The Future Of Work With Jacob Morgan

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...

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 shi...

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 diffe...

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 r...

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...

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 A...

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 ed...

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...

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 warni...

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 alr...

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 go...

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, EV...

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 Tran...

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: The best AI job risk analysis I've seen: who's exposed, who can adapt, and which roles are most vulnerable Accenture reportedly tying promotions to AI tool adoption—what this s...

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 ag...

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 tool...

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 Na...

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...

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-corpora...

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...

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 tempo...