After Sergi Bastardas’ decade at Amazon and floriculture startup Colvin, one thing always stood out  — the feeling that there wasn’t enough efficient “human infrastructure” to manage the workers behind the scenes. He took this feeling and, in 2025, alongside his co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, launched Orbio, an enterprise startup that helps businesses manage frontline workers — using AI agents, of course. 

On Monday, the company announced a $21 million Series A in a round led by Dawn Capital. The startup says its customers already include Poke and YUM! Brands (owners of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC), to onboard and manage their frontline employees. Bastardas said customers are progressing from using Orbio in pilot to now fully deploying the software. As an example, he said that at behavioral health provider The Stepping Stones Group, Orbio now runs the company’s full US operation, with 20% more candidates making it through to get hired

The Orbio agents (Maria, Daniel, and Claire) can interview candidates, assess fit, monitor employee output, and conduct daily check-ins throughout an employee’s work lifecycle. The goal is to help businesses run their workforces autonomously, Bastardas said, adding that businesses will be able to engage and support the frontline workforces while also delegating some workforce operations to AI agents. 

“Each agent generates data that feeds back into the others: onboarding signals inform recruiting quality; exit interviews reveal why employees leave, which recalibrates hiring criteria; engagement data identifies retention risks,” he continued. 

Orbio competes with several startups — such as Paradox, which helps automate recruiting, and WorkJam, which helps manage frontline employees. 

Bastardas considers Orbio’s biggest competitor to be the legacy approach, however, to how frontline workers are managed (especially in industries like healthcare, retail, and logistics) — a fragmented process that sometimes still involves spreadsheets and phone calls. All of this is changing rapidly, however, in the age of AI. Orbio has raised $26 million in funding to date from investors, including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures. Bastardas said the fresh capital will be used to hire and develop more AI agents. 

“This will be [a] transformation for businesses, but also the workforce,” Bastardas said. “The 2.7 billion people who keep healthcare, retail, logistics, and hospitality running, most of whom don’t have a corporate email address, have previously got nothing. This is their AI moment.” 

Something strange is happening in tech right now. Companies are posting record profits and revenue while laying off tens of thousands of people, citing AI as the official explanation. So far this year, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech companies this year, affecting nearly 150,000 people — a pace of about 974 people per day, 44% faster than last year — according to TrueUp, a tech job board and recruiting platform that also runs one of the most widely cited tech layoff trackers.

The trend appears to be accelerating. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years last month, with nearly 40,000 cuts, and AI was the most-cited reason for layoffs across every industry for the third month running, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas.

There’s growing skepticism that AI is really the culprit, though — that it’s more of a convenient cover story than the actual cause. Few examples illustrate the pushback better than what happened at the payments outfit Block earlier this year. After getting hammered over laying off nearly half the company earlier this year, Jack Dorsey denied the cuts were a sign of trouble, insisting instead that AI tools “are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” But pressed by commenters on X about the bloat he’d created during the pandemic, Dorsey later acknowledged that Block had, in fact, over-hired.

Other voices have also begun to weigh in, including famed VC Marc Andreessen, who recently called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are really about pandemic-era overhiring. In conversation with podcaster-investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen said, “Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It’s at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%. Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.”

What makes this combustible is that at the very moment that tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming wealthy on a scale that’s hard to comprehend.

Early last month, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems closed its first day on the Nasdaq up 68% from its $185 IPO price, giving the chipmaker a market cap of roughly $67 billion — the largest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s 2020 debut. By the close, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie were billionaires. (The company’s shares have since fallen 30%.)

SpaceX meanwhile went public on Friday and enjoys, as of this writing, a $2.1 trillion market cap, turning Musk into a paper trillionaire and potentially minting an estimated 4,400 millionaires, and around 400 centimillionaires in the process — assuming the shares don’t fall. Anthropic and OpenAI are quickly inching toward the public market, too, both at valuations of roughly $1 trillion or more.

The effects are showing up closer to home, too. In San Francisco — now home to dozens of AI companies, including the big AI labs — high-end homes are routinely selling for millions of dollars over asking price.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. In early March, he purchased a $170 million mansion on Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker,” setting the all-time record for the most expensive home sale in Miami-Dade County history. Two months later, Meta announced it would lay off 8,000 people, or roughly 10% of its workforce.

Tech titans routinely shell out jaw-dropping sums on their real estate portfolios. But these extremes come at a moment when many Americans are getting squeezed harder than they have been in years.

Consider that workers with employer-sponsored health insurance face premium increases of about 6% to 7% this year, more than double the rate of inflation, the cost of private health insurance has roughly doubled since 2008, and median home prices have climbed 28% since early 2020, while mortgage rates have nearly doubled.

In a January 2026 New York Times/Siena poll, 65% of voters said a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach, and a more recent poll found 76% of Americans now name cost of living as their top economic concern, up sharply from 58% a year earlier.

This is about more than job losses in isolation, in short. It’s tens of thousands of laid-off tech workers hitting an unusually unforgiving cost environment at the same time that tens of thousands of AI insiders are seeing once-in-a-generation paper wealth materialize, and being told that AI is why they’re out of a job. Whether or not that’s the real explanation — many economists point instead to tariffs, war in the Middle East, and broader economic uncertainty as the actual drivers of corporate caution — the optics are what they are. One group is getting unfathomably rich off the advancements that are supposedly replacing the other.

It isn’t hard to find a precedent for what happens when that divide gets wide enough. In 2008, a financial crisis that began with loose lending and over-the-top risk-taking on Wall Street ended with bailouts for the banks that caused it, while millions of Americans lost jobs and homes in the Great Recession that followed. Three years later, that anger crystallized into Occupy Wall Street.

That movement could look quaint in comparison if the current trajectory holds. Occupy Wall Street emerged from a crisis and the public anger was, at its core, about who paid for the cleanup. This time, there’s no crash to point to. Companies are profitable, AI itself is minting a new class of overnight fortunes, and the layoffs are happening anyway, with AI cited as the driver. If the optics of 2008 were, “We’re bailing out the people who broke the economy while you lose your job,” the optics here could end up being, “We’re getting richer than ever off the very tech we’re using to replace you.”

Many companies — Block, Atlassian, Cloudflare, among them — have watched their stocks surge when they point to AI as the reason for cuts, so the strategy makes sense on its face. Still, they might want to consider whether that’s really the message they want to send to the people they’re laying off, and to everyone else now watching.

I work from home, so I typically listen to audio through headphones or AirPods. But I’ve always wanted a desk speaker that doesn’t take up too much space, which made the new Sonos Play a fitting first Sonos product to review.

The Play, launched in March, is Sonos’s first new device in more than a year. The $299 speaker is a hybrid: part home speaker, part portable. It sits on your desk in a pill-shaped dock, but at 1.3 kilograms, with a “utility loop” on the back, it’s easy to carry around the house or take outside.

While testing it, I often started a podcast at my desk and carried the Play to the kitchen while I cooked or made coffee. The advantage over wearing AirPods is that you remain aware of your surroundings — no more missing what someone across the room is saying. And you don’t need to rely on voice commands to control playback; the Sonos Assistant and Alexa are both built in.

Physical controls are another advantage. Skipping tracks or adjusting volume with greasy hands is awkward on AirPods; the Play’s buttons are more forgiving. That said, the controls themselves are easy to miss — they’re the same color as the silicone top and barely raised above the surface. After a few days I had memorized their positions, but the learning curve is a minor frustration that better contrast or more tactile buttons could have avoided.

The speaker is sturdy and IP67-rated, meaning it can handle rain and brief submersion — I ran it under a tap without issue. It can also charge your phone in a pinch, doubling as a power bank, which is a welcome feature for outdoor use.

For sound, the Play relies on dual-angled tweeters, a mid-woofer, and three digital amplifiers, with two passive radiators to reinforce bass outdoors. The result is balanced and detailed at moderate volumes — instrument separation is particularly good. The soundstage is narrow, though, meaning the music can feel somewhat contained rather than expansive, and at higher volumes the mix loses some of its clarity.

The Play is well-suited to a desk or a patio; it isn’t trying to fill a room. For that, Sonos’s Era 100 SL — which launched alongside the Play — is the better choice. Two Play units can be paired into a stereo configuration, either through the app or, more cleverly, by holding the play/pause button on both speakers simultaneously. It’s a useful feature that makes a noticeable difference for music, though less so for television audio — which these speakers aren’t really designed for anyway.

Sonos has also built in Trueplay, which uses the speaker’s microphones to automatically calibrate sound based on the room. Earlier versions of this feature required waving your phone around the space to tune the audio — an awkward workaround that would have made little sense on a portable speaker. The new implementation handles it automatically.

Sonos has had well-publicized struggles with its app — disappearing speakers, glitchy volume controls — and while the company has made meaningful improvements, a few rough edges remain. Sync between the Play and my MacBook was occasionally laggy, for example, and playing or pausing audio on YouTube sometimes produced a noticeable delay before the speaker responded.

Switching audio between speakers worked reliably through AirPlay but failed repeatedly in the Sonos app until I installed the Apple Music integration — and even then, the process is more cumbersome than it should be.

The “Apply” button in the Sonos app, required to confirm speaker changes, feels like an unnecessary extra step. AirPlay handles the same action with a single tap.

Pocket Casts integration has a resuming bug: podcasts restart from the beginning rather than picking up where you left off.

Overall, the Sonos Play is a solid speaker that largely delivers on its premise. The app issues are real but not dealbreakers, and Sonos has shown it is willing to iterate. If portability isn’t a priority, the Era 100 ($219) or Era 100 SL ($189) offer more volume for less money. If you want something more rugged and truly portable, the Sonos Roam 2 or JBL Charge 6 are worth considering. But if you want a speaker that works equally well on a desk and a back porch, the Play makes a convincing case for itself.