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 employee who thinks they can opt out of AI "is not going to be here that long." PwC cut 5,600 staff last year. They are already shifting tax and consulting services into AI-powered tools that operate without a human in the loop.

The people saying this are running the companies your peers work at.

The part that bothers me is that none of this is new information to the people making decisions inside large organizations. The gap between what executives say privately and what they say publicly has been growing for at least two years. What changed is that the gap got too wide to maintain. When you have to get on quarterly earnings calls and explain why headcount is dropping while output is rising, the script starts to fall apart.

The acceleration underneath these statements is real. OpenAI created an internal framework for tracking progress toward human-level AI. They defined five levels. Level one was chatbots. Level two was reasoning. Level three was agents. Level four was innovators, AI that aids in invention. Level five was AI that does the work of an organization.

In the summer of 2024, they told employees they were at level one. Twenty months later, we are entering level four. That is a timeline nobody predicted, including the people building it.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have significantly more powerful models finishing training right now. Anthropic accidentally leaked details of a model they describe as "a step change" over anything they have released. OpenAI's CEO told staff he expects their next model to "accelerate the economy" within weeks. All of this is happening right now, spring 2026.

For someone sitting in a corporate role right now, planning a transition in the next 3 to 6 months, this creates a strange situation. You are making one of the biggest decisions of your career based on a snapshot of technology that will look primitive by the time you launch.

Most people miss the fact that this actually favors experienced professionals.

Every new model makes it easier for one person with deep expertise to do the work that used to require a team. The entry-level employees whose tactical work, the research, the admin, the first drafts, can now be done by prompting a system face the greatest risk. The layer above them, the people who know what good looks like, who can frame problems clearly, who understand how industries actually work, those people become more valuable. But only if they learn to build with these tools instead of around them.

A friend of mine told me a story over golf last week that blew my mind. One of her former colleagues built a business idea over a weekend. He used AI to develop the MVP in two weeks. He submitted his project to Y Combinator at the last minute, got accepted, got funded, and is now moving to Silicon Valley. From idea to venture-backed company in less than a month.

That kind of speed used to be impossible. Now it is becoming normal. And it raises an uncomfortable question for anyone with 20+ years of deep expertise who has been sitting on a business idea for months: if someone can go from zero to funded in weeks, what is stopping you?

The answer, almost always, is that experienced professionals have been building with the wrong tools or no tools at all. They treat AI as a faster email writer instead of the infrastructure for an entire practice. The ones who figure that out are collapsing timelines that used to stretch across years into weeks.

The professionals who are building the strongest independent practices right now share three things.

1. They have deep domain expertise that took years to develop.
2. They have learned to use AI as infrastructure for their business, not as a faster email writer.
3. And they moved while they still had corporate income, a corporate network, and corporate credibility to build on.

The ones who wait until they are pushed out start from a weaker position every time.

The PwC CEO was blunt. The Uber CEO was blunt. Your own leadership probably knows what they know. The difference is whether you hear it now and act on it, or hear it in 12 months during a restructuring conversation you did not see coming.

Warmly,

Salama

P.S. If you are planning your move out of corporate in the next 3 to 6 months and want a clear first step, I set aside time each week for 15-minute strategy sessions. No pitch, no pressure. We map out where you are and what your next move looks like. Apply here.