When General Motors cut 600 IT roles last week, the company reached for a careful phrase. It called the move a “deliberate skills swap,” and said the plan is to replace those 600 people with a smaller number of AI-native workers. Meta ran a similar strategy the same week. It cut as many as 8,000 roles and froze another 6,000 it had been hiring for, under the internal banner of an “AI efficiency push.” If you have spent 20 or more years inside a large company, two words in there strike harder...
10 days ago • 2 min read
Last week, OpenAI launched something called The Deployment Company. A $4 billion vehicle backed by TPG and Bain Capital. The same week, Anthropic launched a $1.5 billion version of the same thing with Blackstone. Both are buying the same role at scale: forward-deployed engineers. Engineers who physically embed inside PE-backed companies for weeks or months, learn the workflows, and rebuild them around AI agents. The model is borrowed from Palantir. You do not sell software from headquarters....
18 days ago • 3 min read
In recent weeks, a senior executive has told me some version of the same thing. They cannot keep up with AI. The newsletters they are subscribed to. The articles they have not read. The tools they should know about. The people they should be following. The shape of it is always the same. They feel buried, and the harder they try to keep up, the further behind they feel. If accomplished professionals with 20+ years of corporate experience are quietly admitting they cannot keep up, you can stop...
25 days ago • 3 min read
You have been telling yourself you cannot leave corporate because you do not know how to sell yourself. Until last week, that was a fair excuse. OpenAI shipped a sales assistant agent inside ChatGPT. Account research, meeting prep, pipeline planning, follow-up sequences, the work that used to live in a corporate sales operations team. Any non-technical user can deploy it in fifteen minutes. It costs the price of a gym membership. The corporate sales team you never had as an independent is now...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Something Cameron Adams, co-founder of Canva, said this week has been running through my head. He said the quiet part out loud: as AI makes everyone “good,” judgment is what separates the greats. He was talking about design. I think he was describing you. A version of this fear shows up in almost every strategy session I run. An executive with 20 plus years in finance, pharma, consulting, law or tech will tell me they are worried their expertise is getting commoditized. Every junior hire can...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
A couple of weeks I ran a deep dive session with a senior leader who had spent more than a year building what he believes is a transformational program. Decades of expertise behind it. A proprietary methodology he developed across a career most people would envy. A deep, thoughtful product that he described, without exaggeration, as his life's work. Revenue to date: zero. When I asked him how many people had paid, he said "nobody." When I asked why, he said he had invited people from his...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Last week, a story broke that stopped me mid-scroll. A guy named Matthew Gallagher launched a telehealth company from his apartment in LA. Twenty thousand dollars. Two months of building. He used ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and a handful of other AI tools to replace an entire corporate workforce. Year one revenue: $401 million. Year two projection: $1.8 billion. His team is him, his brother, and a few contractors. Sam Altman predicted this two years ago. He said the first solo billion-dollar...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Last week, Uber's CEO went on a podcast and said something that executives almost never say in public. He admitted that he has personally heard leaders privately acknowledge the true scale of AI disruption, and then watched those same people go on television and tell audiences that everything will work out fine. His own estimate: AI will replace the work of 70 to 80 percent of humans in knowledge jobs within this decade. The same week, the US CEO of PwC told the Financial Times that any...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
The firms you spent your career inside are about to have a very bad decade. For 30 years, professional services ran on one model: smart people billing hours. The more complex the problem, the more hours it took, the more the client paid. Your entire career was built on this logic. Your compensation, your promotions, your sense of professional value, all of it tied to how many hours your expertise could justify. AI just broke that equation. When a project that used to take a team 10 hours can...
2 months ago • 4 min read