in some cases, job security. The story highlights a shift from optional experimentation to explicit workplace expectations: managers want faster output, standardized drafting and decision support, and see AI fluency as a measurable productivity skill. That push is accelerating adoption but also stirring resistance and ethical concerns among workers and labor advocates. For the AI/ML community this matters because it changes the deployment and governance bar. Companies must now provide reliable, auditable models and guardrails—enterprise-grade LLMs or hosted APIs, prompt engineering guidelines, access controls, data-loss prevention, and human-in-the-loop review—to avoid hallucinations, bias, IP leaks and legal exposure. It raises technical priorities like integration, model monitoring, provenance tracking, watermarking outputs, and user training. The trend also intensifies pressure to produce explainable, robust systems and to measure AI-driven productivity fairly, making governance, tooling and upskilling central to responsible, scalable adoption.