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...
9 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...
16 days 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...
23 days 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...
29 days 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 1 month 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 1 month 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...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Last Tuesday, Atlassian fired 1,600 people. That is roughly 10% of the entire company. More than half of them were engineers. The reason they gave was simple: AI. This was not a struggling company. Atlassian's cloud revenue hit over a billion dollars last quarter, up 26% year over year. They are growing, profitable, and doing well by every financial measure that matters. The stock went up on the news. Let that sit for a moment. The market rewarded them for cutting 1,600 jobs. Just like it...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Last month, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history. $110 billion. Amazon alone put in $50 billion. Nvidia added $30 billion. The valuation hit $840 billion. Then, quietly, in the same week, OpenAI admitted something that should have gotten far more attention than it did. They said AI has not actually penetrated enterprise business processes. Not "has not fully penetrated." Has not penetrated. Their words. Despite the funding, the headlines, the breathless LinkedIn posts...
2 months ago • 5 min read