
Most executives are having the wrong conversation about AI. They’re debating headcount. Calculating how many roles they can eliminate. Building the business case for automation. Running the numbers on labor savings.

Most executives are having the wrong conversation about AI. They’re debating headcount. Calculating how many roles they can eliminate. Building the business case for automation. Running the numbers on labor savings.

The future doesn’t ambush people. It announces itself, loudly, repeatedly, through signals most leaders are too busy to catch. If it caught you off guard, that’s not bad luck. That’s a failure of attention.

Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo, just sent a memo to his entire company. He didn’t sugarcoat it. AppSumo had a brutal year, lost teammates, lost revenue, and lost some of the joy. He owned it. Then he said something most CEOs write around in seventeen layers of corporate softener:

A friend of mine manages a department at a call center that handles bail bonds. Every Friday, she spends about two hours tracking down numbers scattered across multiple Excel files, pulling them into a single report. It’s tedious, mechanical, and completely automatable.

There’s a question your board is already asking, even if your leadership team isn’t: if AI makes every employee dramatically more productive, what do you need all those employees for?

Every industry will be transformed by AI. Some will evolve. Others will disappear. New ones will be built from scratch. That’s not a prediction. It’s already in progress. The only question that matters now isn’t whether AI will reshape your business. It’s what position you’ll hold when it does.