Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

June 19, 2026: Anthropic's Fable 5 shutdown appears to be tied to SK Telecom, Project Glasswing, Amazon researchers, the White House, David Sacks, and a dispute over whether Anthropic should fix or de-deploy the model. Fortune 500 companies just hit record revenue, profit, revenue per employee, and profit per employee while shrinking headcount for the second year in a row, raising a bigger question about productivity gains without job growth. New data from LV8 founder Griffin Hadrill shows AI-generated creative ads are underperforming human-made ads by 3 to 5 times, which is a reminder that originality, emotional connection, and human judgment still matter.

June 18, 2026: Companies are starting to count the real cost of AI after two years of broad experimentation, from rising token bills to the higher wage premiums commanded by AI-skilled workers. Then I look at Senator Ruben Gallego's push to investigate ghost jobs and whether AI-powered hiring platforms are distorting the labor data policymakers rely on. Finally, I break down Wall Street's hiring dilemma: AI can automate junior-level work, but it cannot replace the apprenticeship that develops future rainmakers, dealmakers, and senior leaders.

June 17, 2026: Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Mythos models were pulled after a government directive raised concerns about jailbreak risks, creating a wake-up call for companies building critical workflows on frontier AI models they don't actually control. Then I get into Meta's AI transformation struggles, including layoffs, employee reassignments, low morale, surveillance concerns, and what leaders can learn from one of the most visible AI change-management failures so far. Finally, I break down PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which shows that AI isn't collapsing the labor market but splitting it into two tracks: roles where AI increases the value of human judgment, and roles where AI makes work easier for non-experts to perform.

Kelle Fontenot, Chief Digital Officer at KPMG, joins me to talk about how one of the world's largest professional services firms is embedding AI into the way work gets done. Kelle shares how KPMG is approaching enterprise AI adoption through its AIQ program, why AI requires close partnership between digital, HR, technology, and the business, and what it takes to drive change across 250,000 people globally. We also get into the realities of AI adoption inside a large, highly regulated organization: digital teammates, AI agents, tool overload, trust, security, and why traditional training alone doesn't change behavior. Kelle offers a practical look at how leaders can move beyond experimenting with AI and start making it part of the everyday flow of work without losing human judgment along the way.

June 12, 2026: SpaceX made history with the largest IPO ever recorded, raising $75 billion in its NASDAQ debut and instantly becoming one of the most valuable companies in the United States. But under the hood, this isn't just a rocket company anymore. It's a bet on Starlink, reusable rockets, and xAI's massive AI infrastructure. Then I get into the first-ever appearance of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind leaders at the G7 Summit, and what it means when the most powerful AI companies in the world are now part of global policy conversations. Finally, I break down Jeff Bezos' $12 billion raise for Prometheus, a new company building an "artificial general engineer" that could reshape manufacturing, aerospace, pharma, defense, and the future of high-skill knowledge work.

June 10, 2026: Palantir CEO Alex Karp is warning tech leaders that bragging about AI-driven layoffs is a major political mistake and could fuel backlash against the entire industry. Then I get into a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that 53% of Americans fear AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, which means AI job anxiety is no longer a fringe concern. Finally, I break down the "great flattening," with new data showing that 41% of employees say their companies trimmed management layers last year, and why eliminating too much middle management could create a serious leadership pipeline problem for the future.

June 9, 2026: Meta is investing $115 million into America's Workforce Academy to train electricians, welders, plumbers, fiber technicians, and other skilled tradespeople for the AI infrastructure boom. This isn't charity, it's a talent pipeline for the data centers, wiring, fiber, and physical systems AI depends on. Then I get into Anthropic's release of Claude Fable 5, its most powerful publicly available AI model yet, and what it means for trust, accuracy, pricing, and accountability as AI moves deeper into business operations.

We have all worked at a place where we felt like just another number in a spreadsheet. It is incredibly frustrating when you offer feedback that seems to vanish into a black hole of corporate bureaucracy. But what if your company actually treated your voice like a strategic roadmap for the future? In this episode, DJ Casto, the EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at Synchrony, joins us to explore how his team transformed their culture to become the number one best place to work in 2026. DJ shares the secrets behind their decade-long journey of separation from GE Capital and how they climbed the rankings by anchoring their identity in the concept of trust. We dive deep into their philosophy of co-creation, where active listening through quarterly pulse surveys and roundtables allows employees to directly design the culture they want to inhabit. Discover how Synchrony applies agile software principles to HR by launching minimal viable products for benefits like personalized wellness coaches and on-site therapists to see what truly resonates with the workforce. We also tackle the modern challenge of AI, moving past the doom and gloom to discuss how technology can actually unlock human creativity and fulfill more enriched roles. You'll learn how to foster employee accountability through a focus on critical experiences rather than rigid job paths. This episode unpacks how you can build a high-trust organization where continuous improvement is a lifestyle rather than a one-time goal. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

June 5, 2026: Two stories today. First: hybrid work's approval ratings are climbing — but new research finds half of its believers quietly defected over three years. There's a name for what's breaking it, and most organizations haven't seen it yet. Second: Anthropic dropped internal data showing AI is writing 80 percent of its own code and outperforming human researchers on their own turf. The numbers are real — but so is the question of who's really behind the warning. One week after closing a $965 billion valuation and four days after filing for an IPO, Anthropic is calling for AI governance and oversight. That might be genuine concern. It might also be regulatory capture — the oldest playbook in business, where the most powerful incumbent shapes the rules in ways that lock out everyone coming up behind them.

June 4, 2026: Microsoft unveiled a wearable AI badge at Build 2026 that can see, hear, and act on your behalf. I break down the real productivity upside, and the chilling effect on human communication that the tech press isn't talking about. Then I take a critical look at Monterey Park's landmark vote to permanently ban data centers — 86% to 14%, the first in America. I understand why communities push back. I also think this particular decision is a mistake, and I'll tell you exactly why.Finally: Uber just cut 23% of its entire HR and recruiting function at record revenue, with 95% AI adoption across engineering — then said AI had nothing to do with it. 

June 3, 2026: Most people use a data center dozens of times a day and have no idea what it is. Today I'm changing that. I break down exactly what data centers are, what "compute" actually means, why every new AI model needs exponentially more of it, and how short we currently are as a country — using real numbers from Goldman Sachs, FERC, RAND, and others. Then I take on the five biggest myths driving the backlash: that new data centers waste water, that they're an energy disaster, that they kill jobs, that taxpayers are funding Big Tech, and that they destroy communities. I debunk every single one with sourced data — because the misinformation around data centers is doing real damage to America's AI future. These buildings currently account for 80% of US economic growth according to S&P Global, they're funding the nuclear renaissance, and they're the front line in a race with China that we cannot afford to lose. This is the episode I'd send to anyone who thinks data centers are the enemy.

June 2, 2026: Senator Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to own half of OpenAI, Anthropic, and every major AI company in America — and he's framing it as reclaiming stolen public knowledge. We break down exactly how his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would work, why the Norway comparison falls apart, and what would actually happen to valuations, talent, and American competitiveness if it ever got close to passing. Then: Apollo Global Management's chief economist says there is zero evidence AI is killing jobs — and the data may actually back him up. We look at Jevons paradox, the AI washing phenomenon, and why the aggregate labor market story is more encouraging than the doom headlines suggest. And finally: new Federal Reserve research reveals that 64% of the rise in young worker unemployment since the pandemic traces back to remote work, not AI — and why being willing to go to the office five days a week may be the single best career move a worker in their twenties can make right now.

Have you ever walked into a meeting and felt like everyone was just wearing a mask of professional perfection while their true selves stayed hidden in the parking lot? It is easy to get lost in the data and the dashboards of modern work, but we often forget that the people behind those numbers are what actually drive the results. We all want to be part of a team where we are seen for who we really are rather than just what we can produce. In this episode, I sit down with Veronique Subileau, the Senior Vice President of HR at UGI Corporation, to explore the invisible roots of corporate culture that turn a 140-year-old energy company into a breakthrough environment. Veronique shares her unique philosophy on why leaders must touch the heart before speaking about results, offering practical tools like her four core questions regarding fun and purpose to foster deep human connection. You'll learn how to navigate the tension between high-performance standards and radical authenticity through the company's poetic values framework while discovering why the shadow you cast as a leader determines the energy of your entire team. We also dive into the future of work as Veronique explains how to invest in humans as much as technology by using AI to unleash time so employees can shift from being human doings to true human beings. This episode redefines the role of the leader as a human prompt engineer who knows how to pull unique creativity and heart out of a workforce in an increasingly automated world. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

May 29, 2026: Costco's CEO Ron Vachris said it plainly this week: "I don't see AI making choices for Costco" — and with $440 billion in market cap and 17% stock gains this year, the companies doubling down on human judgment are quietly outperforming the ones cutting workers for AI. On today's episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down three stories that together reveal the gap between what companies say about AI and what they're actually doing: why Costco, IBM, and Delta are winning by betting on humans; why corporate America is getting the bill for "tokenmaxxing" — the practice of deploying AI everywhere without measuring whether it works — and what disciplined AI investment actually looks like; and what OpenAI's newly published Frontier Governance Framework, which formally maps its own risk categories including "loss of control," means for every business leader who needs an enterprise AI governance strategy before the regulations have teeth.

May 28, 2026: Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8, sharper reasoning, better agentic coding, and a fast mode that runs 2.5x faster at a third the cost, with Mythos-class models coming in weeks. A new EY-Parthenon survey of 1,200 CEOs shows 99% expect AI to reshape their workforce strategy but only 42% are doing anything about it and why the 57-point gap between awareness and action is the real story. And a deep look at grade inflation in American colleges: the average GPA is now above 3.5, yet 43% of students meet none of ACT's college readiness benchmarks, 12th-grade math and reading scores are at all-time lows, and recent college graduate unemployment sits at 5.7% with a job-finding rate now matching high school graduates. What's behind it, what it costs, and what it means for the future workforce.

May 27, 2026: The two CEOs most responsible for the AI jobs apocalypse narrative are walking it back — and the timing couldn't be more revealing. Sam Altman says he's "delighted to be wrong." Dario Amodei is softening. Both are heading toward trillion-dollar IPOs. In this episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down the financial logic behind the narrative shift, what a chart from Bianco Research reveals about software development jobs that contradicts the doom story, and why Uber just burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months with nothing to show for it — and why 80% of enterprises are facing the exact same problem.

May 26, 2026: Today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went on Singapore's CNA and called the AI layoff narrative "lazy and irresponsible" — I'll break down the data and history behind why he's largely right. Then, the CEO of Bolt fired his entire HR team onstage at Fortune's Workplace Innovation Summit — I'll trace the full arc of the HR function and make the case for what the Chief Future of Work Officer needs to become. And U.S. MBA programs including Carnegie Mellon Tepper, Indiana Kelley, Georgetown McDonough, UCLA Anderson, and Emory Goizueta are losing ground fast — I'll walk through the cost trend, the job market deterioration, the AI mechanism dismantling the consulting pipeline, and the argument I've been making for years that companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks are becoming the new universities.

What happens when you stop focusing on human resources and start focusing on the human experience? Technology is advancing faster than human nature can keep up. If you want to stay relevant, you need a fundamental cultural reset, not just new software.  In this interview, Laura Cushing, the Chief People Experience Officer at Pacific Life, discusses the evolving intersection of organizational culture, employee engagement, and artificial intelligence. She emphasizes a strategic shift toward accountability and transparency as the balance of power moves back toward employers in a post-pandemic landscape. To prepare for an AI-driven future, Pacific Life has implemented a Gen AI Academy and Innovation Labs to demystify technology and help staff reimagine their workflows. Cushing highlights the rising importance of "power skills"—human-centric abilities like coaching and visionary leadership—which remain essential as technical tasks become automated. Ultimately, she argues that HR leaders must cultivate deep business acumen and proactive trust-building to successfully guide their workforces through digital transformation. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

May 22, 2026: The AI job apocalypse story has become one of the most-shared narratives of the decade. It is also one of the most misleading. In this episode, I dismantle the doom narrative being sold to young workers and lays out what the actual labor market data shows: 170 million new jobs projected by 2030, an AI wage premium that doubled in a single year, nearly a million graduate hires at small businesses in 2026, and entire job categories — AI governance, AI integration, agentic systems, growing at over 1,000% annually. I argue that the fear is a product, the despair is a business model, and the 22-year-olds being told they have the worst possible timing actually have the best. A different kind of conversation about AI and the future of work, one grounded in numbers rather than headlines.

May 21, 2026: Today might be the most consequential single day for the future of work in all of 2026. In a two-hour window yesterday afternoon, OpenAI's AI autonomously solved an 80-year-old math problem, Anthropic announced its first-ever profitable quarter at $10.9 billion in revenue, SpaceX filed a $1.75 trillion IPO, and every major tech CEO was summoned to Washington for an AI executive order signing. We break down what all of it means for leaders and workers. Then: Microsoft and EY just committed $1 billion to deploy AI inside every major enterprise on the planet — finance, tax, HR, supply chain, healthcare. This is the ERP moment for AI, and it's happening now. And finally: California's Governor signed the first executive order by any U.S. governor aimed at protecting workers from AI displacement. We look hard at what it actually does and what it doesn't.

May 20, 2026: Meta began notifying 8,000 employees of their layoffs this morning — while simultaneously redirecting $145 billion into AI infrastructure. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI and the architect of Tesla's self-driving brain, just joined Anthropic with a specific mission: use AI to make AI better. And a major new Milken-Harris Poll finds that 80% of Americans want government workforce transition programs now, 68% say they're navigating the AI shift entirely alone, and 88% of business leaders privately admit companies cannot solve this without a coordinated national response. 

May 19, 2026: Everyone has an opinion about AI and jobs. Today we have actual data — three major studies published this week that, taken together, tell a story that's more nuanced, more surprising, and more actionable than anything you'll hear in the headlines. First: a Wall Street Journal report reveals that the companies going deepest on AI are actually increasing entry-level hiring — nearly three times more than are cutting — and why a 22-year-old with AI fluency may be the most valuable hire in the market right now. Then we get into why nearly half of Gen Z workers say AI is making them cognitively weaker, what London taxi drivers and GPS research tells us about what's actually happening to the human brain, and why the most dangerous AI user isn't the person who refuses to use it. And we close with Gartner's bombshell finding: 80% of companies cutting headcount for AI are seeing zero ROI — and by 2030, the ones that starved their talent pipeline this year will be paying a 15% premium just to catch up. Plus: why commencement speakers keep getting booed.

If your organization isn't obsessed with how fast your people can learn, you're already falling behind in the race to "out-learn" the competition. In this episode, I'm joined by Susan LaMonica, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Citizens Financial Group—a super-regional bank with $226 billion in assets and 18,000 employees.  We explore how they are driving a massive workforce transformation to build a team that is ready for the future of work. We dive deep into their journey of becoming a skills-based organization and how they use a "skills taxonomy" and an internal talent marketplace to support mobility and career development. Susan also explains their "measured approach" to AI governance within a heavily regulated industry, including the role of their Generative AI Council. We unpack their "Reimagine the Bank" initiative, where they are rethinking 47 different business processes to drive value and effectiveness. From launching internal "gigs" to tracking productivity metrics like customer NPS and employee sentiment, this conversation is a strategic guide for any leader looking to blend high-tech tools with a human-centered culture. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

May 15, 2026: The Guardian documents the tech industry's accelerating purge of middle managers — and history says companies have tried this exact bet before with Jack Welch and the Reengineering movement, with disastrous long-term results. The Wall Street Journal reports companies are drowning in ungoverned AI agents, raising a critical question: is agentic AI actually different from the RPA sprawl crisis of a decade ago, and is the difference showing up in real outcomes? And Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and NYU's Gary Marcus argue in Fortune that America's 1,200 AI bills have no shared test for what makes good policy — and the regulatory patchwork hardening in place rhymes uncomfortably with the conditions that produced the 2008 financial crisis.

The traditional corporate ladder is a relic of the past. While we once viewed career growth as a predictable, linear climb, today's AI-driven landscape has replaced that fixed path with a much more fluid reality. In this episode, Denise Kulikowsky, CPO of Tapestry, joins me to explore the rise of the non-linear career path and how forward-thinking companies are formalizing professional fluidity to drive innovation. Tapestry, the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade, utilizes a "walk, run, fly" AI strategy where tools are treated as enablers for employees to proactively direct their own development. Denise reframes the concern that using AI is "cheating" by emphasizing that it is an efficiency tool, provided employees remain accountable for the final output. Denise highlights key strategies like the Talent Communities program, which facilitates six-month global job swaps for senior managers and directors to drive cultural immersion. The company also uses a "magic and logic" approach to build success profiles that define future-ready behaviors like leading with courage and activating the vision. Additionally, she shares insights on bridging the gap between frontline and corporate roles through rotational programs that bring store leaders into the home office. Get the strategic blueprint you need for building a resilient workforce that is adaptable to technological advancement. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

May 6, 2026: The Wall Street Journal reports a genuine split emerging among CEOs — Coinbase and PayPal cutting aggressively while Spotify, IBM, and Axon hold headcount and bet on growth instead. Business Insider goes inside Disney and JPMorgan to show how AI adoption pressure has shifted from C-suite memos to manager dashboards and performance reviews — and why measuring token usage instead of outcomes may be building a very expensive illusion. And author David Epstein, writing for Fast Company, makes the case that AI's real danger isn't replacing workers — it's making it almost free to imagine new work while doing nothing to help you decide what should never have been started. The bottleneck isn't ideas anymore. It's execution.

A massive wave of retirements known as "Peak 65" is creating a serious crisis for organizations as decades of institutional knowledge begin to walk out the door. This shift in workforce demographics means we must act now to secure our talent pipeline before these experts leave for good. In this episode, CHRO Robin Benoit shares how she and her team at FM are tackling this challenge at its core. We explore their unique mentorship program called AKA (Accelerating Knowledge Advancement), which pulls experts away from their day jobs to help newer employees reach senior-level career growth years ahead of schedule. Robin explains the balance between AI optimization and human interaction, highlighting the danger of using technology to automate entry-level work in a way that "kills off" the learning process for future leaders. We discuss building a "career lattice" for internal mobility and why we need transparent retirement conversations to ensure experienced workers don't block promotion paths while we still benefit from their wisdom through reverse mentorship. This episode is essential for CHROs who want to use succession planning and employee engagement to thrive in the future of work. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

May 1, 2026: Mark Zuckerberg admits in an all-hands meeting that Meta's 8,000 layoffs aren't because AI is replacing workers — they're because AI infrastructure is expensive, and compute won the budget battle over people. The Washington Post reports that "AI washing" is rampant across Silicon Valley — companies using the technology as cover for a pandemic-era hiring hangover. And Snap's CEO, whose company has AI writing two-thirds of its code, warns that tech leaders are dangerously underestimating the societal backlash building against AI. 

April 24, 2026:  The Wall Street Journal reports entry-level hiring is rebounding — but IBM's HR chief says AI can already do almost everything those jobs used to require, and ZipRecruiter's data shows 73% of grads are now considering gig or trade work because corporate entry roles have dried up. Business Insider investigates "tokenmaxxing" — the new corporate sport where employees at Disney, Meta, and JPMorgan compete to burn the most AI tokens — and a new study of 22,000 developers shows exactly what that's doing to actual work quality. And The Guardian reports Meta cutting 8,000 jobs and Microsoft offering buyouts to 9,000 people on the same day they announce hundreds of billions in new AI investment. 

April 23, 2026: OpenAI released GPT-5.5 today — its second major model in six weeks. But while the software accelerates, the physical infrastructure powering it is triggering gunfire at council members' homes, Molotov cocktails at tech CEOs, and a grassroots rebellion that just ousted every incumbent on a Missouri city council one week after they voted yes on a data center. We also dig into the first-ever U.S. Census Bureau data on how AI is actually being adopted across American businesses — and why the real number is very different from what McKinsey has been telling you. And we look at what happened when Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm that advises OpenAI on safe AI deployment, filed a federal court brief riddled with AI hallucinations. 

April 22, 2026: What does it actually take to build an organization where people perform at their best? In this episode, I'm breaking down what I call Empathetic Excellence — and it comes down to three things: competence, merit, and empathy. Not one of them. All three. I share two stories that have stayed with me — one about my daughter Naomi on the tennis court, and one about my father's first job in America — that I think capture this better than any research study could. I also get into why calling meritocracy a myth is a trap, what two dystopian novels from the 1950s and 60s can teach us about the workplace today, and why the diversity conversation inside organizations needs to shift from what people look like to how they think. If you lead people — or want to — this episode is for you.

April 21, 2026: Amazon commits $33 billion total to Anthropic in a landmark deal securing 5 gigawatts of compute — the equivalent of five nuclear power plants — while Anthropic's revenue triples from $9 billion to $30 billion run-rate in months, signaling we are past the pilot phase. Meta installs tracking software on employee computers to capture every keystroke and mouse movement as training data for AI agents — examined here against the full context of $73 billion in Reality Labs losses, an AI model that trails its competitors on agentic benchmarks, and a photorealistic AI clone of Zuckerberg designed to replace human management conversations. And the Wall Street Journal goes inside BlackRock's AI transformation, where the world's largest investment firm is rolling out firm-wide agentic platforms and human "squads" to oversee AI — with its own head of AI admitting no one has fully cracked the nut yet. 

Technology is moving faster than ever, and many of us feel the pressure to keep up without losing our human touch. We need a clear path to help our teams embrace change while building a culture of trust and growth. In this episode, Lisa Coulson, SVP and Chief Human Resource Officer at Principal Financial Group, joins me to talk about what it means to build an AI-literate workforce at its core within financial services. We explore how their data literacy and employee training program reached 90% of workers and how internal AI tools helped with their AI adoption. Lisa shares their step-by-step "funnel" approach to reskilling and upskilling, the impact of AI in leadership development, and how to build an internal talent marketplace to match employee skills with new roles. We also tackle the necessity of governance in a regulated industry and the ongoing challenge of measuring AI's ROI and productivity gains during a workforce transformation. This episode is every CHRO's clear guide for leading a digital shift while keeping the employee experience strong. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

April 17, 2026: Employer power has officially returned and workers are accepting things they never would have a year ago — but is that actually a bad thing? Then, teen boys are dating their AI chatbots and experts are warning about what that means for the future workforce. And finally, Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report reveals that global employee engagement has hit a five-year low — and what employees say they actually want from their leaders might surprise you. Watch the full episode on YouTube.   ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ If you lead people, you design experiences—do it on purpose with The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order now: 8EXlaws.com

April 16, 2026: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7 this morning — a significant upgrade focused on complex coding and self-verification that changes what human oversight of AI actually needs to look like. Bank of America posted near-record earnings and credited AI, spotlighting a new tool for its 18,000 financial advisors that raises important questions about what happens when information advantage disappears from knowledge work. A major new global survey from WalkMe finds 80 percent of enterprise workers are actively avoiding AI tools, and new Gallup data shows Gen Z's enthusiasm for AI is collapsing fastest among daily users — pointing to a crisis of institutional trust that no training program can fix. And the CEO of Indeed argues the entire AI-and-jobs debate is focused on the wrong threat: demographic contraction, not AI displacement, will define the next 50 years of work — and almost nobody is preparing for it.

April 15, 2027: A failed sneaker brand rebrands as an AI compute company and its stock jumps 600% in a day — and that tells us something important about the race for AI infrastructure. Then, OpenAI releases GPT-5.4-Cyber, a specialized cybersecurity model, and quietly rewrites the rules for how dangerous AI gets deployed. The shift from restricting what models can do to verifying who can access them has direct implications for every business leader thinking about AI governance.

April 14, 2026: The Stanford AI Index shows generative AI has hit 53% global adoption — faster than any technology in history — but also reveals a 50-point gap between expert optimism and public fear about jobs. An AI agent in San Francisco opened a store, hired staff, negotiated with vendors, and forgot to schedule anyone on opening day. Meta is building a photorealistic clone of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with employees — raising hard questions about leadership presence at scale. And a new Bloomberg Businessweek investigation finds college students are skipping the broken entry-level job market entirely and founding AI companies instead. Jacob unpacks what each story actually signals for leaders, organizations, and the future of work.

Companies today are rushing to build an AI strategy, but they often forget to create a human strategy to match it. As technology takes over daily tasks, keeping the human element alive at work is a huge challenge for business leaders. In this episode, Kathie Patterson, Chief Human Resources Officer at Ally, joins us to explore how to balance new AI tools with human emotional intelligence. We uncover how to roll out AI to employees for better efficiency while making sure a human is always in the loop for the moments that truly matter. Kathie explains why leaders need strong EQ and training in crucial conversations to handle conflicts, since frustrating moments like getting stuck in dead-end phone trees prove that people still crave real human connection during stressful times. We also explore balancing workplace empathy with business accountability, offering real support like mental health and fertility benefits without treating adult employees like children. Finally, we look at how to adapt to generational shifts, like Gen Z entering the workplace, and the risks of using AI for HR tasks like hiring and promotions. CHROs will find this episode essential for building a future-ready culture that embraces both high-tech tools and deep human connection. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

April 10, 2026: Andreessen Horowitz just released hard data showing nearly a third of the Fortune 500 has live AI deployments — and the pattern underneath reveals exactly which jobs and functions are next in line. Then: Gallup says global employee engagement just hit a five-year low, and I'm going to argue that metric is fundamentally broken and why your board should stop asking for it. Plus, Microsoft Research coins a term you'll be using by tomorrow — "workslop" — and reveals the hidden social penalty employees face for using AI openly. McKinsey adds a critical wrinkle: your most AI-fluent employees are your biggest flight risk. And a new Wharton study finds that 80% of people follow wrong AI answers with complete confidence — and feel better about themselves while doing it. 

April 9, 2026: Meta had a big week. The company launched Muse Spark, its first model from a completely rebuilt AI team, framing it as the opening move toward personal superintelligence. And internally, employees were competing on a secret leaderboard tracking exactly how many AI tokens each of the company's 85,000 workers consumed — with titles like "Token Legend" awarded to the top users. Their CEO didn't crack the top 250. We break down what both stories mean for the future of work, plus why Lowe's just committed $250 million to skilled trades training and why OpenAI and Anthropic are building AI models too dangerous to release to the public.

April 8, 2026: A major new survey finds that 44% of Gen Z workers admit to actively sabotaging their company's AI rollout — and the real story isn't what you think. Second, Anthropic just announced Project Glasswing, a landmark cybersecurity initiative built around an unreleased AI model that autonomously found vulnerabilities hiding in critical software for up to 27 years — flaws that thousands of expert researchers missed entirely. And third, a New York Times investigation reveals Google's AI Overviews are wrong one in ten times — which sounds small until you do the math at five trillion searches a year. Jacob breaks down what each of these stories really means for the future of work, and why the most important insights are the ones the headlines are missing.

April 7, 2026: Sam Altman published a 13-page blueprint this week arguing capitalism won't survive superintelligence — and proposing robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and a 4-day workweek. Goldman Sachs says AI is erasing 16,000 U.S. jobs a month, with Gen Z taking the hardest hit — but a second Goldman report says the macro unemployment impact is just 0.1%. Brands are slapping "no AI" labels on their content as consumer trust erodes and a broader societal backlash builds. And software engineering jobs just hit a three-year high in the middle of the worst tech layoff quarter since 2023. Today's episode breaks down what's actually happening — and what leaders need to do before the headlines catch up to the reality.

Preparing a global team for a world that changes by the minute can feel like a race against time, especially when 80% of jobs face major shifts by 2030. In this episode, we tackle the challenge of turning that fear into a high-performance culture that stays ahead of the technology curve. Tracy Platt, CHRO of Newell Brands, joins us to explore top strategies for AI adoption, focusing on the move toward "agentic commerce" and the urgent need for AI literacy across the whole company. We also unpack simple ways to put AI into daily work, like cutting performance management review times from two hours down to 30 minutes. Our discussion highlights the shift from tracking vanity metrics to measuring real business results and why human judgment is the ultimate guardrail for AI-driven work. Tracy shares how managing ambiguity has become the most valuable currency for modern leaders in this brave new world. For CHROs, this episode is your clear roadmap for leading your talent strategy and workforce planning through the rapid evolution of the future of work. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

April 3, 2026: Two major academic papers dropped today alongside fresh labor market data, and together they paint the clearest picture yet of what AI will actually do to the economy and to work. Stanford economists show that 87% of U.S. productivity growth since 1950 came from automation — and explain why AI's impact will be real but slower than the hype due to "weak links" in production. A Chicago Fed forecasting paper reveals that even expert economists admit the range of outcomes is genuinely wide. On top of that: AI is now the #1 cited reason for tech layoffs, a new Forrester study finds most workers still don't know how to use the AI tools their companies deployed, Jack Dorsey argues AI should replace middle management entirely, a startup built an AI coworker that monitors your work and reports to your boss, and OpenAI just bought a media company to control the narrative. Seven stories, one through line: the disruption is real, the timeline is uncertain, and the window to prepare is open right now. Watch on Youtube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Preorder here: 8EXlaws.com

April 2, 2026: A landmark MIT study out today challenges the AI job apocalypse — and the data lands somewhere more optimistic than the headlines suggest. Then: the "AI washing" debate exposes a harder truth — with Gallup data showing only 21% of employees are engaged globally and $438 billion in annual productivity losses, most large companies were already carrying 10 to 20% more workforce than they needed long before AI arrived. The Wall Street Journal profiles the real people filling 640,000 new AI-created jobs — from a 25-year-old Head of Human AI Solutions to a pathologist earning $75K on the side training medical AI. And CHRO pay at S&P 500 companies just surged 30% — what boards are really pricing in when they write those checks. Watch full episode on Youtube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Stop patching problems and start designing an intentional workplace. The 8 Laws of Employee Experience gives you the how. Order your copy: 8exlaws.com

The first quarter of 2026 was not just a collection of headlines. It was a definitive "hard reset" for the global workforce, marking the moment where the gap between legacy systems and the new AI-driven reality finally collapsed. In this episode of Future Ready Leadership, we're revisiting the top stories that made it to our Best of the First Quarter edition. We start with the trillion-dollar software sell-off, where the market's reaction to AI-driven workflows signaled a massive shift from humans performing manual tasks to supervising automated systems. This move toward radical accountability is further exemplified by Citigroup's declaration of the end of the "effort era," as CEO Jane Fraser mandated that employees be judged solely on measurable results rather than visible busy work. We then examine Amazon's internal talent mobility strategy, which reframes automation-related job changes as an opportunity for redeployment by giving staff 90 days to find new internal roles. This leads into a discussion on the reset of the HR technology operating model, as boards begin to question the value of traditional seat-based licensing now that AI is becoming the primary interface for data. Finally, we analyze Accenture's decision to tie promotions to AI usage, highlighting the need for a "human judgment receipt" to ensure leaders are rewarding actual performance improvement rather than mere "corporate theater". Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

March 27, 2026: Anthropic accidentally leaked Claude Mythos — its most powerful model ever — and the implications for cybersecurity and enterprise AI go far beyond a product announcement. America's top HR leaders gathered at the WSJ CPO Summit and delivered a blunt message: most companies are building AI agents completely wrong, and IBM learned that the hard way. JPMorgan has made AI adoption a formal, trackable performance requirement for 65,000 engineers — and it's a preview of what's coming to every large organization. And a new KPMG survey finds Gen Z wants the C-suite and a 5 o'clock logout — so we have an honest conversation about whether that's actually possible.

March 26, 2026: A California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately addictive platform design — and the legal framework they used is headed straight for enterprise AI. Salesforce freezes base salary raises for directors and above, shifting to equity as Big Tech quietly rewrites its compensation playbook. Indeed's Hiring Lab data shows 95% of job postings still don't mention AI — and why that number is a warning, not a comfort. And Meta's president drops a number that reframes the entire AI workforce conversation: half a million electricians needed, and we're nowhere close.

March 25, 2026: Fortune reports that the job market has gotten so broken that people are paying $1,500 a month just to have someone apply to jobs on their behalf — and on average it takes 863 applications to land a single offer. We break down the AI doom loop that created this dysfunction, what it means for how companies hire, and what job seekers need to hear that nobody is telling them. Then ADP Research drops one of the largest workforce surveys ever conducted — 39,000 workers across 36 countries — and finds that only 22% of people feel their jobs are safe despite historically low unemployment. We push back on the doom framing, make the case that some anxiety is actually healthy and necessary, and surface the single most powerful lever any leader can pull right now: the data point that makes workers 5.3 times more likely to feel secure. And we close with Business Insider's exclusive look inside a Microsoft internal memo revealing a sweeping overhaul of the company's HR organization — including specific structural changes to performance management, lateral moves, and compensation that signal where corporate HR is heading across the entire industry.

March 24, 2026: Three major research reports dropped today with a combined picture of where AI and work actually stand right now. A landmark NBER working paper of nearly 750 CFOs finds AI had zero measurable employment effect in 2025 — but projects roughly 500,000 job losses this year, concentrated in clerical and administrative roles. The same paper finds a productivity paradox: executives believe AI is working before the revenue proves it, echoing a pattern economists last saw with the personal computer. Anthropic's new Economic Index reveals something most organizations are completely missing: experienced AI users have a 10% higher success rate than newcomers — not because of what they're doing, but because of how long they've been doing it. AI fluency compounds like a skill, not a software license. And a major Gallup survey finds college graduates are more pessimistic about finding a job than at any time since 2013, with software developer postings down 29% and marketing down 27% — but the real explanation goes deeper than AI displacement alone. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com