Podcasts

Satya Nadella, on the launch of Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index yesterday noted that every firm will need to reconceptualize work as they build agentic systems. Every AI conversation is really an operating model conversation. As agents take on more of the execution, the opportunity in front of leaders is to expand and elevate human agency, and to redesign how work gets done around it. The data tells you exactly how far most firms are from capturing that opportunity. 1 in 5

Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs just launched a new AI-native enterprise services firm. It is backed by approx. $1.5B in committed capital, to embed Claude and Anthropic engineers inside private-equity-backed and mid-market companies. This is beyond a distribution play for Claude. The idea is to democratize access to "forward-deployed engineers." Here is what I believe the venture is really pricing in: 1. Forward-deployed engineering is the operat

At CRExCLT last week, I spoke to a room of executive leaders through that shift: from Industrial Age factories to AI Age cognitive factories. From linear planning to exponential change. From asking for "AI use cases" to realizing that every AI conversation is really an operating-model conversation. A few ideas that I shared: → Mediocrity is now effectively free. When average output is cheap and abundant, the only things that compound are quality, judgment, proprietary data, w

Most leaders I speak with can name three Western AI models. Very few can name three Chinese ones. That gap may start to cost teams real money this year. The MIT Technology Review reported earlier this year that Chinese open‑source models have surpassed US models in total downloads. The three names worth knowing: 1\ Kimi K2.6 Released April 20, 2026, this open model delivers coding performance in the same league as top Western systems at a much lower price. 2\ DeepSeek V4 Come

Clusters are won by regions that combine research depth, commercialization infrastructure, and workforce pipelines in the same ecosystem. Chicago is doing all three at once. IBM plans to create 750 AI, quantum, cybersecurity, and data-science jobs over the next five years at its new FutureNow Chicago center, supported by a $19M state tax credit and partnerships with the University of Chicago and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. That announcement sits inside a much lar

The biggest AI players are competing for your desktop. Three interesting moves this week: 1\ Amazon poured another $5B into Anthropic, deepening what was already one of the largest AI bets in history. 2\ Microsoft and OpenAI amended their exclusivity deal. Within 24 hours, AWS announced GPT-5.5, Codex, and OpenAI-powered agents on Bedrock alongside Claude, Llama, Mistral AI, and Amazon's own models. 3\ Andy Jassy posted yesterday about Amazon Quick, a desktop AI that connects

We don't program intelligence line by line anymore, we shape behavior through data, models, prompts, tools, and governance. But here's the flip side. AI is now shaping our behavior at work too and a new Microsoft Research study shows us where. Researchers analyzed 200,000 anonymized Bing Copilot conversations and mapped them to O*NET (the U.S. Department of Labor's database that breaks down 900+ occupations into the specific work activities they involve). That let them measur

Accenture is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 740,000+ people. As Satya Nadella notes this is Microsoft's largest Copilot deployment so far, and it is not an accident. Over the last two years, Satya has turned Microsoft into an AI‑first company. He's reshaped leadership, including bringing in Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI. Copilot is the new front door to work and has crossed an important threshold with Council, Researcher, Agent Mode, Agent 365 and deep integrat

Are we simply our patterns? That question used to belong to philosophy. Now it belongs to the workplace. A fascinating piece from MIT Technology Review and Caiwei Chen documents the viral GitHub project in China called "Colleague Skill". The project was built as a spoof, it imports chat histories and workplace documents from apps like Lark and DingTalk (Slack / Teams equivalents), then generates “manuals” describing a coworker’s tasks, habits, quirks, and work style so an AI