The Future Of Work With Jacob Morgan

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 th...

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...

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 uncov...

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, Micr...

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 C...

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 o...

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...

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 to...

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 Chicag...

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 th...

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 soft...

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 fo...

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 w...

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...

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 believ...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 overbl...

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...

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...

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. Meanwhil...

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 in...

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 n...

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, betti...