Relias, which offers training and administrative platforms to health care workers, had created more than 300 local jobs and retained more than 300 others under its 2016 state job development investment grant, which ultimately gave the company $1.3 million in North Carolina tax benefits. To keep this grant alive, however, Relias had to have filled 423 new positions by 2024, a total the company says it couldn’t reach as it adopted new technologies.
“In 2024, we, like many businesses in the area, began growing in our usage in the exciting area of generative AI, with a focus on automation, efficiency and innovation,” Nicole Matteson, Relias’s vice president of human resources, wrote in a February 2025 letter to the N.C. Department of Revenue.
Matteson later stated Relias had identified “areas where Artificial Intelligence could optimize our work product” in explaining reductions to certain technology roles.
The North Carolina Economic Investment Committee voted to cancel the company’s grant during a March 3 meeting in Raleigh.
“North Carolina remains central to our business strategy,” Relias spokesperson Anna Nolte wrote last week in an email to The News & Observer. She said her company currently has 838 U.S. employees, a 62% increase since 2016.
In addition to AI, Nolte noted Relias began permitting more remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic, leading some workers to relocate outside the state, which would make them ineligible toward the grant requirements. Yet she said more than 75% of the company’s workforce still resides in the Triangle.
AI DISRUPTS TRIANGLE TECH HIRES
Founded in 2012, Relias grew rapidly last decade from its original Cary headquarters. The company went from having fewer than 20 employees to almost 300 in the years before its major expansion announcement, as it offered online training services to nurses, social workers and other staff. Relias has since grown its lineup of health care solutions to include recruitment, performance measures and public relations.
Now, improving AI tools from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have tech employers across the Triangle and beyond reexamining their workforce plans. “I don’t think there’s any question that if you’re searching for an entry-level job in software development or (in the) financial activity sector or professional business services, that it’s a lot harder right now than it was two years ago,” Laura Ullrich, economic director at the employment website Indeed, told The N&O last fall.
A few months later, Anthropic’s public release of its Claude Code platform ignited new questions about the future of software development in the AI age.
“I hired a lead engineer who told me seven months ago that based on our company’s growth, he would need a team of at least two, three, four (people) by now,” Chip Kennedy, founder of the Raleigh AI voice startup CivicReach, told The N&O in January. “A month ago, because of the progression with Claude Code, because of how we’re using AI to assist in our product building, he said that was no longer necessary.”
IBM, a major and historically significant Triangle employer, has reduced its global headcount in recent years as it invests more in AI. And on Friday, three days after North Carolina terminated its Relias grant, the California financial technology company Block announced it would lay off 4,000 workers as it intended to use artificial intelligence to complete more tasks.
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