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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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".

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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

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.

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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

The real bottleneck to AI isn’t the code; it’s our own ego. We’re so hooked on being the "expert" that we’ve forgotten how to be beginners again, and in a world changing this fast, that’s a dangerous place to be. If we want to move forward, we must trade the safety of our legacy habits for the “productive discomfort” of constant unlearning.

In this episode, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, Amy Coleman, joins us to talk about managing 220,000 employees through a growth mindset and explore the deep link between AI, culture, and leadership. Amy shares how to embrace adaptive leadership, which basically means leading even when you don't have all the answers.

She explains why decreasing proximity is the secret to keeping trust alive during massive change by bringing employees closer to the "why" behind every decision. We get tactical as we uncover strategies for large-scale re-skilling, shifting from just tracking activity to rewarding real impact, and using talent redeployment to make sure people can grow their careers without leaving the company.

Amy highlights why human judgment and empathy are more valuable than ever, how responsible AI is non-negotiable, and how Microsoft stays scrappy by letting "citizen developers" use AI to disrupt old systems from the bottom up. This episode is your guide to scaling a culture where employees feel like the company truly has their back as they reinvent their careers.

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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

March 20, 2026: 

The White House dropped its national AI legislative framework today — I go through the whole thing, because there's a provision about preempting state AI laws that is one of the most consequential things to happen in AI policy in years.

A columnist at The Sunday Times made an argument that stopped me: the real AI risk isn't losing your job — it's what happens to your retirement if AI disrupts your career at 50 instead of 30. Most people aren't thinking about it this way. They should be.

Jensen Huang proposed paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary, on top of cash. I explain what tokens are, why elite engineers are leaving high-paying jobs over GPU access, and what it means that the unit of value in the AI economy is shifting from time to compute. The New York Times is calling it tokenmaxxing.

And JPMorgan deployed AI to monitor junior bankers' hours — not because they're over-reporting, but because they're deliberately hiding how much they're actually working.

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/

Stop patching problems and start designing an intentional workplace. The 8 Laws of Employee Experience gives you the how. Order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com

March 19, 2026: Jensen Huang had one of the biggest weeks in tech at Nvidia's GTC — but his sharpest line wasn't about chips. When asked why companies are laying off workers, he said simply: because they're out of imagination. We unpack what that means, plus his surprise take on compensation from the All-In podcast.

Then Cognizant drops a bombshell update to its 2023 workforce study: 93% of jobs impacted by AI, $4.5 trillion in labor shifting to machines, six years ahead of schedule. Their own words: "We underestimated the technology."

But two CEOs are pushing back on the doom narrative — Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick says humans will be "super fine" until AGI arrives, and Tech Mahindra CEO Mohit Joshi argues the demand for human labor isn't going anywhere, and has the data to back it up.

We close with JPMorgan Chase's 2026 tech trends report and the concept quietly reshaping what leaders actually do: context engineering.

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/

Stop patching problems and start designing an intentional workplace. The 8 Laws of Employee Experience gives you the how. Order your copy: 8EXlaws.com

March 18, 2026: Two-thirds of CEOs are freezing hiring while betting billions on AI — and a gender economist argues they're cutting the very people needed to make those bets pay off. A 7,000-word Substack essay imagined a "Ghost GDP" collapse by 2028, moved the Dow 800 points, and sparked a Wall Street war between Citrini Research and Citadel Securities over whether AI job fears are real or overblown.

Management consulting was supposed to be dead by now — Capgemini's strategy chief explains why it's not, and why the shift to outcome-based billing may be the more disruptive story. And Microsoft's chief scientist says the degree with the worst starting salaries may be the most future-ready credential in the age of AI. Sources: Fortune, Bloomberg, Fortune Eye on AI.

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----------

Looking for what actually moves the needle on performance and retention? It’s in The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order here: 8EXlaws.com

March 17, 2026: Five major AI models shipped in a single week in February. Your company's training budget grew 5%. Cathie Wood told Bloomberg this morning that AI is already pushing productivity above trend and projects it hits 6% annually — Goldman Sachs says there's no macro evidence of it yet. Both can be right, and today we explain why. Plus: FedEx's blueprint for an AI agent workforce across 50% of its operations, the real argument against traditional corporate training programs, and the full financial math on Meta's reported 15,000-person layoff — including whether the company leaked it on purpose to let Wall Street price in $160 billion in market cap before a single cut is confirmed.

Many managers today spend more time on paperwork and individual tasks than actually coaching their teams. This lack of true leadership hurts the employee experience and stops a business strategy from succeeding.

In this episode, Emily Field and I talk about her strategic transition from a McKinsey partner to becoming a first-time Chief People Officer at LPL Financial. She shares her initial 30-day "learning tour" where she focused on listening to employees to understand the company's unique culture before building her people strategy.

We also unpacked her "People Leader Operating System" and a "talent flywheel" designed to improve the talent lifecycle from hire to retire. We explore the 50/50 performance management split to measure both business outcomes and human values, as well as using AI as a "superpower" to assist work while keeping human judgment as the main partner.

Emily also explains the "people P&L" dashboard to track leadership data, the "align-empower-reinforce" model for training 1,300 leaders, and the importance of rewiring business processes to remove friction for employees. For CHROs, this is your guide to scaling a people-first culture and building a future-proof organization.

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/

Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Order here: 8exlaws.com

March 13, 2026: Most companies are cutting headcount to fund AI — but do they actually know what AI costs? When agentic AI runs autonomously overnight, the compute bill can hit $120,000 to $270,000 a year. Add hidden infrastructure costs running 200 to 400 percent above vendor quotes, plus the human oversight that never goes away, and the "AI is cheaper than people" math falls apart fast. Meanwhile Elon Musk is going the other direction — Tesla is increasing headcount while Atlassian and Block are cutting thousands, betting that output per human will get "nutty high." And an AI agent autonomously applied for 278 jobs this week, nearly got hired, and is still running. HR has no governance framework for any of this. Today's episode is about the gap between what organizations think AI costs, what it actually costs, and who's responsible for closing that gap.

March 12, 2026: Companies are failing to communicate the real promise and potential of AI to their people. Sam Altman stood in front of BlackRock and admitted nobody knows what to do about the labor-capital shift AI is creating. At Morgan Stanley's TMT Conference, the dominant investor question was what AI means for the next generation of workers — and the anxiety in that room is trickling down into every organization. Axios published data showing white-collar job cuts have been compounding for three years, giving employees every reason to be pessimistic. Gen Z is bringing parents to job interviews and planning early retirement in their 40s — two symptoms of a generation that has stopped believing the employment system will work for them. And Fast Company makes the case that women over 50 are the most undervalued workforce asset in the AI age — a missed opportunity hiding in plain sight. 

March 11, 2026: Amazon corporate workers say the company's AI push is creating more work, not less — with surveillance dashboards tracking every click and promotion criteria now tied to AI adoption. Oracle's Larry Ellison became one of the first Fortune 500 CEOs to explicitly confirm on an earnings call that AI tools are reducing his headcount — while the company carries $100 billion in debt and negative free cash flow. A new UBS report finds 63% of U.S. entrepreneurs are planning to exit their businesses in the next five years, an exit wave nobody is connecting to AI-driven workforce disruption. And as layoffs accelerate, the unemployment insurance system — unchanged since FDR built it in 1935 — is failing to reach 75% of the workers it was designed to protect.

March 10, 2026: AI is generating real, measurable productivity gains at major companies. Workers aren't seeing any of it. A new survey of 100 major CEOs finds only 9% plan to cut jobs because of AI this year — but buried inside that optimistic headline is an admission about ROI that changes the entire picture. China just launched the most ambitious society-wide AI employment push in history, betting that the technology creates more jobs than it destroys with 300 million retirements on the horizon. Fortune has the one metric CEOs are now using to quietly recalculate how many humans they actually need — and most employees have never heard of it. And Mercor, a $10 billion startup, is paying doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers hundreds of dollars an hour to train the AI that may eventually replace them.

While many companies focus only on buying new AI tools, the real secret to success often lies in changing how leaders think and act to drive a massive business turnaround. In this episode, Anna White, EVP and Chief People Officer at Lumen, joins the show to discuss how a major networking company is transforming its business through a deep focus on leadership and AI. We explore how leaders must shift from being "knowers" to "learners" by embracing curiosity and a growth mindset. The discussion covers practical steps like launching an AI literacy academy for all employees, using "Dare to Lead" training to build courage, and managing the risks of "work slop" by ensuring human judgment always checks AI work. We also dive into real examples of AI pilots, such as the GoalPro tool for aligning targets, and examine how to prepare for a future hybrid workforce where humans manage AI agents. This conversation offers a clear roadmap for HR leaders handling the complex mix of culture change and digital transformation.

----------

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. Order here: 8exlaws.com

March 6, 2026: The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February — and the headline number is almost the least interesting part of the story. When you break down where the losses actually came from, you get a picture far more complicated than the AI-took-our-jobs narrative dominating social media right now. Healthcare, tech, federal government, manufacturing, transportation — each sector tells a different story, and together they reveal a labor market being squeezed from multiple directions at once: AI, tariffs, Baby Boomer retirements, post-pandemic correction, and a geopolitical shock that just sent oil past $87 a barrel. Meanwhile, the Fed is openly questioning whether it even has the tools to respond — because cutting rates doesn't create jobs for people whose skills have structurally shifted out of demand. Also this week: Uber's CEO says don't come here if you want to coast — and why that lands so differently in this economic moment. A new survey reveals that 90% of companies have AI chatbots but almost none have integrated AI into real workflows — and that gap is driving some dangerous workforce decisions. And the Bank of England just started war-gaming what happens if AI triggers a full economic shock. 

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-----

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/

Looking for what actually moves the needle on performance and retention? It’s in The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order here: 8EXlaws.com

March 5, 2026: The company making AI (Anthropic) just published real data on what AI is actually doing to jobs — and the finding that should concern everyone isn't layoffs. It's that the hiring door for workers aged 22 to 25 has quietly dropped 14% in AI-exposed fields since ChatGPT launched.

Today we cover four stories: Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson on why minimum wage increases are accelerating robot adoption. Anthropic's brand new labor market study — and why you should read it with a critical eye. The February job cut numbers, which look better than January but hide a more troubling signal. And Vinod Khosla predicting today's five-year-olds will never need jobs — a claim we push back on hard.

The data is in. It's more complicated than either side wants to admit.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

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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

March 4, 2026: The ECB just released new data showing companies that use AI are hiring, not firing — but the full story of what happened to bank tellers reveals why that optimism has a shelf life. USAA CEO Juan Andrade says Gen Z won't be as well off as Boomers and Gen X, and the numbers are stark: entry-level job postings down 29% globally, Gen Z financial insecurity up 18 points in a single year, and an average net worth of negative $22,000. Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield says most of what passes for work in large organizations isn't actually work — he calls it hyper-realistic worklike activities, and the data shows it's costing U.S. companies $37 billion a year in ineffective meetings alone. And a neuroscientist who testified before the U.S. Senate says Silicon Valley convinced schools they were broken when they weren't, spent $30 billion putting screens in classrooms, and produced the first generation in modern history to score lower on cognitive tests than their parents — and now AI in classrooms is about to repeat the exact same mistake.

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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

March 3, 2026: The hype around AI and jobs is loud. The actual data tells a more nuanced story. This week, Stanford economist Nick Bloom released the most rigorous study yet on AI's impact on employment and productivity — surveying nearly 6,000 executives across four countries with the Federal Reserve and Bank of England. The findings are striking: 90% of firms report zero employment impact from AI so far, yet US executives are planning to cut over two million jobs in the next three years based on gains that haven't materialized yet. We break down what that gap means for workers, leaders, and organizations. Plus: CNN pushes back on the viral AI doom-loop narrative — and why "don't freak out yet" isn't the same as "you're fine." Why 43% of workers want to change careers but almost none will — and the psychological trap behind what researchers are calling "job hugging." And the central irony of the AI economy: the companies spending trillions to automate knowledge work can't build the infrastructure to run it because there aren't enough electricians — and why Gen Z is starting to pay attention.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

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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

Many parents and leaders are wondering if a college degree is still worth the high educational costs. With student debt reaching nearly $2 trillion and the AI impact changing the future of work, the traditional path to success is facing a major disruption. In this episode, Eric Gertler, Executive Chairman and CEO of US News and World Report, joins us to talk about the "broken compact" in higher education and how college rankings are changing as consumer trust falls. We explore how university leadership must move away from focusing on real estate growth and instead prioritize critical thinking, internships, and lifelong learning. We also cover the growing demand for high-paying trades like electrical work over four-year degrees and a story from Eric's time in government where a hospital leader identified the need for data analysts years before it became a trend. This episode helps CHROs build better talent strategies by showing how to find and train workers based on their actual skill development in a job market where actual skills matter more than a diploma.

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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

February 27, 2026: Jack Dorsey cuts 40% of Block's workforce — 4,000 jobs — credits AI, and predicts most companies will follow within a year. We do a deep dive on whether this is genuine AI transformation or a compelling narrative layered on top of a management mistake, and why the answer might be both.

Plus: Anthropic draws a hard line against the Pentagon, refusing to allow Claude to be used in autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance — and faces threats of being labeled a national security risk. OpenAI closes the largest private funding round in tech history at $110 billion and an $840 billion post-money valuation. And despite all the doom headlines, computer science graduates are on track to earn $81,500 starting salaries in 2026 — up 7% from last year.

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/

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

February 26, 2026: Engineers are facing a productivity panic as coding agents accelerate output — and pressure — at the same time. Nvidia just posted a staggering quarter, underscoring how fast the infrastructure buildout is moving compared to the human transition. Reuters reports nearly one million young people in the UK are now “NEET” (not in employment, education, or training), a flashing warning light for the entry-level pipeline. Burger King is rolling out an AI assistant that listens in, coaches, and scores worker performance in real time. And Rolex’s ultra-competitive trade school is producing graduates positioned for $95,000 jobs — a counter-narrative to the idea that all opportunity lives in knowledge work.

Watch the full episode on Youtube

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Looking for what actually moves the needle on performance and retention? It’s in The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order here: 8EXlaws.com

February 25, 2026: This week Anthropic — one of the companies most associated with responsible AI — gutted the safety commitment it made in 2023. The same week the Pentagon gave its CEO a Friday ultimatum: allow military use of your AI or lose a $200 million contract. Meanwhile Jamie Dimon went on record at a JPMorgan investor meeting and confirmed something most CEOs won't say out loud: AI is already displacing his workers, their redeployment infrastructure can't keep up with the pace of it, and society needs to start thinking seriously about what comes next. I also cover why Big Tech is paying up to $1.2 million for communications talent — and what that says about which human skills are becoming most valuable — plus Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank deploying AI to surveil their own traders in real time, and LinkedIn's 2026 Skills on the Rise report, which tracks which skills are actually converting to job offers. 

February 24, 2026: Five major stories broke in the last 24 hours at the intersection of AI and the future of work — and they're all in conversation with each other.

Anthropic launched Claude directly inside Excel, PowerPoint, and Slack, making its biggest move yet into everyday knowledge work. A Federal Reserve governor said on the record that if AI drives unemployment, interest rate cuts — the government's go-to economic tool — may not be able to fix it. Goldman Sachs revealed that despite hundreds of billions in AI investment, it may have contributed almost nothing to U.S. economic growth last year. Yale's Budget Lab pushed back on the AI productivity revolution narrative, saying the data simply doesn't support it yet. And a financial research firm's fictional scenario set in 2028 went so viral it triggered a major market selloff.

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Many companies try to solve low morale with simple perks like wellness apps, but workers often care more about real pay and career growth. The big challenge today is keeping frontline employees happy while the world worries about AI impact and high turnover. What could be the most substantial, meaningful investments leaders can make that truly build real loyalty? In this episode, Paul Marchand, EVP and CHRO of Charter Communications, more popularly known as Spectrum, discusses how to invest in people to create a better customer experience. He explains the strategy behind helping a 95,000-person workforce through absorbing rising benefit costs and programs like frictionless, prepaid tuition reimbursement and a unique employee stock purchase plan designed to build an owner mindset. Paul shares how "open mic" sessions at Charter improve their employee retention, and the way Spectrum GPT is being used to make HR more efficient. We also explore the 'high school pathways' initiative, upcoming M&A integration with Cox Communications, and how HR role evolution is turning leaders into Chief Future of Work Officers, going far beyond traditional employee management. This episode shows CHROs how to use a people-first strategy to build a resilient and competitive workforce.

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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

Feb 20, 2026: AI is already deciding who gets hired, promoted, and fired — and there are almost no rules governing how it does any of that.

In this episode, I'm building those rules. I call them the Five Laws of AI in the Workplace, constructed in the spirit of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics — rigorous enough to pressure-test, honest enough to admit where they fall short.

We cover the Law of Transparency — why 30 million job applicants in 2024 were evaluated by algorithms they never knew existed. The Law of Human Primacy — why a human rubber-stamping an AI decision isn't the same as a human making one. The Law of Honest Attribution — why AI washing is one of the most underreported forms of corporate dishonesty happening right now. The Law of True Cost Accounting — why the real costs of workforce cuts don't disappear, they just move to taxpayers and communities. And the Law of Reversibility — the full Klarna story, and why 31% of companies that made AI-driven layoffs ended up worse off than if they'd never done it.

February 19, 2026: AI is rapidly becoming a career requirement and the workforce is splitting into those who can adapt and those who get squeezed.

In today’s episode, I cover 5 stories that reveal what’s changing right now:

1. The best AI job risk analysis I’ve seen: who’s exposed, who can adapt, and which roles are most vulnerable

2. Accenture reportedly tying promotions to AI tool adoption—what this signals and why it can backfire

3. Why the “AI will replace you” narrative is dangerous—and how fear distorts leadership decisions

4. Walmart’s approach: training 1.6 million workers on AI instead of using AI as a reason to cut headcount

5. Google + Ipsos data: only 5% of workers are AI fluent—and the gap is already linked to raises and promotions

I also share the bigger takeaway: the future isn’t just “learn AI.” It’s building adaptive capacity, creating real mobility pathways, and upgrading people at scale while keeping human judgment and accountability at the center.

If you lead people, culture, or strategy, this episode will help you see what’s happening—and what to do next.

The U.S. economy is creating wealth… but not many jobs. At the same time, AI is spreading across the workplace, yet most employees still don’t trust it to run without human oversight.

In today’s episode of Future Ready Today, I break down the signals behind the “jobless boom,” what the Federal Reserve is warning leaders about, why the job-switching pay premium is collapsing, and the rise of AI agents that can literally hire humans to do real-world work.

Stories covered:

• Only 17% trust workplace AI without human oversight

• The shrinking job-hopping premium and the loyalty tax

• The Fed’s three AI labor-market scenarios (including a “jobless boom”)

• Growth without jobs: investment, output, and the widening GDP–jobs gap

• AI agents hiring humans: the rise of the “Human API” economy

Feb 17, 2026: Today I break down five signals that are quietly reshaping work:

• OpenAI hiring the creator of OpenClaw—a major shift from chatbots that talk to agents that act

• Why “supervisors are disappearing,” and how title inflation is quietly breaking the career ladder

• The AI productivity paradox (backed by new NBER research): adoption is real, impact is lagging

• Anthropic’s push into “work tools” and the battle to own the workflow layer

• Australia’s psychosocial safety rules—and why well-intentioned mandates can spiral into dependency, bureaucracy, and leadership abdication if we don’t draw boundaries

Leaders today face a critical AI dilemma: move too quickly and risk producing low-quality "work slop," or move too slowly and sacrifice a crucial competitive edge in innovation. But one global real estate powerhouse, managing 3% of the world’s GDP, has successfully navigated this tightrope for nearly three years, offering a proven model for enterprise AI adoption. In this episode, Prologis CHRO Nathaalie Carey reveals how the company solved this dilemma with an "innovation first" strategy, a journey that began by deploying an enterprise version of ChatGPT well ahead of the curve. Prologis achieved this by deliberately empowering its workforce, intentionally prioritizing widespread innovation over premature governance. By providing direct access to tools, supported by strategic training, the company drove 95% adoption rate and sparked over 1,000 crowdsourced custom GPTs. Carey explains how the company built trust by reframing AI as a "bargain" to trade mundane tasks for high-value strategic work. She also details the company's evolution from using AI for basic information gathering to utilizing it for complex decision-making and upcoming "agentic AI" workflows for processes like underwriting and background checks. Carey argues that as AI becomes a "great equalizer" for technical skills, the true competitive advantage lies in balancing technological speed with authentic human connection and the power of human imagination.

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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

Feb 13, 2026: Inflation just cooled to 2.4%. Markets are betting on rate cuts. And at the same time, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation.

That’s not coincidence — it’s transition.

In today’s episode, I break down:

• What falling inflation actually means for capital and corporate strategy
• Why Anthropic’s massive funding round signals intelligence becoming infrastructure
• The U.S. Department of Labor’s new national AI literacy framework — and what it means for workforce strategy
• The “AI scare trade” hitting markets beyond tech
• Why IBM is tripling entry-level hiring in the middle of AI disruption

This isn’t about hype. It’s about capital flows, workforce redesign, and how leadership must evolve as intelligence scales. When the cost of capital falls and the cost of intelligence falls, the cost of standing still rises.

Let’s unpack what this moment really means.

Feb 12, 2026: In this episode of Future-Ready Today, I break down four major stories that reveal how the workplace is recalibrating in 2026.

Ford is boosting companywide bonuses to 130% after major quality improvements — a clear signal that performance discipline is back. At the same time, 60% of Gen Z say they plan to pursue skilled trade careers, challenging the long-standing college-to-corporate pipeline.

I also dive into a new Harvard Business Review study showing that AI isn’t reducing workloads — it’s intensifying them. Employees are working faster, taking on broader responsibilities, and extending their hours, often voluntarily. And as AI adoption accelerates, safety leaders at major AI firms are quitting, raising deeper questions about ethics, speed, and institutional trust.

If you’re a leader trying to understand compensation strategy, talent shifts, productivity pressure, and cultural tension in an AI-accelerated world, this episode is for you.

Leaders often try to "brute force" AI adoption, only to find their best people pushing back. The blame often goes to a lack of skill. But this friction is actually caused by a crisis of identity where high performers feel their professional value is being replaced by an algorithm. To overcome this means moving from "enforcement" to "normalization" by focusing on how people actually work. In this episode of Future Ready Today, I break down eight exclusive insights from Uber’s CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, on why organizational velocity, not just efficiency, is the new competitive divide. Expect a deep dive into why ROI obsession sabotages growth, how to disassemble jobs into tasks, and why the real risk of AI isn't job loss, but the threat of rogue agents. We also unpack why HR and Tech must now operate as a single leadership system to keep culture from becoming purely software-driven.

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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

Feb 10, 2026: Today’s leaders are buried under an avalanche of trend reports and news cycles, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between genuine structural shifts and mere media noise. This "trend inflation" has created a cycle of reactive decision-making and to move forward, leaders are required to shift from simple awareness to discernment—the ability to separate a true signal from temporary hype. In this episode of Future Ready Today, I give you a practical walkthrough of the STEEPLE framework to help your organization categorize every emerging trend into one of three actions: adapt, pause, or push back. By examining a case study of a manufacturing company evaluating AI for performance reviews, I teach you how to interrogate the context of a trend rather than just copying a headline. We’re focusing on using internal data and organizational values to ensure innovation fits the company’s unique culture rather than being forced upon it. Not Every Trend Deserves Action.

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Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Order here: 8EXlaws.com

The old playbooks for leadership no longer apply when your top performers might never step foot in a traditional office. It's time to move past the superficial logistics of where people sit and uncover the specific cultural habits that maintain high standards and relentless speed as your organization evolves. In this episode, LJ Brock, Chief People Officer at Coinbase, joins me to explore the high-stakes evolution of leading a remote-first organization that scales without losing its competitive edge. We dive into the practical reality of managing 5,000 global employees, moving beyond the "return to office" debate to discuss Coinbase’s "magnet, not mandate" hub strategy and their recent pivot toward mandatory quarterly in-person sessions designed specifically for execution. LJ pulls back the curtain on the unique operating system that powers their culture—including the bold decision to outlaw committees—and shares the specific decision-making frameworks, like the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) and Problem Proposed Solution (PPS) models, that ensure individual accountability remains front and center. From tackling the nuances of performance management and asynchronous collaboration to leveraging AI for future efficiency, this conversation is a must-watch for CHROs who want to build a high-performance culture that prioritizes measurable results over physical proximity.

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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

Feb 6, 2026: Artificial intelligence is hitting a tipping point — and it’s showing up everywhere at once.

In today’s episode of Future-Ready Today, I break down a wave of stories that all landed at the same time: Big Tech’s plan to spend roughly $650 billion on AI infrastructure, a trillion-dollar selloff in software stocks, healthcare workers protesting the use of AI on the front lines, and a new wave of state AI laws set to reshape how employers use technology at work.

Taken together, these stories reveal how AI is no longer just a technology trend — it’s becoming a force reshaping markets, labor, and regulation simultaneously.

Feb 5, 2026: Are software vendors in trouble? Why are employees suddenly complying with return-to-office mandates? And what happens when leaders are afraid to ask their own teams for feedback?

In today’s episode of Future-Ready Today, we unpack five stories that together reveal a major reset happening inside organizations:

• Why Workday is cutting jobs — and what falling enterprise software stocks (including ServiceNow) signal about how AI is disrupting traditional SaaS business models.

• New data showing workers backing down on return-to-office demands as employers reclaim leverage.

• A leadership study revealing that senior executives want feedback — but fear appearing weak if they ask.

• Layoffs surging to the highest January level since 2009, driven in part by restructuring at UPS following shifts in volume from Amazon.

• And research from Bain & Company showing a massive disconnect between leaders who think change is working and employees who say it isn’t.

Feb 4, 2026: In this episode of Future-Ready Today, I explore a fundamental shift in the workplace: the transition from a task economy to a trust economy. As artificial intelligence moves from "future tech" to "daily tool," the basic mechanics of how we hire, manage, and let go of people are under intense pressure. We aren't just dealing with new software; we're dealing with a breakdown in identity and accountability.

I dive deep into five stories shaping this week's headlines:

• The Deepfake Candidate: Why identity verification is becoming the most critical new skill in HR.

• California’s Algorithmic Guardrails: The new legislative push to ensure humans—not code—remain responsible for firing decisions.

• The "Job Apocalypse" Debate: Analyzing Ben Horowitz’s take on why new work emerges even as old categories vanish.

• The $818 Billion Admin Tax: How poorly designed organizations are drowning in emails, and why AI might be the only way out.

• The AI Layoff Script: Why "technology made us do it" is becoming the new corporate excuse, and how leaders can maintain credibility during transitions.

The Bottom Line: The future of work won’t be won by the companies with the most AI. It will be won by the companies that use technology to remove "administrative garbage" while doubling down on human accountability.

Feb 3, 2026: We start with the rise of “résumé Botox,” where experienced professionals are removing years of experience just to get past hiring filters. Then we look at new data showing how Americans are rethinking what “safe jobs” look like in an AI-driven economy, with growing confidence in hands-on and blue-collar work.

From there, we explore the next phase of automation as AI moves beyond screens and into the physical world — with robots learning to operate in messy, real-world environments. We also go inside Google’s Project EAT to understand how one of the world’s largest companies is turning AI from a personal productivity tool into a standardized operating model. Finally, we examine why the construction labor gap is shrinking — and why that may say more about slowing demand and capital cycles than a true solution to labor shortages. Each story stands on its own, but together they point to a bigger shift in how experience, skills, and job security are being redefined.

What happens when activist investors call your multi-billion dollar acquisition the “single worst deal of the decade”? Most leadership teams would panic, but NRG Energy did the opposite: they doubled down on their people. While most large-scale acquisitions look great on a spreadsheet, they often fail because leadership loses sight of the human energy behind the numbers. In this episode, Peter Johnson, SVP and Head of Talent and Culture at NRG, reveals how his team navigated the acquisition of Vivint—a deal that tripled their workforce to 16,000 employees and was publicly condemned by activist investors as the “single worst deal” in the sector. While the announcement triggered a 25% stock crash, their leadership’s commitment to a strategic “North Star” and a “don't crush the butterfly” cultural philosophy eventually drove a staggering 420% stock recovery. Peter explores the raw challenges of an 18-month integration, from the technical hurdles of migrating 16,000 employees between competing HR systems to the deeply emotional task of harmonizing job titles across disparate industries. By prioritizing the "why" behind the change and fostering a unified "One NRG" identity, the company successfully blended traditional corporate discipline with tech-forward innovation, nearly doubling employee engagement and proving that human-centric leadership is a massive financial win. If you’re a CHRO, this episode shows what real value creation looks like when people come first.

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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—preorder a copy here: 8EXlaws.com

January 30, 2026: The future of work is accelerating—and for many leaders, it feels overwhelming.

Political shifts, new laws, rapid advances in AI, rising ethical expectations, and changing employee demands are all converging at once. The volume of change can make it feel like you’re stuck on a treadmill that keeps getting faster.

But here’s the reality: not every trend deserves your attention.

In this episode, I walk through how external forces—political, legal, and ethical—are reshaping the employee experience, from pay transparency and AI governance to data privacy, workplace monitoring, and evolving expectations of leadership. I also explain why compliance is no longer just an HR or legal responsibility—it’s becoming a shared leadership mandate.

More importantly, I share why trends aren’t truths.

Just because something is happening doesn’t mean you should chase it.

January 29, 2026: Today a series of stories made it impossible to ignore how fast work is changing. Meta says AI now allows one employee to do the work of entire teams. Engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI say AI writes nearly 100% of their code. Amazon and Dow announced thousands of job cuts as they restructure for efficiency. And at the same time, companies are hiring storytellers to help cut through the growing flood of AI-generated content.

In this episode of Future Ready Today, I connect the dots across these developments and explain what they reveal about shrinking teams, disappearing roles, changing career paths, and the rising importance of human skills in an AI-driven world. These aren’t isolated headlines — they’re signals of a deeper shift in how companies are redesigning work right now.

I break down what’s actually happening inside organizations, share the data behind these changes, and offer a futurist lens on what this all means for leaders, employees, and anyone trying to stay future ready.

January 28, 2026: In today’s episode, I zoom out to help you see what’s really shaping the future of work.

Before we talk about AI, leadership, or organizational strategy, we need to understand the forces happening outside our companies. Because work doesn’t evolve in isolation—it’s shaped by powerful external trends in technology, society, economics, and more.

That’s why I walk through the STEEPLE framework: a futurist tool designed to help leaders move from reacting to predicting—and from predicting to designing.

STEEPLE stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, and Ethical forces. Together, these seven domains explain how work is changing and what leaders need to prepare for over the next five-plus years, especially in an AI-driven world.

We explore how AI is becoming the central nervous system of organizations, why skills are replacing job titles, how identity and purpose are reshaping careers, and why the economic contract between employers and employees is being rewritten in real time. I also share why the future of work isn’t something organizations “deliver” to employees—it’s something that’s co-created, requiring accountability on both sides.

If you’re trying to make sense of rapid technological change, shifting employee expectations, and what leadership really means in the age of AI, this episode gives you a practical framework to understand what’s coming—and how to design for it.

January 27, 2026: Executives say AI is making work more efficient. Employees say it’s barely saving time. Gartner warns that overreliance on AI will actually lead to worse decisions. And one of the world’s leading AI CEOs says the real risks are arriving faster than society is prepared for.

In today’s episode of Future Ready Today, I break down four stories that, together, reveal what’s really happening at work in the age of AI:

• A 5,000-year historical lens from Forbes Tech Council on how every major technology shift redefines what humans are valuable for — and why AI is no different, just faster.

• A new warning from Gartner that by 2030, 30% of organizations will see worse decision-making because employees are relying on AI before developing judgment.

• Reporting from the Wall Street Journal showing a growing gap between executives who believe AI is boosting productivity and employees who experience more rework, confusion, and an “AI tax” on their time.

• A sobering essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who argues that AI is entering its “adolescent” phase — powerful, fast-moving, and increasingly difficult to govern.

Grab a copy of my new book: https://8exlaws.com/ 

Request to join my CHRO group: https://futureofworkleaders.com/ 

Join my Non-CHRO group: https://employeeexperienceleaders.com/ 

AI can handle entry-level tasks today, but at what cost to your future leadership? Many companies are accidentally "hollowing out" their talent pipeline by cutting junior roles, creating a massive gap that will haunt them in five years. Efficiency today shouldn't come at the expense of your leaders tomorrow. How do we thoughtfully architect the future workforce to prioritize the health and depth of the leadership bench? In this episode, Melanie Tinto, CHRO of Grainger, joins us to explore how the company utilizes Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) to ensure a "tech powered, human led" organization that balances automation with career development. This discipline informs every aspect of Grainger's talent strategy, from navigating the impact of AI to addressing talent shortages. We look into the necessity of viewing workforce planning as a mirror to financial planning, focusing on the strategic migration of roles and skills rather than simple headcount reduction. Key highlights include managing the surge of AI-generated job applications, the importance of foundational talent programs such as maintaining the campus recruiting "spigot," and transitioning toward a skills-based organization through internal upskilling and "build vs. buy" strategies. This episode is the CHROs’ blueprint to become strategic visionaries who stay three moves ahead of market disruption. Discover how to master these critical "chess moves" before the talent gap becomes irreversible.

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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

January 23, 2026: In this episode of Future Ready Today, I unpack why Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser’s blunt “results over effort” message is such an important signal—and why it marks the end of comfortable work far beyond Wall Street. Citi’s job cuts and cultural reset aren’t about short-term cost savings; they reflect a broader shift toward harder performance standards, fewer layers, and much less tolerance for ambiguity. I connect that message to Amazon’s continued flattening of corporate roles, the growing “sink-or-swim” reality many employees are feeling across industries, and what global leaders at Davos are quietly admitting about jobs, competition, and adaptability in an AI-driven world. I also explore why the lack of consensus among AI leaders themselves is pushing responsibility back onto human judgment and leadership.

January 22, 2026: For years, we’ve talked about jobs, titles, careers, and skills as if they were stable foundations of work. They’re not.

In today’s episode of Future Ready Today, I break down five stories that reveal a deeper truth most leaders are avoiding: the job itself is starting to fail as the core unit of work.

From Meta’s pullback on long-horizon roles, to Deloitte scrapping traditional job titles, to the growing skills mismatch in hiring, to lawsuits over opaque AI screening tools, and even to Citi’s bottom-up AI experiments — these aren’t disconnected headlines. They’re signals of the same structural breakdown.

AI didn’t cause this. It exposed it.

This episode is about why organizations keep redesigning org charts, titles, and technology — but refuse to redesign work itself. And why the companies that win next won’t be the ones with the best AI tools, but the ones willing to let go of outdated assumptions about jobs, careers, and control.

Grab a copy of my new book: https://8exlaws.com/ 

Request to join my CHRO group: https://futureofworkleaders.com/ 

January 21, 2026: Most conversations about the future of work in 2026 focus on the obvious things: AI tools, hybrid policies, skills, and perks.

That’s not where the real change is happening.

In this episode, I break down the top future of work trends for 2026 that actually matter—the ones quietly reshaping how work is structured, how value is created, and how organizations really operate.

This isn’t a prediction episode and it’s definitely not a fluffy trend list. It’s about a deeper shift in labor architecture, including:

• Why organizations are now managing a second workforce of AI agents—and why most leaders aren’t prepared to govern non-human labor

• How work is turning into a product, making clarity more valuable than effort

• Why entry-level jobs are disappearing, and what that means for long-term expertise and leadership pipelines

• How governance is becoming culture, as systems—not slogans—are increasingly shaping behavior

• Why truly human work is becoming more valuable and more unequal at the same time

Across all of these trends runs one idea most leaders underestimate: legibility. When systems execute work and decisions, organizations must be able to explain what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who is accountable.

Grab a copy of my new book: https://8exlaws.com/ 

Request to join my CHRO group: https://futureofworkleaders.com/ 

January 20, 2026: Oxford Economics data suggests AI-driven layoffs are still a small slice of overall job cuts, raising questions about whether AI is being used as a convenient explanation for traditional cost cutting. At the same time, Goldman Sachs warns that up to 25% of work hours could be automated—not as a job apocalypse, but as a task-level shock that exposes poorly designed roles.

I also unpack new PwC research showing that most CEOs aren’t seeing meaningful ROI from their AI investments yet—and why that failure has more to do with broken workflows and leadership decisions than with the technology itself. Meanwhile, a quieter but more consequential shift is happening as physical AI and robotics move rapidly into logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and other parts of the real economy. And finally, I explain why ServiceNow’s partnership with OpenAI signals AI moving into the core “plumbing” of organizations—where it will force leaders to confront inefficiency, bureaucracy, and outdated ways of working.

Grab a copy of my new book: https://8exlaws.com/

Request to join my CHRO group: https://futureofworkleaders.com/ 

Imagine an eighty-year-old grandmother discussing Russian literature with ChatGPT in her native tongue; it is a powerful reminder that AI is no longer a futuristic concept but a present reality that bridges generations. For CHROs, the challenge is not simply the technology itself, but rather shifting the human behaviour that interacts with these tools. In this episode, Joanne Rodgers, the CHRO of New York Life, shares the strategic roadmap used to scale AI adoption across 24,000 employees and agents by focusing on the mindset, skill set, and tool set. We explored the firm’s Ignite AI initiative, which prioritised responsible AI and AI training, remarkably leading to the creation of over 10,000 self-made GPTs. We look into how they integrated mandatory AI goals into performance reviews while maintaining a strict human-in-the-loop governance model to protect the employee experience. Moreover, Joanne highlights the success of their career hub and talent marketplace, explaining how time-bound gigs have boosted internal mobility to 40%. This discussion is your fresh playbook in change management, demonstrating how to foster employee engagement and upskilling in a rapidly evolving landscape without sacrificing the essential human element.

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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

January 16, 2026:

Everyone keeps asking whether AI is going to destroy jobs. That question is already outdated.

In this episode of Future-Ready Today, I walk through five stories that reveal what’s really happening in the labor market—and why the biggest risk isn’t job loss, but broken pipelines.

I explore why Boomers are staying in the workforce longer while Gen Z struggles to break in, how AI is driving a surge in construction and infrastructure jobs, and why the real bottleneck in the AI economy isn’t software talent but electricians, plumbers, and skilled trades. I also unpack new data showing that AI has already created more than a million jobs globally—and why those jobs aren’t evenly accessible. And finally, I look at what it means when firms like McKinsey deploy tens of thousands of AI agents and fundamentally change the leverage equation in knowledge work.

Taken together, these stories point to a hard truth: AI isn’t replacing humans—it’s exposing weak systems. Systems that stopped training, stopped investing in skills, and assumed talent pipelines would take care of themselves.

January 15, 2026: AI job data says work is stable. Productivity reports promise trillions in gains. Job seekers tell me finding work is getting harder. These stories can’t all be true at the same time.

In this episode of Future Ready Today, I break down new research from Anthropic on how AI is quietly reshaping jobs task by task, why supposed productivity gains are leaking away through rework and quality issues, how bold $4.5 trillion productivity projections depend on leadership decisions most companies still aren’t making, and why job seekers are sensing a tightening labor market before it shows up in official data.

This isn’t an episode about AI hype or fear. It’s about the growing disconnect between what the data says, what companies promise, and what workers are actually experiencing — and what leaders need to understand if they want to be future ready.

January 14, 2026: Change takes far longer than leaders expect—and that gap is where frustration, failure, and missed opportunity live. In this episode, I break down why organizations struggle to move at the pace of the world around them, even when the need for change is obvious.

We explore the real blockers slowing transformation: legacy technology, bad data, bureaucracy, internal politics, and cultures built for a different era. AI promises speed and intelligence, but without clean data, modern systems, and the courage to rethink how decisions get made, it only amplifies existing problems.

I also unpack how the CHRO role has fundamentally changed. Today’s CHRO is the CEO of people—responsible not just for HR, but for aligning talent, culture, technology, and foresight with business outcomes.

Finally, we challenge the idea that employee experience is an “HR thing.” It’s not. It’s a shared system co-created by leaders and employees alike. Building a future-ready organization isn’t about quick wins—it’s a long game that requires persistence, discipline, and the willingness to do the hard work of real transformation.

January 13, 2026: In today’s episode, five stories reveal why work is starting to crack under pressure. New data shows employee financial stress is no longer a personal issue but a measurable drag on productivity, just as healthcare costs surge and job mobility slows. At the same time, a major study finds AI is already doing 20–40% of the work in many organizations, yet produces inconsistent and low-quality results when left without human oversight.

Research also shows that always-on expectations and over-availability are quietly draining loyalty, even in places where right-to-disconnect laws exist. While employees remain physically present, many are mentally hedging, disengaging, or preparing exit options. On the hiring front, reporting confirms that cold applying still leads to jobs, but hiring systems are buckling under massive application volume and collapsing signal quality. Finally, a viral backlash calling to “fire 90% of HR” exposes a deeper trust and legitimacy crisis, raising hard questions about whether HR functions are delivering outcomes that match today’s pace of change.

Scaling a massive workforce culture often fails because the big-picture strategy never reaches the people on the front line. What is the real secret to consistent growth future-ready leaders should know to scale culture within a massive organization of 130,000 employees? In this episode, I sat down with Chipotle COO Jason Kidd to explore how culture actually scales through systems, standards, and leadership discipline. Jason breaks down the discipline of "mastering the mundane," a strategy that ensures every department—from the CHRO to marketing and finance—is perfectly aligned to support the front line. We discussed how Chipotle achieves an incredible 80–90% internal promotion rate for General Managers by identifying "happy people" with a competitive drive and utilising "Avacado," more often called “Ava,” their AI-driven recruitment assistant, to remove friction from the hiring process. For executive leaders, Jason provides a masterclass in granular succession planning, revealing how they forecast leadership needs up to four years in advance to sustain rapid growth. This episode highlights that while technology like AI serves as a powerful "assist," the human touch and leadership intuition remain the essential ingredients for scaling a high-performance culture.

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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

Most organizations aren’t shaping the future of work, they’re chasing it.

In this episode, I share what CHROs admit privately but rarely say out loud: HR has become reactive, stuck in firefighting mode, and focused on looking good instead of doing what actually drives results. Traditional HR metrics are backward-looking, accountability has eroded, and the pendulum has swung dangerously toward entitlement.

This isn’t about blaming employees. It’s about restoring honesty, balance, and courage in leadership. Because work is a value exchange—and when leaders are afraid to say that, both performance and culture suffer.

The future of work doesn’t need more perks. It needs leaders willing to tell the truth.

January 8, 2026: 

In today’s episode of Future Ready Today, I break down the most important future-of-work stories shaping how work is actually changing right now. I look at new research showing workers rank AI as one of the top forces shaping their workplace — even as pay and work-life balance remain their biggest concerns. I examine why Amazon is tightening its performance review process and asking employees to clearly articulate what they accomplished, and what that says about accountability making a quiet comeback at work.

I also dig into new labor data showing more Americans are working multiple jobs than at any time since 1999, what LinkedIn’s latest talent research reveals about a growing confidence gap in the workforce, and why falling job openings matter more than the headlines suggest. Taken together, these stories paint a picture of a labor market where expectations are rising, pressure is increasing, and work is becoming less forgiving — even as many workers feel less prepared to navigate what comes next.

January 7, 2026: Nearly a decade ago, I wrote The Employee Experience Advantage to challenge organizations to move beyond perks, surveys, and surface-level engagement. Since then, employee experience has become a top priority—but in many cases, we’ve lost sight of what it actually means.

In this episode, I share why post-pandemic workplace strategies focused on “giving everything to everyone” were unsustainable, how accountability and performance quietly disappeared, and why great employee experience isn’t about making work easy—it’s about enabling people to grow, contribute, and do meaningful work.

I also explain why employee experience is a leadership responsibility, not an HR program, and introduce a futurist framework built from conversations with over 100 CHROs around the world to help organizations design workplaces that are human, challenging, and future-ready.

If you’re trying to cut through the noise and rethink what employee experience should look like for the next decade, this episode will help reset your perspective.

January 6, 2026: Is AI actually increasing productivity — or just shifting responsibility without reward?

In this episode of Future Ready Today, I unpack seven of the most important future-of-work stories shaping leadership decisions right now. From why Gen Z is entering the workforce anxious about AI, to new evidence that AI can slow work down instead of speeding it up, to the rise of empowered employees quietly ignoring return-to-office mandates, this episode explores what’s really changing beneath the surface.

I look at why the U.S. government is reviving apprenticeships, how AI is enabling four-day workweeks only when leaders redesign work intentionally, why flexibility debates have shifted from where work happens to when it happens, and how expanding responsibility without expanding pay is setting the stage for the next trust crisis at work.

When a longtime CEO steps down, it’s not just a change in leadership—it’s a shift in the organization’s heartbeat. After 40 years of service, Williams faced exactly that moment: a legacy to honor, a culture to protect, and a future to build. But how do you preserve stability while ushering in transformation? In this episode, Debbie Pickle, Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer at Williams, talks about orchestrating a seamless CEO succession  after long tenures and the CHRO’s pivotal role in managing the culture, priorities, and structure during these executive transitions. She walks through creating a CEO Resource Guide, using tools like Hogan Assessments, 360 feedback, and development plans to prepare candidates, and crafting a thoughtful 30–60–90-day plan for the incoming CEO. Debbie also shares how Williams redefined its core values and replaced its mission and vision with a purpose statement, all while aligning the board of directors through strong governance principles like “noses in, fingers out.” CHROs will learn all tips into managing leadership transitions through feedback loop, the importance of continuous learning during change, and how to become a true strategic partner and CEO whisperer in the organization. You’ll learn how to guide your company through its next defining leadership chapter and balance what’s changing vs. what’s staying the same.

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Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Preorder here: 8EXlaws.com