Beverage and syrup company Torani hasn’t laid off a single employee since the Great Depression. Not in 2008, not during globalization or the automation wave that gutted American manufacturing towns, and not during the pandemic that shut the cafes that buy most of its flavored syrups.
Now, as generative and agentic AI reshape entry-level work in corporate America, Melanie Dulbecco—who has run the 101-year-old, San Leandro, California-based syrup maker for 35 years—is wrestling with the same question facing executives everywhere: How can she adopt technology that could theoretically replace employees’ work? But Dulbecco has an extra consideration, and that’s navigating the AI age without breaking Torani’s no-layoffs streak.
