The Meg and Amy Show

🚀 AI didn't add a new chapter to the software story — it restarted the book at page one. In this solo episode, Meg and Amy explain why that makes sensemaking the scarce skill right now, who earns the role that survives every era of disruption, and what it actually looks like to stop waiting and build. 🔑 IN THIS EPISODE: - The agentic HR moment: NovaWorks and SOL just came out of stealth — two ag...

🚀 You're Not Unmoored. You're Unchained. | Nick Mehta on identity, reinvention, and the AI reckoning hitting every SaaS company. After stepping down as Gainsight CEO, Nick joins Meg & Amy to reframe what comes after the title ends — and breaks down forward deployed engineers, "token maxing," and why AI-native startups generate 10x the revenue per employee. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Cold open: unmoored...

🚀 The AI rush of 2025 didn't move the skills agenda forward — it stalled it. That's the contrarian read from the founder of Degreed, the company built to make skills the currency of the workforce. David Blake walks us through why he thinks 2026 is the most important year of your career, what leader-led learning looks like when agents can actually run it for managers who were never trained to teac...

🚀 Maria Colacurcio asked her own AI agent to pull a code repository. Three times. It refused — and directed her to men on her team. That moment is the throughline of an episode about what's actually breaking in compensation, what AI buyers will spend on now, and the org-design conversation every founder is dodging. Maria is the CEO of Syndio — the company that defined the market for pay-equity so...

🚀 Amy and Meg dig into Jaya Gupta's "experience is now a tax" frame — and what actually survives when AI makes credentials look like overhead. Learn why the most golden job for the next decade is the translator role, how to stop optimizing AI for speed and start using it as an anxiety reducer, and why "manager wars" is the wrong fight to be picking right now, in this conversation on business tran...

🚀 Running Pilots Is Not a Strategy: Charlene Li — three-decade authority on disruptive leadership and co-author of Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success — breaks down the consistent failure mode she's watched leaders repeat across the internet, social media, and now AI. Learn why "adapting" beats "adopting," why reinvention is the real AI opportunity (not efficiency), and the structur...

Han-Shen Yuan — who led mobile engineering at eBay and Netflix and took Upwork to IPO as SVP of Engineering — explains why AI transformation is a constraint problem before it's a software problem. Learn why the real bottleneck is rarely the technology, what a "loose grip on your identity" means for senior leaders right now, and why cutting headcount on the back of AI productivity gains is eating y...

Amy and Meg go solo to revisit the five threads they called at the start of the season — and find them converging and accelerating faster than anyone predicted. A wide-ranging conversation on creative destruction, high-agency work, AI security readiness, and how to find meaning when everything you build has a shelf life. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Cold open + Pebble Beach catch-up 02:49 Revisiting the f...

🚀 AI DARWINISM: Futurist Brian Solis reveals why most companies are using AI to optimize yesterday — and the "spark of the possible" that separates real transformation from glorified digitizing. Learn why ServiceNow's AI maturity index actually DROPPED in 2025, how IKEA's chatbot generated €1 billion in new revenue, and why intellectual humility beats technical expertise for AI-era leaders. ⏰ TI...

Ankur Bhatt — Head of AI at Service Titan — joins Amy and Meg to explain why most AI agent initiatives die between demo and production, and what to do about it. Ankur has spent the last two years building production agents that handle high-stakes work like tax notices and payroll compliance, and he's published one of the most useful practitioner guides on the topic anywhere. The answer, he argues,...

Pat Wadors spent 20 years building cultures at some of tech's biggest names — LinkedIn, ServiceNow, UKG. Then she made an unusual move: from leading people at tech giants to becoming CHRO at Intuitive Surgical, the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot that has served over 20 million patients. In this conversation, Pat shares the personal scorecard moment that changed her career trajectory, w...

Nilofer Merchant, ranked among the top 50 most influential management thinkers in the world, joins Amy and Meg to dismantle one of management's most beloved myths: the high-impact player ideology. From launching over 100 products netting $18 billion at companies like Apple and Autodesk, to getting fired after securing board approval, Nilofer reveals why making yourself indispensable actually makes...

Doug Merritt led one of the boldest transformations in enterprise software — taking Splunk from $220M perpetual license to over $3B in cloud SaaS revenue. Now, as CEO of Aviatrix, he's building the network security layer enterprises desperately need in the AI era. In this conversation, Doug gets vulnerable about his months of depression when ChatGPT launched, shares why "buying into fear is super...

Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Himanshu Palsule joins Amy and Meg to discuss Generation Beta, the leadership pipeline vacuum, and what it takes to build a workforce for a world that doesn't exist yet. From his World Economic Forum panel on corporate ladders to hiring a Chief AI Officer who asked for just 12 people, Himanshu shares what he's learned leading a major talent platform through complete transf...

MIT researcher and People Analytics author Ben Waber joins Amy and Meg for one of the most myth-busting conversations about AI, productivity, and what actually drives enterprise value. From a 23-year-old grad student who discovered that billion-dollar companies don't know how their own teams communicate, to the lunch table experiment that changed programmer productivity by 20%, Ben brings 15 years...

Our guest had to cancel (get well soon, Ankur!). So instead of the episode we planned, you're getting something better — us, unfiltered, on everything that's been consuming our lives for the past month. Amy has 100+ hours of vibe coding under her belt and has things to say. Meg has been reading Dan Heath's Reset and watching Jason Lemkin slowly become the worst worker on his own team. And together...

UNLEASH founder and CEO Marc Coleman joins Amy and Meg for a conversation about what 5,000 HR leaders actually need right now — not in theory, in practice. From launching a disastrous first conference with tangled lanyards and no sleep to building one of the world's largest HR technology events, Marc shares how he reads market signals, why he shifted from benefit-led to decision-led content, and t...

Radical Candor author Kim Scott joins Amy and Meg for one of the most candid conversations about leadership, courage, and what it really means to care in an era of AI disruption and rising authoritarianism. From managing diamond cutters in the Soviet Union to coaching CEOs at Google, Apple, and Twitter, Kim shares the personal stories behind her frameworks — including the moment a colleague's feed...

We're back! In our Season 2 opener, we dig into everything that's happened since we wrapped Season 1 — and there's a LOT. Amy's been vibe coding an app for her mom (with a full AI development team), Meg's been having her brain broken by AI agents, and the business landscape has shifted dramatically. We introduce five interlocking threads that will guide Season 2 — think of them as a rope, not a li...

Amy and Meg get brutally honest about the toxic workplace archetypes every leader faces - and share the real stories that shaped their careers. This isn't just storytelling; it's a masterclass in pattern recognition, strategic response, and hard-earned wisdom. These are REAL experiences from two executives who've navigated decades in corporate America. We're not just sharing war stories - we're br...

🚀 Jason Averbook reveals the 4 forces creating the biggest change HR has ever seen—and why 95% of AI projects are failing. This isn't about technology; it's about trust, engagement, and fundamentally rethinking how work gets done. ⚡ THE 4 FORCES RESHAPING WORK: 1. Engagement is slipping (trust in companies at all-time lows) 2. Jobs and skills are changing rapidly 3. Early career on-ramp is broke...

🚀 FROM FOOD CRITIC TO KITCHEN: John Sumser, HR tech's leading independent analyst for over 20 years, reveals what happens when you step from the sidelines into operations—and why most of what we believe about AI, HR, and career success is wrong. Learn how to navigate uncertainty as opportunity, why "I don't know" is the most powerful thing a leader can say, and what the next 5 years hold for HR i...

Finland – Universal Basic Income Pilot🚀 THE CASE FOR GIVING PEOPLE MONEY: UBI expert Scott Santens reveals why the most radical idea in economics might be the simplest - just give people cash. Discover how Alaska has proven this works for 40+ years, why his crowdfunded basic income changed everything he thought about work, and what happens when we shift from survival mode to abundance thinking....

🔄 What happens when two leaders with completely different upbringings join forces? In this deeply personal episode, Amy and Meg explore how their vastly different childhoods - one marked by stability and support, the other by constant change and scarcity - shaped their leadership styles, decision-making approaches, and the way they navigate challenges today. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction & Ba...

What would you build if you were creating a product organization from scratch in 2030? SugarCRM Chief Product Officer Maksim Ovsyannikov joins Amy and Meg to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping product development, design thinking, and organizational structures. From "very little user experience" as a value proposition to why QA is more critical than ever in probabilistic systems, this conve...