09/02/2026
This detail from September's Snelling workforce brief stands out: Starbucks rolled out an AI inventory system across more than 11,000 locations, and employees ended up scanning shelves for the AI, then counting everything again by hand because the numbers didn't match. Nine months later, the company reverted to manual counting entirely.
That's not really a story about a bad algorithm. Research tied to RAND puts enterprise AI failure rates above 80%, and the reasons are overwhelmingly organizational, not technical. Somebody has to staff the gap between what a rollout promises and what it actually delivers on day one, and most companies don't plan for that gap at all.
The same pattern runs through the rest of this month's articles. E-commerce fulfillment teams now get as little as three weeks' notice before a platform reshuffles a major sales event, which means a staffing plan that only works with months of lead time isn't a plan. Biogas investment topped $2 billion last year with no established technician credential or school pipeline to supply the industry, so the workforce has to be found among people already doing adjacent work under a different job title. Even IT hiring runs into this: job descriptions built for the last person in the seat routinely describe a role that no longer exists.
The common denominator across all of it: plan for the messy middle, not just the finished state. Worth your time if you're building a workforce strategy that has to flex:
This month's Snelling Workforce Brief looks at the hiring market behind U.S.
