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ISSUE 12 · AI + COMPENSATION
Google Antigravity, and where gravity hits back
TL;DR
Antigravity is Google's answer to handing a whole job to an AI, and it sits in a different place from Claude Cowork. Where your pay data lives decides which of the two you can use. It’s September, and survey consolidation is the task it does well ahead of the season, and the free allowance runs out sooner than you'd plan around.
THE BREAKDOWN
What is “Antigravity”?
Someone in Range asked whether Google Antigravity is the same thing as Claude Cowork. It's a fair question, and I couldn't answer it in one line because I’m no AI guru, but I like to try out tools for comp and TR teams.
Antigravity is Google's tool for handing over a whole job and letting an AI work through the files on your own machine while you go and do something else. It replaced Gemini CLI, which stopped serving free, Pro and Ultra accounts on 18 June. There are four ways in now, including an extension that drops the same agent inside VS Code so nobody has to move house to try it, and it will happily run Anthropic's models next to Google's own.
What decides it against Cowork is where your files actually live. Cowork reaches into Drive, Gmail, Slack and Notion. Antigravity reaches into folders sitting on your laptop. So if your survey exports arrive by email and stay in Drive then Cowork can get at them, and if you download everything into a folder on your machine then Antigravity is already sitting where you work.
Survey consolidation is where it earns its afternoon. A dozen exports, all shaped differently, that have to become one master sheet before you can price anything. You point it at the folder and ask it in normal English to standardise the headers and convert everything to GBP, flagging any file that's missing a salary column. It shows you each step and asks before it changes anything.
The idea I'd steal is the timer. Since the end of July you can schedule a job with a ceiling on how long it may run, so a market data refresh that goes off every Monday before you're awake is waiting for you when you sit down. None of that is judgement work and none of it needs you present.
Mine ran out of free quota 49 documents into an 83 document job, with a counter telling us to come back in 166 hours. Reviewers have also caught it writing up results for commands that never actually ran, so a green tick is where your review starts. Real pay data goes through a paid, governed account or it doesn't go through at all (just a suggestion).
I've written the whole thing up, including what the free tier really gives you and the two rules I'd hold to before pointing it at anything.
ON THE RADAR
Employment in AI exposed work is 19% lower for the under 26s. Revelio Labs published its August workforce update on 3 September. Employment in the most AI exposed occupations sits about 6% below the least exposed since November 2022, and for workers aged 22 to 25 that gap is 19%. The US added 36,500 jobs in August, active postings fell 3% month over month to 18.3 million, and advertised salaries in new postings fell 3.4%. Read → the update
That 19% is a gap against the least exposed occupations, so it describes relative thinning at the entry level. Worth checking which of your own job families sit on the exposed side.
AI postings are now 6.3% of everything advertised in the US. Indeed's Hiring Lab snapshot, 24 August. That share peaked at 3.3% in 2022, and Indeed counts a posting as AI related if it mentions machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence, generative AI, large language models or Chat GPT. Its overall postings index sat at 101.8 on 14 August, a little above where it was before the pandemic. Read → the snapshot
That keyword list is doing a lot of the work. A good share of those postings are asking for an analyst who has heard of Copilot, which is a pay question more than an AI one.
Only 4% of firms have laid anyone off because of AI. The New York Fed published its August survey on 1 September. 61% of service firms in its district now use AI, up from 40% last year and 25% in 2024, and manufacturers roughly doubled to 51%. About 15% of service firms hired fewer people than they otherwise would have and about 13% hired more. Just over a third are retraining staff. Read → the survey
Sits awkwardly next to the item above it, and both are probably right. Nobody's being made redundant, the door is just opening less often. The retraining number is the one that lands on your job architecture.
If you've already pointed one of these agents at a folder of survey exports, I'd like to know what it got wrong. Hit reply.
RECENT EDITIONS
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 Until next week, Giac |
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