Axios

It's the final day of work for more than 300 employees at Carrier's Indianapolis plant, a facility that rose to national prominence after then-candidate Trump criticised Carrier's plans to close it and ship production to Mexico. The administration reached a deal to keep 1,069 jobs at the plant for 10 years, in exchange for $7 million in incentives. But the company is moving forward with plans to move other jobs to Mexico while also investing in new labor-saving technologies.

Why it matters: The Trump Administration scored a PR victory when it won Carrier's promise to keep some jobs in Indiana, but it hasn't implemented policies, like aggressive new tariffs, that would cause multinational corporations to reconsider efforts to save money through offshoring.

Usual weekly earnings for workers at the lowest 10% of the pay scale rose by 3.2% in the second quarter from a year earlier, faster than at any point since the start of the recovery and faster than pay gains in the middle and top of the income spectrum, per the Wall Street Journal.

Why it's happening now: The unemployment rate continued to decline over the past year, from 4.9% to 4.4%, but it fell even faster for low-income workers, from 7.5% to 6.4%. Another factor is likely higher minimum wages across the country, as wage floors have increased in 19 states since the beginning of the year.

A welcome change: The bottom 10% of earners have only risen 12.5% since 2009, which hasn't been enough to keep up with inflation. Wages for the top 10% of earners, on the other hand, have gone up nearly 20% during that period.

The BBC published the salaries of its highest-paid stars today after the British government pushed the publicly-funded media corporation to disclose the previously confidential information, per the AP.

• The big thing: Women and ethnic minorities make substantially less than their white male counterparts. For example, its top-earning news anchor Huw Edwards brings in over £550k (about $718k) while his female counterpart Fiona Bruce makes about £200k (about $261k) less.
• The top earner: Radio presenter and former Top Gear host Chris Evans at £2.2 million ($2.87 million).
• Point of comparison: The amounts earned by BBC talent are notably less than their American counterparts. Matt Lauer makes about $25 million annually at NBC — and its deal with Megyn Kelly earlier this year reportedly came in somewhere between $15 million and $20 million, according to Forbes.

Software companies are seeking to exploit the current artificial intelligence craze by "AI washing" — exaggerating the role of AI in their products, according to a new report by Gartner, the research firm.

Gartner, which tracks commercial manias through a tool it calls the Hype Cycle, compares what is currently going on in AI with a prior surge in environmental over-statement — "greenwashing, in which companies exaggerate the environmental-friendliness of their products or practices for business benefit."

The bottom line: More than 1,000 vendors say their products employ AI, but many are "applying the AI label a little too indiscriminately," Gartner says in its report. Kriti Sharma, who runs the AI team at Sage, tells Axios that a lot of companies are seeking to solve problems using AI that would be better done by humans. And what is often called AI "is just automation that you are doing," she said.

Google's much-touted Glass technology failed to gain traction with consumers, but the company says it has given the computerized spectacles new life as a business tool. The tech giant says it used a lightened up, clip-on version in a two-year beta test of "Glass Enterprise Edition," and that it's now going commercial with them.

They are less creepy: In a blog post, Google shows workers wearing a far less-clunky version of Glass than the weird ones that co-founder Sergei Brin frequently sported when he ballyhooed the product in 2013. Google says workers wearing the new Glass can view instructions for what to do next right in their line of sight rather than stopping what they are doing to consult a laptop or an instruction manual. Google's website lists about three dozen beta customers, and says some have improved the efficiency of tasks by 25%.

Shift, an online marketplace for used cars, has raised $38 million in Series C funding led by BMW iVentures.

Industry view: Shift's latest funding comes within months of rival Beepi shutting down (after raising $150 million), and Carvana going public and trading well. "I think it's nothing but good news for Shift because we have a very clear comp" in the public market, Shift CEO George Arison told Axios. "The beauty of this industry is that it's not a winner-take-all situation."

N.Y. Times TV Critic James Poniewozik, "Watching 'Fox & Friends,' Trump Sees a Two-Way Mirror":

"'Fox & Friends,' the three-hour wake-up program on Fox News, is an interactive magic mirror for Donald J. Trump. President Trump is the show's subject, its programmer, its publicist and its virtual fourth host. The stars offer him flattery, encouragement and advice.

"When he tweets, his words and image appear on a giant video wall. It's the illusion of children's TV — that your favorite show is as aware of you as you are of it — except that for Mr. Trump, it's real."

Corporate America has become ever more concentrated over the past two decades, and its monopoly power is killing the incentive for large companies to invest in the economy, according to new research from NYU's Stern School of Business.

• The paper's authors assert a cause-and-effect relationship between a widespread increase in large company monopolies and a decrease in investment in new technologies, plants, and equipment by those same monopoly companies.
• Economists have been confounded by a dearth of corporate investment in the economy for years, since high profits and low interest rates should encourage more investment. But if companies feel they are protected from competition by their sheer size, they needn't continue to invest to maintain high profits.
• Why this is bad for U.S. workers: Weak corporate investment holds back GDP growth and stunts wage growth. When corporations invest in new technologies, they tend to raise productivity, enabling workers to demand higher pay.

Political, business and technology leaders are turning their attention to the rapidly changing workforce, but they are only beginning to understand what the future of employment looks like and what matters most to workers, several acknowledged at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen.

Why it matters: Our ability to make employment transitions as painless as possible will hinge on our ability to get ahead of these trends. Apparently, we have a long way to go.

What workers care about: Contrary to popular assumptions, most American workers are more concerned about having a stable and consistent income than making more money, said DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, whose company employs independent contractors to make food deliveries.