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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism

There's a lot of great talent on the market, it takes real systems to access

There are more skilled, recently displaced workers available right now than at any point since the pandemic recovery. The technology sector alone has shed 139,156 jobs through June, up 83% year over year, and AI has been cited in nearly a quarter of all cuts across industries. June payrolls came in at 57,000, well below projections, with the prior two months revised down by 74,000. The talent pool is deep. Most organizations cannot access it because their hiring systems were built for a different market.

The post-pandemic labor market was extraordinarily dynamic. Hiring surged, quits hit unprecedented levels, and workers moved aggressively toward better matches. That dynamism is what made the market healthy -- churn is how workers find higher wages, how firms find better talent, and how the economy reallocates people toward productivity.

What economists are now calling “slack water” is the opposite. Hiring is subdued, separations are scarce, and the matching process has frozen. The unemployment rate sits at 4.2% and looks fine. Underneath, the market is going sclerotic. A worker who would have changed jobs for a raise stays put. A firm that would have taken a chance on someone new holds off. Opportunities stop materializing.

That is a problem for the economy. For you, it is an opportunity…if you have the systems to act on it. In a frozen market, the best people are not applying. They are sitting tight, waiting. Reaching them requires outbound sourcing, referral infrastructure, and speed. If you built those systems during the tight years, you still have them. If you relied on inbound volume and job boards, you are staring at a pool of exceptional people with no way to reach them. The window will close when hiring picks back up and those people land somewhere else. Right now, it is open.

Soft skills are hard and hard skills are soft?

The skills that are hardest to hire for, most expensive to develop, and most resistant to automation are all “soft.” The skills that are easiest to learn, cheapest to source, and most vulnerable to automation are all “hard.” The conventional hierarchy has inverted. Software engineers are finding that the bottleneck with AI coding tools is cognitive, not technical.

The transition from writing code to reviewing and directing it requires ego management, intentional skepticism, and precise communication. Without those skills, developers waste hours rewriting functional automated output to match their personal style, or worse, blindly accept code that introduces technical debt.

Ford figured this out the expensive way. After recalls cost the automaker $4.8 billion per year, the company hired 350 veteran engineers specifically for their judgment and mentorship. They run mandatory peer design reviews to hunt for failure points before blueprints reach the factory floor, and they reprogram ineffective AI tools. The result is a jump from 10th to 1st in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey. The company attributes the turnaround to a culture change emphasizing the role of human workers.

Most organizations’ hiring criteria, compensation structures, and development budgets have not caught up to this inversion. They are still screening for syntax and syntax is now a commodity. If your hiring criteria, compensation structure, and development budget still prioritize technical skills over judgment and adaptability, they are optimized for a world that no longer exists.

Quote of the Week:

“The differentiators that turned AI into real performance included discernment, curiosity, connection and humility. Smart companies will ultimately shift to measuring how employees execute strong judgement in AI usage, instead of usage or tokens alone.”

— Leslie Caputo, organizational psychologist and SVP of global solutions at coaching platform EZRA

Reading List:

Interesting work drives engagement, can "interesting" be a part of every job?

Controlling for pay and benefits, workers who found their new job more interesting than their last one were 27% more likely to rate it better overall. Better work-life balance made them 18% more likely to prefer the new role. This data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics arrives as Gallup estimates 8 million people have disengaged at work since 2020. If you are losing people and your compensation is competitive, the problem may be that the work itself is boring. If AI is automating the interesting parts of a role while leaving the tedious oversight, you are making this worse.

Jobs are "senioritizating"

Entry-level AI-exposed roles are now seven times more likely to require skills traditionally associated with senior employees, including judgment, leadership, and face-to-face persuasion. Job openings for these newly elevated roles grew 35% since 2019, while traditional entry-level openings shrank 10%. The routine coordination and documentation work that once helped new employees build context is now handled by software. The consequence is that the first rung of the career ladder is structurally disappearing. If you are not deliberately building the judgment layer into early-career roles, you are contributing to a structural problem that will embedded in your org chart in five years.

Getting specific about where AI shouldn't be used in people

Managers are using chatbots to write performance reviews, draft PIPs, and decide who to promote. One sales strategist described her boss consulting ChatGPT like a "Bible," generating constant strategic pivots, monitoring Slack messages for tone, and overriding her judgment with the model's output. The pattern is consistent: the manager already has a decision and uses the tool to validate it. That is corrosive in a specific way. It removes the friction that forces a manager to defend a personnel decision to themselves before making it. If you are tracking AI use in performance reviews, you are measuring the wrong thing. Volume of AI use tells you nothing. Judgment in AI use tells you everything.

Data Point: Feeling the Squeeze

52%

Percentage of US workers are planning staycations this summer as costs rise.

In Other News

• CEO of $248 billion cybersecurity company says workers are about to face a ‘Darwinian moment’ thanks to AI: Evolve or get cut. (Fortune)

• Remote Work Is Making It Harder for Grads to Find (and Keep) Jobs: New research argues that frustration among employers over remote work may be leading them to cut back on hiring young workers. (Wall Street Journal)

• Early career workers’ wages can’t match inflation, Glassdoor finds. (HR Dive)

• White-collar America is having a nervous breakdown about AI: “For the first time in at least a generation,” an economist said, “the future is up for grabs, and they might not end up on top”. (Quartz)

• Gartner Says CHROs Must Identify Hidden Workforce Costs to Protect AI ROI. (Gartner)

• The diminishing political returns of a solid labor market. (Morning Money)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism

Change as a skill

Thirty-nine percent of core skills will change by 2030, according to the World Bank. MBA programs are rebuilding curricula around judgment as everything else becomes a commodity. And employers want AI proficiency from new hires…while complaining that Gen Z workers lack the critical thinking to use those tools well (more on that In Other News). Everyone agrees: build new skills. Yet skill (re)development is the right answer to the wrong question.

The harder question is whether your organization can keep building skills indefinitely without the building process itself becoming destabilizing. Reskilling programs have a target. They close a specific gap at a specific moment. What most organizations lack has no target: the ability to keep working while the next requirement is still forming. Call it change tolerance. A leadership discipline, not a training program.

In practice this looks like clear directions from January feeling abstract and inapplicable by February. A major initiative gets reprioritized, two experienced people rotate out, their replacements arrive with different assumptions. Each shift is manageable alone. In combination, they erode alignment faster than leaders can restore it.

No reskilling budget touches that problem. What touches it is whether your managers have the mandate to rebuild shared understanding every time the context moves and whether they have the time. Right now almost none do.

AI is increasingly a distraction from the real work

The organizational energy being spent on AI is starting to crowd out the work AI was supposed to improve. Software engineers describe workplace paralysis from the release cadence alone (major releases have jumped from 18 in 2023 to 69 in 2025) and report spending more time learning, evaluating, and switching tools than building.

Middle managers are buried under oversight: validating AI output, coaching juniors who produce polished deliverables but cannot tell when the analysis is wrong, and interpreting what "AI-enhanced" means for client work with no firm-wide guidance.

The time juniors save producing output is consumed by managers checking it. Manager engagement has fallen from 30% to 22% in two years. Ninety percent of companies use AI in recruiting; fewer than 5% report transformational outcomes on any metric. The attention tax is real, and it is compounding. If your people are spending more time managing AI than doing the work AI is supposed to support, that is worth measuring before adding the next tool.

Quote of the Week:

This is the first time I have seen a technological innovation benefit older workers more than younger workers in terms of job security…All of that deep experience and expertise in a specific profession—but also in those soft skills of critical thinking and understanding at a systems level what’s happening—those are skills that older workers tend to have.”

—Heather Tinsley-Fix, AARP’s senior advisor of employer engagement, on the dilemma facing older workers whose soft skills may be rewarded amid the AI transformation: adapt or retire

Reading List:

Get ready for a wave of “physical AI”

The AI conversation has been dominated by software and knowledge work. The next phase is already getting physical. General Motors installed 50 robot arms at its flagship EV factory while 1,300 workers remain on temporary layoff. JD.com’s founder warned that the company’s 700,000 delivery workers will be replaced by robots sooner or later. Agility Robotics, which makes humanlike robots for warehouses, is going public at a $2.5 billion valuation.

Critical thinking is eroding

A study of 72,000 workers and found Gen Z and millennials are 18% below average in critical thinking, 17% below in attention to detail, 10% below in creative problem solving than other generations. Declining academic standards, weakened vocational pathways, and a generation that onboarded through Zoom rather than by watching experienced colleagues has create a clear but quiet crisis. Now they are using AI tools that produce polished output regardless of whether the judgment behind it is sound. Harvard Business School research confirms the risk: when bonuses depend on outcomes more than accuracy workers actively choose not to examine the AI’s reasoning.

We’re entering an uncompliable territory

Regulators are producing employment law faster than legal teams can implement it. California signed an executive order that could require 90 days' notice for AI-driven layoffs at a threshold of just 25 workers, New York passed a bill that bans companies from posting “fake” jobs, Michigan is debating a bill which makes it illegal to contact employers after work. In aggregate, they are pushing businesses toward a calculation European employers already make routinely: when does compliance risk cost less than compliance itself?

Data Point:

96%

Percentage of HR leaders that that, in the next five years, entry-level employees will be responsible for monitoring AI systems according to Cognizant

In Other News

• A 6 year study shows which CEOs are pushing RTO mandates: The ones with the biggest egos. (Fortune)

• Inside Consultants’ Messy Shift From Hourly Billing. (WSJ CFO Briefing)

• One in three entry-level tasks is now completed by AI: The adaptability imperative. (Cognizant)

• Our highly-paid, overworked junior staff keep leaving just as we get them fully trained. (Ask a Manager)

• AI Is Learning to Spot Toxic Bosses: Is sacrificing your own privacy worth it to stem your manager’s worst tendencies? (Bloomberg)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism

Leading people in an increasingly brittle economy

Companies are posting record profits yet laying off tens of thousands, and your employees are hearing all about it. Tech layoffs through May have already surpassed 115,000, running 44% faster than last year. But when Gallup asked laid-off workers directly what caused their layoff, and only 1% named AI. The more common answers were organizational restructuring, cost-cutting, and role elimination. Well quoted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put a sharper point on it: most large companies are overstaffed by 25 to 50 percent, and AI has become the convenient cover story for cuts that were coming regardless. That is worth sitting with if you are a leader who has cited AI as the reason for a headcount decision, or is about to.

What makes this combustible is the environment those workers are worried about landing in. Only 22% of workers globally strongly agree their job is safe. Consumer prices jumped 4.2% in May, the highest in three years. Healthcare premiums are rising at double the rate of inflation. This economic climate is brittle to say the least, strip away AI-related spending and the economy has been in a recession for nearly 2 years.

Gallup data shows workers who used AI less than monthly were three times as likely to have been laid off as those who used it regularly. AI adoption is now a layoff risk factor, and most of your workforce does not know that. This is especially important for engaging those who stay.

We mined the comments of those laid off - a dataset of over a million comments over the last couple years - shows how much the layoffs felt like a rug pull, and are almost certain to lower the starting level of trust and engagement going forward.

Don’t give up on grads

Internship postings on Handshake fell 16% earlier this year, another double digital decline in a multi-year collapse in interns. In certain sectors, entry-level hiring has dropped more than 50% since 2019. The logic writes itself: AI handles the routine work that junior hires used to do, so why bring them in?

Yet the smartest money, hedge funds and leading firms, are starting to reverse course, seeing cutting entry-level programs as severing a key mechanism for transferring knowledge and building the next generation of people who actually understand how the work gets done. The routine tasks may go, but the judgment, the context, the institutional knowledge still have to come from somewhere, and are abut to get scarce.

Citadel just ran its largest intern cohort in the firm’s history, IBM is tripling its entry-level hiring this year. IBM’s CHRO put it plainly: “The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment.” The companies cutting their programs will have powerful tools in three years and no one who came up learning how to use them.

Quote of the Week:

“The goal cannot be surveillance for surveillance’s sake. The healthiest systems use assessment to support growth, mentorship, and adaptation. If workers only experience measurement without support, organizations create fear.”

— Carrol Chang, CEO of Andela

Reading List:

Hiring still happens but for increasingly narrow talent

Three in four CHROs expect hiring to concentrate in specific roles rather than expand broadly, according to a Conference Board survey of 111 CHROs. More than 70% say specialized technical roles are the hardest to fill. Only 21% of those who reduced hiring tied it to AI -- the majority cited financial caution. The Conference Board's own conclusion: skill requirements are evolving faster than talent pipelines, and anyone who cannot source this talent externally will have to build it internally. Most have not started. Shifting budget from recruiting to reskilling is the move, and it is easier to make before you are desperate for the skills than after.

Employers increasingly raise worker healthcare costs

Nearly half of large U.S. employers plan to shift more healthcare costs onto workers next year, according to Mercer's survey of 604 organizations. This is happening as workers are already squeezed by inflation, a low-hire market, and the job insecurity documented above. The timing matters. Workers currently blame insurers for rising costs, not employers…but that goodwill is not permanent. Cost-shifting does not reduce healthcare spend. It delays care, which drives up long-term costs and degrades productivity. If you are one of the organizations holding the line on benefits while competitors cut, that is a retention story worth telling your people explicitly.

Should you continually assess performance?

Airlines stopped measuring pilots by logged flight hours when cockpits became automated and started analyzing data from every flight to understand how they make decisions. HBR argues knowledge work is heading the same direction. The risk is Meta's mistake: a monitoring system employees experience as surveillance triggers backlash, not development. One CEO drew the line that "if workers only experience measurement without support, organizations create fear. If assessment is paired with coaching and transparency, people are much more willing to engage with change."

Data Point:

22%

Number of workers globally strongly agree that their job is safe from being eliminated according to the ADP People at Work 2026 report.

In Other News

• AI anxiety may be ramping up despite productivity hopes. (HR Dive)

• Mrs. Dow Jones: The American dream is ‘very dead’ for millennials and Gen Z. (Business Insider)

• Enterprises report increasing budgets for security training in AI and other critical topics. (CyberSecurityDive)

• Work From Home Is Here to Stay—Even if Some CEOs Don’t Love It. (Wall Street Journal)

• When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak? In the nineteen-eighties, an office job promised security and fulfillment. For graduates starting careers today, the prospect is often tinged with dread. (New Yorker)

• This assumes the underlying data is right: Mistaking a Hiring Freeze for a Robot. (Apollo)

• I went viral on TikTok making $100 a day for 100 days by testing different side hustles — only 3 were worth sticking with. (Business Insider)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism

Leaders need a change strategy

I gave a speech this week and afterward the COO of one of the attendees pulled me aside. He wanted to talk, even though his company was already doing most of what I had recommended. That itself was notable. When I asked why they were so far ahead, I was ready to write it off as rare leadership and move on.

Then he named something that’s surprising for reasons I’m still not fully sure of: they had spun up a continuous improvement function years ago. That is the gap many leaders miss. Good leadership is a state whereas a continuous improvement function is a mechanism. One depends on the quality of the people in the room. The other runs regardless of who is in the room if done well.

“Oh no! Not another thing…” - CEOs

This is particularly important these days as the change is coming fast and from all directions at systems ill-prepared to handle it. The result is burnout at best if now downright risk:

• Rapid technological change is creating all sorts of changes that are far beyond the normal playbook: Companies aren’t prepared for how AI is accelerating the ability to impersonate CEOs for fraud. (HR Dive)

But change management (these days somewhere between incremental updates and holding on for dear life) is not the same thing as a change strategy is not a change management plan. A change strategy is the organizational infrastructure for making continuous change decisions well. It requires three things:

1. clear articulation of what will not change (the values, the talent philosophy, the trust compact with employees),

2. a structured process for evaluating what should change and at what pace,

3. and leadership accountability for the irreversible decisions.

The CEO from the first paragraph had all three. They did not build them in response to AI. They built them years earlier, and the AI transition was simply the latest input into a machine that was already running.

The practical implication is uncomfortable for leaders who prefer to move fast. Irreversible decisions, the ones that cannot be undone once made, require a higher bar of deliberation than reversible ones. Nobody said change at this rate was going to be comfortable, but it just might be less uncertain with the right structures.

AI-driven dis-engagement, Part 2

The new disengagement does not look like disengagement. Workers are busy, productivity metrics are up, but something is quietly eroding that’s hard to put your finger on.

Boston Consulting Group’s research calls it the joy paradox: 67% of workers report higher job satisfaction with AI, but 41% report a significant increase in cognitive load, and 47% say they spend more time managing AI than doing the actual work. Meanwhile, Penn State and USC researchers found that passive AI use (copying and pasting AI-generated responses) reduces feelings of ownership by 20% and meaningfulness by 10%.

Workers feel less connected to their output even when that output is better. And often its just replacing busy work more than being strategically valuable, white-collar employees spend 6.4 hours per week “botsitting,” managing AI output rather than producing, and one in three AI sessions fails completely.

The fix involved reorienting our relationship with the tools. Organizations that deploy AI as a productivity layer without redesigning workflows are trading long-term engagement for short-term output metrics. The 66% of employees given no guidance on what to do with AI-freed time are not being empowered. They are being left to drift.

Quote of the Week: More human, not less

“The skills that are most resistant to displacement by AI are the ones that are the most distinctly human: relationship building, conflict resolution, the ability to guide and motivate other people, and ethical judgment.”

— Maria Flynn, Jobs for the Future

Reading List:

What are tokens, why is everyone talking about them, and should you care?

Tokens are suddenly the “new thing” CEOs are being forced to think about. Simply put, tokens are the units vendors use to represent AI work and they are becoming the new headcount budgets. The top AI services are priced per token rather than per seat, which means the cost of AI scales with usage rather than with the number of employees who have access. Amazon recently cautioned its own employees against "tokenmaxxing," or using the most powerful models for tasks that do not require them.

Fortune 500s launch programs to own the labor as key shortages undermine growth strategies

Rather than lobbying for better workforce pipeline, Fortune 500 companies are increasingly building them…and in turn potentially controlling strategic talent supplies. With an estimated 2.1 million skilled trades jobs potentially going unfilled by 2030, the talent market cannot move fast enough. Meta, Bloomberg, and Ford are all investing in programs to offer free training and guaranteed jobs for every graduate in hot areas like data center construction.

GenZ's newest psychological feature: slow and steady?

44% of Gen Z prefer steady progress over fast-paced promotions, and 55% are delaying major life decisions due to economic uncertainty according to the 2026 Deloitte Gen Z and Millennial Survey. The instinct is to read this as a lack of ambition. It is more accurately read as a rational response to the environment they inherited. Gen Z entered the workforce during a pandemic, watched the mass layoffs of 2023-2024 eliminate people who had done everything right, and is now navigating an AI transition that makes career planning genuinely uncertain.

Data Point: “Botsitting”

6.4

Number of hours white-collar workers spend per week "botsitting" (managing AI output rather than producing work) according the Glean Work AI Index.

In Other News

• People who eagerly seek out managerial positions may be least suited for the roles. (HR Dive)

• Doomjobbing Report: 48% of Job Seekers Apply Without Reading the Full Job Description. (Monster)

• Labor market adds 172,000 jobs in May, but growth remains uneven: Most industries saw no changes or declines in total employment. (HR Brew)

• Making the case for fractional and AI employees: At New York Tech Week, a panel focused on how startups can benefit from workers—agentic or otherwise—who aren’t on the full-time payroll. (HR Brew)

• More Employees Embrace ‘Microshifting,’ Carving Their Workday Into Chunks: The hope is that it can help people produce better work, while preventing burnout and turnover. (Wall Street Journal)

• New York passes a bill aimed at halting ‘ghost jobs’. (HR Dive)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism

How do we know what should stay the same and what should change?

This question is probably harder to answer now than it has ever been, and not for the reason most people cite. The pace of change is obvious. What is less obvious is that the cost of being wrong has become asymmetric. In a stable environment, if you change something that should have stayed the same, you reverse it. The cost is friction and some lost time. In the current environment, some changes are irreversible.

You cannot un-fire 17% of your workforce. You cannot un-break the trust compact once employees have watched you track their mouse clicks and walked it back. You cannot un-signal to your best people that they are disposable.

These are real cases. Meta reversed course on an employee mouse-tracking tool after internal backlash. The policy was reversible. The damage to the psychological contract was not. Microsoft omitted a question from an internal survey about whether leadership was listening and got (ironically) hammered for it. They can add the question back. The signal about what leadership is willing to hear is harder to take back. Snowflake’s CIO threatened layoffs to force AI adoption. Whether the signal and rise in ChatGPT use is worth it remains debatable.

We don’t have a perfect answer to this question. However the leaders we see doing this well are the ones who have a clear mental model of what is reversible and what is not, and they apply that model before they act. The practical discipline is simple: before any significant change, ask whether it can be undone.

If the answer is no, the bar for needing to proceed should be much higher. The changes that look bold in the short term and are genuinely irreversible in their human consequences deserve the most scrutiny, not the least.

The strategic value of variance

Artificial intelligence is an engine of sameness. Just like a good manager, it trains on what good is, optimizes for reliability, and produces the expected. In many operational functions, that consistency is a feature. But in strategy, design, and human capital, that consistency is sneakily becoming a strategic risk.

When every organization has access to the same models, the same prompts, and the same generated patterns, the baseline of acceptable work rises, but the ceiling of differentiated work becomes harder to reach. Wharton research on user experience design highlights this trap: AI can accelerate the creation of competent, me-too experiences, but it systematically compresses the productive variance that leads to breakthroughs. The same dynamic applies to talent. Workers increasingly prefer AI feedback because it is less judgmental, but a culture optimized for comfort over candor will eventually lose its edge.

The best path forward is to augment the baseline, but deliberately introduce human friction, divergent thinking, and non-consensus decision-making into their most critical processes. Differentiation requires variance, and variance requires humans.

Quote of the Week: One foot in, one foot out

"I hate the word balance. If you can finish everything before you go to sleep, you don't have an interesting enough job."

— Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global

Reading List:

Spending more than your G&A budget on AI

So-called tokenmaxxing (quick note: genzs have taken to adding the term “maxxing” onto any word to imply doing it extensively) is on the rise. Stupid name aside, the phenomenon of spending any amount of money on AI credits is leaving some companies with some head scratching numbers. Last week it came out that one Fortune 500 company spend half a billion dollars on AI credits. When you are spending more on AI than all G&A and labor costs combined, the “efficiency” thesis of adoption needs to be seriously re-considered

Employees can now reject AI for religious reasons

When a North Carolina software engineer secures an exemption to avoid using AI at work on religious grounds it sounds silly. But the legal implications of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical are serious. What the pope did with this formal decry was offering a written theological argument to around 60 million Catholic workers in America. Under Title VII, employers must accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless doing so causes undue hardship. If you are mandating AI use across your workforce, get ready for a rise in exemptions and potentially legal risk if it’s treated it as a condition of employment.

Culture plots its revenge in the efficiency era

The efficiency era has treated culture as a soft variable to be managed after the structural cuts are made, but McKinsey research shows companies with strong, aligned cultures are three times more likely to deliver superior total shareholder return. Culture is not the backdrop to strategy. It is the operating system, and the efficiency era's habit of treating it as an afterthought is accumulating a debt that will show up in execution long before it shows up in earnings.

Data Point:

200

The number of metropolitan areas where unemployment rates were higher in April 2026 than a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, signaling a broader cooling in the labor market outside of a few high growth areas.

Beyond hiring that divide is critical for understanding geographic differences in spending for sales targeting.

In Other News

• These COOs became CEOs. Here’s what they wish everyone knew about the tricky transition. (CEO Daily)

• Leaders who can’t see worker problems are creating a ‘dignity debt. (HR Dive)

• 1 in 4 White-Collar Workers Are Stalling Out: Invisible barrier keeping many Americans from getting ahead—midcareer stall. (Wall Street Journal)

• A Three-Minute Protocol to Reduce AI Manipulation Risk: A simple critical-thinking habit can protect employees and organizations from AI-enabled deception and manipulation. (MIT Sloan)

• Rising healthcare costs are prompting HR to rethink benefits strategies: Three-fourths of employers think they’re doing enough to help mitigate medical costs, but only 46% of employees agree. (HR Brew)

• ‘I’ve applied for more than 400 roles’ - how young people are facing the job shortage. (BBC)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Supporting your employees when everyone is overwhelmed

When we sit down to write this newsletter each week, there is a hesitant calculus about what is worth bring to you. Our audience skews heavily executive. We are always considering the fact that each new problem we bring up, or even action proposed, is pulling from an already depleted ability to do much with it in most workplaces.

This is especially difficult as an era of layoffs, geopolitical unrest, AI-fueled uncertainty, and unrelenting pressure to deliver leaves little room for anything else. Asking people to think about their career development on top of everything feels impossible. But supporting your team’s growth is an essential part of your job. The question is how to make career development feel relevant rather than tone-deaf when your own plate is just as full.

The answer is to stop treating learning as an extracurricular activity. Helen Tupper, cofounder of career development consultancy Amazing If, notes that most employees know they should be building new skills, but the demands of the here and now leave little room for it. They put their day job over their development.

The solution is to build learning into the week, not onto it. Look at their calendar. There is almost certainly something already coming up, such as a client event or a presentation, where they could play a bigger part. Let them open the meeting, lead the Q&A, or debrief the client. When it is done, make sure you take the time to reflect on it together.

And since you are figuring it out too, resist the urge to pretend otherwise. Share what you are currently reading or working on. Talk about a conversation that challenged your thinking. Be open about a mistake and what you took from it. As Tupper puts it: “Learning can look like anything, as long as they can see you doing it.”

How can learning compete in an attention deficit?

Workplace training has a TikTok problem. Learning experiences were designed in an era when social media exist and there weren’t a host of tools we have now to present complex ideas in genuinely entertaining ways. Now, people are scrolling constantly, consuming content that is fast, personally relevant, emotionally engaging, and designed by teams who understand human attention down to the millisecond.

When employees are asked to sit through dense modules and generic slides that feel like they were built before color TV, the disconnect is obvious. Low engagement with training is likely as much an issue of bland resources and boring design that do not feel worthwhile, as of being busy.

For the future of trainings, creativity, story-led content, and direct relevance to those taking it are better than completeness. On that note, measure impact rather than just completion is key to make learning more than just a box to check. Completion rates alone tell us very little about whether learning has actually had an impact.

Quote of the Week: Not how I’d roll out AI

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologized for offending colleagues and strangers alike when he said the British bank’s aim with using AI is to partly replace “lower-value human capital.”

Reading List:

HR invests more time in training as “skill engagement” becomes a rare point of workplace alignment

The share of HR leaders naming employee training their top priority jumped nearly 90% since last year. AI is the driver: it is increasing role complexity faster than existing programs were designed for. A Go1 survey of 2,000 L&D leaders found 7 in 10 professionals use AI weekly, but only 14% consider themselves advanced users. The organizations making the strongest progress are treating workforce capability as infrastructure, not a budget line that fluctuates with hiring.

CEOs get ruthless about performance

The corporate ethos of the previous decade, when leaders put empathy out front while quietly wishing employees worked harder, is over. As AI gives employers more leverage in a sluggish white-collar market, a growing chorus of CEOs is saying the quiet part out loud. Nestle's Philipp Navratil pledged to be "ruthless in assessing talent." Citigroup's Jane Fraser reminded staff they are judged on results, not effort. Executives used the phrase "performance culture" 633 times on S&P 500 earnings calls last year, up from 460 the year before. B-players are being managed out.

Don’t let yourself go numb, or back to sleep on AI’s disruption

There is a lot of noise right about AI right now, but the cost of tuning it out is rising too. Adecco Group research across 2,000 C-suite executives shows a widening gap between what leaders expect AI to deliver and what their organizations can actually do. While 45% of leaders expect AI agents integrated into workflows within a year, less than a third of workers agree, and only 36% of leaders say their talent strategy clearly shows how AI creates opportunity rather than displacement. "AI may move at software speed," Adecco CEO Denis Machuel said, "but organizational trust moves at human speed."

Data Point: Even the summer camps aren’t hiring

30%

Year on year fall in camp counsel jobs indicating a rough climate for teens looking for a summer job. Literally EVERYONE is affected in this economy.

In Other News

• ‘I live in survival mode’: The rise of the multi-job workforce. (BBC)

• The 19th-century guide to running an effective meeting: A US officer and engineer devised the process that is still in use today. (Financial Times)

• Target plans to evaluate employees on customer engagement. (HR Dive)

• More workers are raiding their 401(k)s as average balances fall, Fidelity says. (CNBC)

• Bolt CEO says he let go of his entire HR team for creating problems that didn’t exist: ‘Those problems disappeared when I let them go’. (Fortune)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Creating employee engagement during a culture of fear

When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed during a graduation speech about AI, it was as much a protest against a technology as it was signal that uncertainty is fast metastasizing into fear. The fear is justified. Customer service roles fell 130,180 in the year through May 2025. Credit authorizers are down 26.2% since ChatGPT’s introduction. The playbook is visible: Intuit cut 17% of its staff, targeting mid-level managers. Meta laid off thousands and moved managers to IC roles. As one Capital One employee virally posted: “This is exactly why you should never sacrifice too much for these companies. You are always disposable to them.”

And to a degree it’s true, isn’t it?

The question is what the new compact looks like. Sophos CEO Joe Levy faces this directly. When employees ask if support jobs will be eliminated, his answer is honest: “I don’t know.” Instead of false promises, Sophos uses a four-part framework: provide tools, give training, share examples, and offer incentives. Most companies stop after the first two. Sophos goes further because “What should I do with it?” is the most common question. They make AI part of performance reviews, measuring both outcomes and the process of finding efficiencies.

The leadership challenge is maintaining engagement when the workforce assumes they are being automated out. The answer is not pretending the threat does not exist. It is giving employees agency over the transition. Leaders who admit uncertainty but provide tools and incentives for employees to figure it out alongside them replace paralyzing fear with productive experimentation.

Fast adoption and poor governance kicks AI risks to HR departments…or legal

Get ready for shadow AI. Verizon data shows a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions tied to unauthorized AI use. Of the 45% of professionals using AI regularly, 67% access platforms via unauthorized personal accounts. Workers with access to sensitive material are plugging it into their tool of choice, leaving their organization blind to the exposure.

The risks are concrete: 28% of data loss prevention violations involved employees entering source code into AI tools. In 3.2% of cases, workers uploaded proprietary research. Yet only 13% of organizations have adequate AI agent governance. The gap is driving the development of AI-BOMs to track configurations and system prompts. Until governance catches up to adoption, IP loss and compliance violations will land on HR and legal.

Quote of the Week:

"We as employers aren't doing a good enough job saying [to older workers], we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better."

— Becky Frankiewicz, Chief Strategy Officer at ManpowerGroup

Reading List:

Workers contend with ‘skill atrophy’

There is a vicious cycle forming in AI adoption. A new GoTo survey found that 60% of employees feel pressured to use AI for productivity, yet 39% say the reliance has already weakened their skill sets. Half acknowledge they depend too heavily on the technology. The pressure to adopt is eroding the very capabilities that make human judgment valuable. While “perishable” skills tied to specific tools will be replaced regardless, but durable skills like judgment, critical thinking, and decision-making are what will differentiate high performers in an AI-saturated workplace.

Despite public examples, most employers are not cutting paid leave

When Zoom cut parental leave from 22 to 18 weeks and Deloitte halved theirs from 16 to 8, it felt like the start of a trend. It is not. A Marsh McLennan Agency survey found 86% of firms have no plans to change vacation time and 93% will maintain sick leave levels. The legal environment is part of the reason: 12 or more states now mandate paid family and medical leave, and 18 require paid sick leave, making cuts both complex and risky. If your organization is holding the line while competitors cut back, that is a story worth telling your employees.

When it comes to leadership, replacement is abdication

The most relevant AI risk for leaders might be abdication more than competitive effects. Data finds that leaders who outsource judgment to AI - out of fear of obsolescence - become less trusted by their teams. AI can generate, optimize, and even mimic wisdom. But it cannot hesitate, doubt, or read a room.

Data Point:

67%

Number of professionals who use AI regularly are accessing platforms using unauthorized personal accounts.

In Other News

• Indeed parent company touts record growth driven by AI. (HR Dive)

• Bolt’s cofounder scrapped its HR department. This CEO says people management is key to thriving in the AI age. (CEO Daily)

• Meta is rapidly reorganizing its workers’ jobs around AI: ‘Transfers aren’t optional’. (The Guardian)

• LinkedIn declares war on AI slop: The job networking site plans to target low-quality AI posts that distract its users from finding value on the platform. (Fast Company)

• While other tech CEOs warn of mass job losses, Glean’s chief says AI will never replace a single worker. (Fortune)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Get ready for a whole host of new AI compliance headaches

Nearly 70% of employers now use AI in hiring; which is great for speed but no so much for rapidly increasing, legal exposure. The federal government has signaled permissiveness, and many employers have read that as permission to move fast. It is the opposite. The compliance burden is fragmenting into a state-by-state patchwork harder to manage than a single federal standard would have been.

The regular suspects have been active. Colorado just signed SB 26-189 requiring employers to notify individuals within 30 days when an automated tool materially influences an adverse employment decision, effective January 2027. New York City requires bias audits and public disclosures. Illinois mandates applicant notification. California has expanded its civil rights framework to cover AI-driven employment decisions with extended record retention. Courts are not waiting either: a federal judge allowed disparate impact claims to proceed against Workday’s screening software, and a separate class action alleges AI applicant scoring violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Your vendor contract does not transfer legal accountability. Employers remain responsible for employment decisions regardless of whether a human or an algorithm informed them.

If you are using AI in hiring, performance management, scheduling, or productivity monitoring, the compliance obligation already exists under Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA. The new state laws add disclosure, audit, and recordkeeping on top. Algorithmic errors at scale quickly become systemic violations. Map your tools, engage your vendors on transparency, and document decision-making processes now.

New critical metric: agent to employee ratio

The metric that will define workforce planning for the next decade just arrived. Leading mid-market organizations (ie the 5% of firms that have actually figured out how to do AI well) have an average of 144 AI agents deployed for every human employee. In small businesses, the ratio is 59 to 1. These are production systems doing work; the cumulative population of specialized, agents spawned across a typical operating period, executing work that used to require human handoffs between systems.

At ClickUp (a $4 billion productivity platform with 1,300 employees), the company now runs roughly 3,000 internal AI agents. The CEO instituted a policy: employees must go through an AI agent before pinging him directly. The shift, as he describes it, is from “actually doing and waiting on the work, to reviewing the work and ensuring that it meets your standards.” Employees are becoming managers of agents.

Guardrails exist (agents cannot delete anything for example), and the company maintains an “agent org chart” listing every agent by name, owner, and cost to run. When people talk about scale decoupling from headcount, this is what they mean. The question for every HR and operations leader is what workforce planning looks like when your employee-to-output ratio is no longer fixed.

Quote of the Week:

"The biggest shift is from actually doing and waiting on the work, to reviewing the work and ensuring that it meets your standards."

— Zeb Evans, ClickUp CEO on how the shifting agent-employee ratio is affecting work

Reading List:

Leadership development is no longer just for leaders

New research from ADP speaks for itself: Half of organizations now offer leadership development to workers at all levels with 79% reporting improved organizational culture and 68% saying job performance improved. Communication and decision-making top the list of what executives value and learners want. The challenge is access: 63% of managers say the role of leader was more difficult than anticipated, and more than half report their organization provided little training to prepare them.

Designing operations for resilience without sacrificing efficiency

The traditional assumption is that efficiency and resilience oppose each other. New MIT Sloan research argues they don’t have to if you’re willing to accept some complexity. Most organizations optimize for internal metrics (on-time performance, utilization rates, inventory turnover) that capture efficiency without customer or external resilience. The fix becomes pairing measurements (one metric for efficiency, one for customer experience for example), strategic buffers deployed by disruption probability rather than uniform rules, and curated choice sets that remove high-risk options before customers select them.

MBA’s are having a fire sale as fewer businesses want their wares

Business school applications are rapidly declining and institutions are responding with discounts on specialized degrees promising AI-era relevance. The two-year MBA faces intensifying ROI scrutiny as employers value demonstrated skills over credentials. Schools are pivoting toward shorter programs, acknowledging the market has moved faster than their curricula. The price cuts suggest that any MBA you might want to hire should get cheaper, even if they become scarcer than over the past decades.

Data Point:

30 days

The timeline Colordo businesses have to notify individuals of “adverse AI-influenced decisions”

In Other News

• Employers adopt AI tools faster than they can train workers to use them. (HR Dive)

• What 25,000 Intern Applicants Taught Me About People. (Forbes)

• Workers are getting paid to teach AI how to do their jobs. (CBS)

• OpenAI just acquired the consulting firm it was born alongside. The model company is now the services company. (The Next Web)

• Your Work Team Is Now a ‘Pod’ and Your Co-Workers Are AI Agents: Companies are restructuring engineering teams into smaller, more nimble cross-functional ‘pods,’ made up of humans and AI agents. (Wall Street Journal)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

You have to win the workplace before you can win your market

In the rush to avoid falling behind on artificial intelligence, organizations are forgetting the human foundation required to actually deploy it. The disconnect is stark: 88% of employers agree AI requires their workforce to develop new skills, yet four in five prioritize automating routine tasks over investing in people strategies.

Aon calls it a “clear misalignment.” Companies are pushing automation while underinvesting in the people required to align those tools with business goals. The result is a workforce that feels the pressure to adapt but lacks the support to do so.

The financial engineering approach to this problem is failing. When CFOs treat AI adoption as a spreadsheet exercise, the workforce strikes back. Docebo found that 56% of employees are so overwhelmed by manual tasks they do not have time to learn the AI tools intended to save them time. Culture Amp data shows AI tools are actually increasing workloads and driving engagement downward.

The organizations getting this right are the ones treating AI fluency as a leadership mandate, not just an IT rollout. AlphaSense CFO Samantha Greenberg dedicates 10 hours a week to learning AI skills herself, operating as a “player coach” to ensure her finance team understands how to use the technology as a thinking partner rather than just a productivity hack.

The market rewards the companies that get the workplace right first. Organizations with a dual focus on culture and performance experienced a 47% increase in share price, according to Culture Amp. The alternative is the cycle of financial engineering seen at companies like Coinbase, where leadership attempts to force an “AI-native” structure through mass layoffs and flattened org charts. You cannot financially engineer a culture of innovation. If you want to win the market in the AI era, you have to win the workplace first.

Build vs buy, organizational AI version

The fastest path to organizational AI gains is training your existing workforce, but companies are increasingly deciding it is easier to just buy new talent. General Motors recently laid off 600 IT workers, roughly 10% of the department, in a deliberate skills swap.

They are clearing out legacy employees to make room for hires with specific AI-native development and data engineering backgrounds. It is a stark admission that retraining legacy IT staff is proving too slow or too difficult for the pace of the current market.

This “buy over build” strategy is an expensive dilemma to get wrong. Coinbase took a similar approach, cutting 14% of its staff to rebuild around “AI-native pods” and eliminate pure managers. But buying talent is not a silver bullet. Poor engagement and the rapid atrophy of AI skills mean companies will eventually be forced to develop effective training programs regardless of who they hire.

Companies and academia are not equipped to teach these skills because the curriculum development process is too slow. The organizations that figure out how to build “AI builders” internally will have a sustainable advantage over those constantly trying to buy them on the open market.

Quote of the Week:

"Companies buy talent, they don't build it."

— Sam Caucci, founder of 1Huddle

Reading List:

New employees are already dis-engaged by the time they hit their desk

The hiring process has become so opaque and impersonal that candidates are burning out before they even receive an offer. A Monster report found that 60% of job seekers say the most exasperating part of the hunt is not knowing if a human ever looked at their resume. The frustration is driving behavioral changes: 48% of candidates resort to "spray and pray" applications, and 38% of U.S. candidates have withdrawn from a hiring process simply because it included an AI interview. When 54% of workers favor banning applicant tracking systems entirely, the system is actively damaging employer brands before day one.

New “code of conduct” phishing campaigns show concerning effectiveness

Malicious actors are weaponizing workplace anxiety. A new phishing campaign identified by Microsoft uses "code of conduct" violations as bait, targeting 35,000 users across 26 countries in just two days. The emails use genuine delivery services, HIPAA-compliant encryption banners, and polished enterprise templates to create a false sense of urgency. By preying on the fear of HR disciplinary action, attackers are successfully triggering credential harvesting flows, showing that the next generation of cyber threat is as psychological as it is technical.

The pay for performance era arrives

The era of "peanut butter" raises, where every employee receives an equal percentage increase, is ending. Only 4% of U.S. employers are still distributing raises this way, according to Mercer. The shift is being driven by the AI divide in the workplace. While 54% of workers are bypassing their company's AI tools to work manually, a distinct group of AI "super users" has emerged. These super users are three times more likely to have received a promotion and a pay raise in the past year. As the gap between high performers and stragglers widens, companies are realizing that equal treatment is no longer fair treatment.

Data Point:

38%

The percentage of U.S. candidates who have withdrawn from a hiring process because it included an AI interview.

In Other News

• The OpenAI trial is exposing a brutal truth about workplace texts - they’re all in bounds legally. (Business Insider)

• Colorado passes bill outlawing wage setting based on AI surveillance. (HR Dive)

• AI coders are carrying half-open laptops through airports, offices, and ice rinks. (Business Insider)

• No one really wants to speak up at work — especially about AI errors, study shows. (HR Dive)

• A $2 billion tech firm is pausing 401(k) contributions for staff in the latest corporate benefit rollback. (Business Insider)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

The job market is becoming a growth issue for businesses

The unemployment rate is low. The stock market is high. Consumer spending is healthy. And yet, unemployment expectations are at levels previously seen only surrounding recessions. The disconnect has a name now: “doomjobbing”. Workers scrolling through infinite listings, submitting applications into automated systems that never respond, slowly internalizing the conclusion that they are unemployable. When enough people believe the economy is broken, they start behaving as if it is.

The corporate side is equally contradictory. Microsoft posted $82.9 billion in quarterly revenue (up 18%) while shrinking headcount and budgeting $900 million for a voluntary retirement program. Its AI business generates $37 billion annually, growing 123%, and capex is expected to exceed $40 billion this quarter. Meta cut headcount by 1% in Q1 and announced further reductions for May. Across the tech sector, Q1 2026 layoffs hit 52,050, a 40% increase over the prior year.

This is how the job market becomes a growth constraint. Companies generating record revenue with fewer people signals efficiency to investors and instability to workers. Workers who feel unstable spend less, apply more desperately, and disengage from their current roles.

Never before has the share of people expecting unemployment been this high without the economy actually being in recession. The risk is that the perception gap closes in the wrong direction: the economy catches down to where people already believe it is.

CHRO importance rising, but HR has its own "K-shaped economy"

The CHRO has never been more strategically important. CHROs in Russell 3000 companies rose from 148 in 2021 to 230 in 2025. Their pay grew 14.7% between 2024 and 2025, 6% higher than all over executives. At S&P 500 firms, the growth was 30.4%. CHROs are attending board meetings, overseeing AI transformation mandates, and the Conference Board’s CHRO Confidence Index just hit a new high of 59.

The K-shape is emerging below the C-suite too. The average HR professional expects to earn $130k+ yet the average salary offered is $90k. That $42,000 gap is larger than the U.S. average across all professions, a particular irony given that HR professionals set salary bands for everyone else.

Meanwhile, no company included a Chief Diversity Officer among its highest-paid executives in 2024 or 2025. The function is bifurcating: the top elevated into the boardroom, the middle squeezed by the same budget pressures HR is supposed to help the rest of the organization navigate.

Quote of the Week: Nice on paper

"Having healthcare benefits you can't afford is like unlimited vacation, it's a false promise."

— Denise Rousseau, Carnegie Mellon University

Reading List:

Workers increasingly ditch company insurance policies as costs surge

The workers that employer health plans depend on to stay solvent are starting to leave. Young, healthy professionals are opting out because they cannot afford the premiums, choosing health-share cooperatives or going without coverage entirely. The share of workers on employer plans has fallen to 61% (from 64% in 2020), and total costs per employee are expected to grow 6.5% in 2026, the highest rate in a decade. Every healthy worker who opts out makes the remaining pool sicker and more expensive.

Starbucks switches to weekly pay to match growing worker need

Starbucks will begin paying employees weekly in August, moving away from the biweekly standard most U.S. employers follow. The decision came directly from employee feedback: "getting paid sooner would help." Hourly wage growth slowed to 0.2% in March, the weakest rate in five years, and nearly one-quarter of U.S. households now spend more than 95% of their earnings on necessities.

Interim leaders in demand as change efforts challenge traditional leaders

Demand for interim C-suite leaders has increased 151% since 2021, according to Heidrick and Struggles. Requests for human capital expertise jumped 129% in the past year alone. HR tops the list of functions seeking interim support, driven by the dual pressure of managing its own transformation while helping the rest of the organization navigate workforce planning and organizational redesign. The pace of change is outstripping the capacity of permanent leadership teams to manage it all simultaneously.

Data Point:

90%

The year on year decline in new job postings as “low fire, low hire” goes to zero hire, high fire.

In Other News

• 67% of high school graduates opting against college cite cost-of-living concerns, poll finds. (Higher Ed Dive)

• KPMG Cutting 10% of U.S. Audit Partners After Voluntary-Retirement Push Falls Short. (Wall Street Journal)

• Total compensation not currently helping engagement much, McLean reports. (HR Dive)

• The uncomfortable truth about AI and the American worker. (Fortune)

• Reed Hastings says AI will drive a return to humanities: ‘I’d be doubling down on emotional skills’. (Fortune)

• Amazon pushes AI use and closely tracks adoption, as some employees push back. (Business Insider)

• AI literacy is popular at the DOL: The agency is bolstering efforts to ready the US workforce for the age of AI. (HR Brew)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Overspending on tech and underspending on talent

As organizational leaders, the job of managing organizational capacity is getting things done with whatever the right mix of capital, talent, and tech looks like. Yet the current mix is being badly imbalanced. Ne KPMG data shows executives are now twice as likely to invest in new technology as in training employees.

While 57% of execs say improving performance and efficiency is a top priority, fewer than 10% say developing workforce training is. The predictable result: 53% of employers say finding the right AI skills is their main talent challenge, and only 14% of graduates report high proficiency applying AI tools professionally.

The organizations avoiding this trap treat AI as a literacy requirement, not a software deployment. Walmart is training all 2.1 million employees on agentic AI tools, from its 35,000-person tech team to front-of-house greeters. The approach is explicitly “people-led, tech powered,” focused on removing friction from daily workflows to create more time for customer-centered work. Same headcount as six years ago, significantly higher revenue, no role displacement.

The alternative is false promises and reactive cuts. Bank of America’s CEO told employees they did not have to worry about AI replacing jobs, then cut 1,000 roles four months later. How engaged or secure do you think those remaining employees will feel?

• Read more: Why are workers so worried about AI? Listen to how business leaders talk about it. (CNBC)

As KPMG’s Atif Zaim notes, new tools alone do not drive performance. Organizations are cutting support exactly when their people need it most. As Korn Ferry’s Emilie Petrone warns, firms cutting HR budgets now may have to double down in two or three years because they skipped the heavy lifting on the people side of AI.

Deloitte cuts benefits as corporate commitment to employees wanes

Big Tech led the way in astonishing employee perks, and now they are leading the way in rolling them back. Consulting is the next domino. Deloitte plans to cut parental leave from 16 weeks to eight, reduce PTO by up to 10 days, and eliminate a $50,000 adoption and surrogacy benefit for its “center” talent model (IT, finance, admin).

The changes take effect in 2027 as AI and hiring cutbacks have quietly prompted the largest reduction in HR budgets in years with just 29% of CFOs plan to invest more in HR, making it the division least likely to see a budget increase.

It’s not hard to imagine the type of backlash this generated, for the businesses that read this newsletter though, this type of discourse can be a pro or a con for employee engagement.

Big companies pulling the rug on promises can allow you to look really good in comparison and can be an engagement-boosting moment if used to clarify how you support your people. Alternatively, if it goes un-addressed since it’s “not relevant to you,” headlines like these leech engagement from employees increasingly pre-disposed to distrust.

Quote of the Week:

"Another shift in today's job market is how many roles are filled before they are widely advertised. In many sectors, more than half of hires occur without a traditional public job posting."

— Andrew Hudson, Colorado Sun

Reading List:

Employees are bringing money problems to work

The average 401(k) balance hit a record $167,970 last year, but hardship withdrawal rates also reached a record 6%, as more participants tapped retirement accounts to avoid eviction or cover medical expenses. The uptick is partly driven by the SECURE 2.0 Act making early withdrawals easier and automatic enrollment bringing more lower-compensated workers into plans.

The next battlefront in AI worker woes - who owns the data

The line between employee skills and company property is blurring. A viral GitHub project that claims to clone workers into a reusable AI skill is forcing workers to confront the reality that their companies might own digital doubles. Fights over this such data are already occurring in the U.S. where suing companies over employee data uses is touted as “more effective than unionizing” according to an HCI analysis of over 100 viral TikTok’s about the subject. Except this fight to grow across more organizations as the roughly 50% of employees which dislike AI to push back harder.

The three types of leadership loneliness

80% of CEOs say they have experienced loneliness in their tenure. According to HEC Montreal’s CEO institute, this isolation rarely stems from a lack of connection. It is driven by "surface acting," projecting confidence that contradicts inner beliefs, and the structural reality of being the only person with a complete view of the company's data. When performance sags, it threatens the CEO's identity, creating a doom spiral where isolation degrades communication, which degrades performance further.

Data Point:

-8.3%

The change in HR budget growth this year, down from 9% in 2025, making HR the corporate division least likely to see a budget increase according to Korn Ferry

In Other News

• Organizations and employees want different things from leaders, study finds. (HR Dive)

• Execs fear job loss over AI adoption failures. (CIO Dive)

• America’s ‘silent army’ of skilled tradespeople are retiring with no one to replace them—and the price tag could hit $1 trillion a year. (Fortune)

• Recent grads are settling for jobs they plan to leave, says ZipRecruiter. (HR Dive)

• Emerging Liability for AI-Driven Hiring Tools: Key Developments in Mobley v. Workday, Inc. (Maynard Nexsen)

• Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. (The Verge)

• OpenAI is working with consultants to sell codex in a revision of the SAP model for AI. (Wall Street Journal)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

AI is now a frontline issue for most businesses. Here are the best practices for adoption.

American executives are all in on AI as the future of work…in Mark Zuckerberg’s case a bit too much (readers, please don’t create an AI avatar of yourself to manage employees). Despite AI’s return on investment lagging the promise, 92% of executives say AI makes them more productive.

Outside of the C-Suite, people are less convinced. 40% of non-managers say it saves them no time at all and around half of individual contributors are actively opposed. That gap has become a management crisis. Four in ten executives are boosting AI spending this year, making it their top strategic response to global disruption.

Meanwhile, 80% of enterprise workers are avoiding or rejecting the tools being deployed, 29% admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, and a new phenomenon called “workslop,” AI-generated output so flawed it creates more work than it saves, is costing organizations an estimated $8.1 million per 10,000 employees.

The generational fault lines are widening it. Among Gen Z workers, 44% have sabotaged their company’s AI rollout in some way, driven by fear of job loss and frustration that the technology diminishes their value. Their anxiety is not unfounded: 60% of C-suite executives say they plan to lay off employees who cannot or will not use AI.

The organizations breaking through share three common practices.

1. Leadership clarity: Intuit overcame its engineering holdouts by setting transparent expectations, modeling AI use at the executive level, and creating listening posts to surface concerns.

2. Manager support: Gallup data shows employees whose managers actively champion AI are nearly twice as likely to use it frequently.

3. Protected time to build judgment: Infosys begins reskilling its 300,000 employees by banning AI tools for the first months of training, ensuring workers develop foundational thinking before the technology accelerates it.

Leadership for the speed of today’s challenges

Ask former Navy SEAL Rich Diviney to draw a high-performing team and he will not draw a pyramid. He will draw a blob. In his dynamic subordination model of leadership, the person closest to the problem and most competent steps up and leads. The leader is wherever the leader needs to be.

This is becoming a structural necessity as AI compresses five-year goals into six-month sprints. Gusto CEO Josh Reeves is building autonomous agents that will soon file taxes and set up retirement accounts for small businesses. Managing that velocity requires teams that move like special operations units, a point echoed by Jamie Dimon in his recent shareholder letter.

The new contours of leadership require understanding the attributes of your people, adaptability, persistence, judgment, and putting the right person at the wheel when the terrain demands it.

Quote of the Week:

The way CEOs are using AI today follows a clear pattern. Most rely on it for familiar, tactical tasks like research, summarizing information, writing, and day-to-day communication. Far fewer leaders are tapping AI as a strategic partner.

— Joe Galvin, Chief Research Officer of Vistage

Reading List:

Five ways to bridge the CEO trust gap

Every internal message about AI making work better lands next to a layoff headline - in turn trust is eroding faster than most CEOs realize. The ones closing the gap practice open-book management, share strategy in plain language, own mistakes directly, and ensure decisions align with stated values. Flexibility and purpose have to be core principles, not situational leverage.

The reason why your productivity changes so much day-to-day

The difference between your best day and your worst is 80 minutes of productive work, according to a new University of Toronto study. On sharp days, people complete more goals and aim higher. Pushing through long hours yields short-term gains, but extended overwork degrades the cognitive clarity required for performing well tomorrow too.

How to create a culture of learning

Three-quarters of organizations say they lack the staff and time to build a learning culture. The ones that succeed are not finding more time. They are protecting it: dedicated learning hours (median of 40 per year), public recognition for skill development, and structured mentorship. As skills evolve faster than training cycles can accommodate, making learning digestible and culturally celebrated is becoming a critical retention strategy.

Data Point:

76%

The number of CEOs who report regularly using generative AI, according to a recent Vistage study (a 10% increase in just nine months). Yet most remain on the sidelines when it comes to actually embedding it into how they lead and run their organizations

In Other News

• Why More People Are Dropping Out of the Job Market. (Wall Street Journal)

• US workers increasingly trapped in the ‘Great Detachment’ as hiring slows, report shows. (Fox Business)

• US workers are quitting at the lowest level in a decade. (HR Dive)

• Nearly half of American households have no retirement savings: In 2022, 46% of households reported retirement savings, with 26% above $100K and 9% over $500K. (USA Facts)

• AI may threaten critical thinking in the workplace. (HR Dive)

• You’re looking at the AI revolution all wrong, top economist says: 40% unemployment and a 3-day work week are the same thing. (Fortune)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

The value of clarity and empathy are surging

The premium on basic human connection is rising exactly as fast as the technology meant to replace it. While leaders obsess over AI integration, Gallup’s latest data shows that the workforce is quietly checking out.

There are 3.2 million fewer engaged workers today than there were in 2023. The root cause is a profound sense of disconnection. In 2020, 54% of Millennial and Gen-Z employees felt someone cared about them at work. Today, that number is 41%. The organizations winning right now are the ones treating empathy as a hard operational requirement.

The mechanism for delivering that empathy is what researchers call attunement. A new study by found that leaders who practice four specific skills (flexibility, reading nonverbal cues, self-regulation, and collaboration) see measurable jumps in team cohesion and psychological safety.

Flexibility means asking what a team needs rather than assuming. Reading cues means paying attention to the silence on a Zoom call. Self-regulation means managing your own stress so you do not transfer it to your direct reports.

But empathy without clarity is just sympathy. When performance criteria are vague, trust erodes and stress spikes. McLean & Co found that employees who clearly understand their job expectations are 8.6 times more likely to be engaged.

Organizations that fail to provide this clarity see voluntary turnover rates 40% higher than those that do. The mandate for HR and senior leadership is clear: before you ask your teams to adapt to the next technological shift, you have to ensure they actually understand how they are being measured today.

Younger employees are sabotaging AI adoption efforts

The biggest threat to your technology strategy is coming from the demographic you assumed would champion it. A new report from Writer and Workplace Intelligence found that 29% of knowledge workers admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI rollout.

Among Gen Z workers, the number jumps to 44%. The sabotage is not subtle. Employees are entering proprietary information into public AI tools, refusing to use approved platforms, tampering with performance reviews, and intentionally generating low-quality work to make the technology look bad.

They are doing this because they are terrified. Nearly a third of those sabotaging the tools cited fear that AI would take their jobs. But the resistance is a strategic error. Sixty percent of executives say they are considering cutting employees who refuse to adopt AI, and 77% say those who refuse to become proficient will not be considered for promotions.

The divide is already showing up in the data: AI “super-users” are three times more likely to have received a promotion and pay raise in the past year. The challenge for leaders is not buying better tools. It is convincing a fearful workforce that using the tools is the only way to stay employed.

Quote of the Week:

"The leaders who are putting in the work to radically redesign operations with human-agent collaboration at the center are the ones compounding their advantage in ways competitors can't replicate."

— May Habib, CEO of Writer

Reading List:

Macro fears lead small business to cut back on hiring

The latest U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index shows a sharp decline in optimism on the economy, investment, and hiring. While 69% of small business owners rate their own business as being in good health, only 28% say the U.S. economy is in good health. Consequently, just 30% expect to increase staff in the year ahead, a 12-point drop from the previous quarter. Inflation remains the top concern for the 17th consecutive quarter.

Middle management is undergoing an identity shift

Large companies are redefining middle management roles and handing off work to AI. Large companies are shifting from manager titles to “org leads” and “player-coaches" who build alongside their teams. Employers advertised 12.3% fewer middle-manager jobs in 2025 than in 2024. While fully offloading management to AI is impractical, the shift toward smaller, cross-functional teams with AI support is accelerating.

Companies increasingly turn to “in office trials” in interviews

Hiring managers increasingly are expecting candidates to show their live work. Companies are using work trials, job simulations, and live tests to evaluate candidates. Startups like Rounds use AI agents to conduct technical simulations, while others pay candidates to work in the office for a few days. The goal is to see how candidates think, adapt, and use AI tools to accelerate their work.

Data Point

In Other News

• Why More People Are Dropping Out of the Job Market. (Wall Street Journal)

• US workers increasingly trapped in the ‘Great Detachment’ as hiring slows, report shows. (Fox Business)

• US workers are quitting at the lowest level in a decade. (HR Dive)

• Nearly half of American households have no retirement savings: In 2022, 46% of households reported retirement savings, with 26% above $100K and 9% over $500K. (USA Facts)

• AI may threaten critical thinking in the workplace. (HR Dive)

• You’re looking at the AI revolution all wrong, top economist says: 40% unemployment and a 3-day work week are the same thing. (Fortune)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

The "Return to Human" Begins

Remember the “Return to Office”? The fight is still ongoing for many, after companies spent years optimizing for remote efficiency, then realized the isolation was hollowing out their cultures and dragged everyone back. We are watching the same correction play out with AI, only broader and more consequential.

AI has made good-enough work available to everyone. A polished cover letter, a competent brief, a passable customer interaction: these used to separate the serious from the unserious. Now they are table stakes. Seventy-five percent of senior HR leaders report a steep rise in AI-generated applications, and more than 40% have extended probation periods because they can no longer tell who is actually capable before the person starts working.

Beyond process, talent quality itself has dipped. When AI handles the messy, frustrating early-career work that builds real expertise, people look competent without becoming competent.

A software consultant with 25 years of experience let AI build his product for three months, then found he could not write code confidently when he took the wheel back. “My swing was off,” he said.

Multiply that across an entire generation of workers who never build the baseline, and you have a workforce that performs well on paper and breaks under pressure.

In response, companies are beginning to push back. L’Oreal has made interviews an “AI-free zone,” requiring every candidate to sit face-to-face with a trained recruiter. Dave & Buster’s is pouring investment into human service standards because its CEO recognizes that the guest experience can never exceed the team member experience.

We believe that the trickle of anecdotes will become a new best practice as companies realize that where not to use AI is a more important decision than where you can.

CEOs Increasingly Feel Threatened by Their CFOs

Roughly one quarter of CEOs surveyed (26%) ranked CFOs as the top job security risk within their own C-suites, followed closely by COOs (24%) and chief commercial officers (20%), according to Boston Consulting Group’s CEO Insomnia Index.

The perceived vulnerability is structural: finance chiefs regularly brief the board on financial performance, forecasts and capital allocation, positioning them as the CEO’s natural heir apparent in ways that other C-suite roles simply do not.

The anxiety has a basis in recent data. CFO to CEO promotions reached their highest level in a decade last year, with more than 10% of sitting CEOs coming directly from a top finance seat, up from 7% in 2024 according to Crist Kolder Associates.

Quote of the Week: Scary to everyone but the CEO

“AI is not yet a primary source of day-to-day pressure for many CEOs. 84% report feeling more energized than stressed by the need to innovate. The stress is coming from inside the house."

— BCG CEO Insomnia Index, April 2026

Reading List:

Manager workloads double

The average American manager now oversees 12 direct reports, nearly double what Gallup tracked in 2013, as AI-enabled cost-cutting guts middle management ranks. Some big companies taken the logic to its extreme with 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratios. The human ledger is looking considerably worse than the balance sheet with these moves: 75% of HR leaders say managers are already overwhelmed, and 69% say they lack the skills to lead change effectively even before full AI integration takes hold.

Workers don’t know how to use AI

Forrester measured employee understanding of AI tools and found the results "alarming." Prompt engineering comprehension, integral to tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, increased by only 4% from 2024 to 2025. Meanwhile, 96% of C-suite leaders expected AI to increase output while 77% of employees say AI tools actually increased their workload. Companies bought the tools and skipped the change management.

Decision-making by consensus increasingly doesn't work

The speed of AI-driven change has outpaced the consensus model. HBR argues that the companies surviving the next decade will be those courageous enough to establish clear decision rights rather than democratic processes. The organizations winning are not those with the best algorithms or the most data. They are the ones that have fixed how decisions get made.

In Other News

• America’s gig economy - Self-employment, at both the high and the low end, is keeping consumption afloat — but for how long? (Financial Times)

• New graduates say they would sacrifice pay for job stability. (HR Dive)

• The sneaky truth about the wave of AI layoffs: Tech companies are axing full-time roles. They’re hiring some back as contractors. (Business Insider)

• Oracle cutting thousands in latest layoff round as company continues to ramp AI spending. (CNBC)

• Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha think AI can make middle management obsolete. (Fortune)

• Trump Team Scraps College Degrees for Hundreds of Federal Jobs. (Bloomberg)

• Jensen Huang just painted the most bold image of AI’s future: 7.5 million agents, 75,000 humans—100 AI workers for every person. (Fortune)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

How to Lead Through Fear

Your employees are terrified. The data is unambiguous: for the first time, more U.S. workers are struggling than thriving, according to Gallup’s Q4 2025 survey. Worker engagement is at a decade low, and just 28% of workers say now is a good time to find a quality job, down from 70% in mid-2022. Globally, only 22% of workers feel their job is safe from elimination, per ADP’s survey of 39,000 workers. The workforce is restless but stuck, a combination that creates quiet deterioration.

• An example: 30-year-old CEO of $11 billion Harvey earned the backing of OpenAI and Sam Altman. He says you have to ‘re-earn’ your role every 6 months. (Fortune)

When workers cannot leave, discontent accumulates. The most engaged employees leave first. The ones who stay are increasingly those who feel they have no choice. Gallup finds that workers who are not thriving miss 53% more days due to health problems and are 32% more likely to be actively job seeking.

Leaders who treat this fear as information will win. It is a signal about clarity and fairness. The data shows that workers who feel secure are more productive and engaged. Creating that security, where warranted, costs almost nothing. Communicating it clearly costs even less. The organizations that do this well will find themselves with a captive audience that is actually paying attention.

Protecting your top performers

In an environment of widespread cost-cutting, leaders think they are protecting their top performers. The data shows the opposite is happening. The employees who drive the most value are the most exposed when development budgets are slashed, a mistake that costs organizations a 36% drag on share price growth over two years.

The mechanism is simple: top performers are the first to feel the loss of growth opportunities and the most likely to burn out from new administrative burdens. Protecting them is not about retention bonuses; it is about protecting the conditions under which they do their best work.

Quote of the Week: Work itself is changing

"57% of U.S. work hours are now automatable using technology that already exists today. Two years ago, that number was 30%. The gap is no longer about technology. It's about knowing where and how to start."

—McKinsey Global Institute, November 2025

Reading List:

White collar employees increasingly getting pay cuts

Among white-collar workers who changed jobs at the end of last year, 40% took salary cuts of more than 10%, the highest share in a decade, per Revelio Labs. With long-term unemployment nearly doubling in three years, employers are requiring more experience for open roles. For workers who accept a pay cut, the consequences compound, as future raises and offers are anchored to a lower base.

Performance reviews are shifting from awkward ritual to continuous conversation

Deloitte eliminated annual appraisals a decade ago, saving two million hours annually. Yet a Gallup poll finds 56% of employees still get a formal review once a year or less, and only 2% of CHROs say their systems work. The gap between research and reality is a change management problem, and it is costing organizations the engagement of their best people.

Why are we so relieved when meetings cancel?

A Rutgers University study finds that unexpectedly gaining time alters our perception of how that time passes, leading people to choose longer, more ambitious activities. The finding has a practical implication for leaders: over-scheduled teams are less capable of the deep, intentional work that moves the needle. Looks like the humble calendar is actually a leadership tool.

Data Point:

22%

The number of US employees that feel safe from layoffs, lower than Egypt, Nigeria, and most of the developing world according to an ADP survey of 39,000 workers across 36 markets.

In Other News

• Toxic managers dehumanize employees, leading to extreme burnout. (HR Dive)

• JPMorgan monitoring keystrokes and video calls of junior bankers. (Fortune)

• Leaders report a ‘growing gap’ between what’s expected of them and the support they receive. (HR Dive)

• How compensation teams can become strategic finance partners. (HR Dive)

• Highly skilled workers have been training AI — that comes at a cost. (Financial Times)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Accountability Is Leadership's Greatest Weakness

There is a 20-point gap between how leaders rate their own ability to create accountability and how their managers rate them. That is a performance problem. A recent Gallup study of seven core leadership competencies found that “create accountability” was the lowest-rated skill for both leaders and managers—and the one with the largest gap between leaders’ self-perception and the reality their teams experience.

This is the quiet crisis of accountability in most organizations, and it can only be addressed top. Beyond the implications for execution, this accountability gap is a primary driver of disengagement. Gallup finds that managers who believe their leaders are accountable are three times more likely to be engaged at work. The mechanism is simple: accountability drives clarity. When leaders fail to set clear expectations and hold the organization to them, the most common result is a quiet drift.

The takeaway is that accountability is a design choice. It is built into the systems that connect what you say matters to what you actually measure. It is reinforced in the weekly one-on-one, not just the annual review. And it starts with closing that 20-point gap by asking your own leadership team what they see, and really listening.

Your talent development budget’s been slashed. Now what?

AI budgets are soaring while talent development budgets are shrinking across the middle market. On paper, this promises efficiency, scalability, and a clear path to future-proofing the business. Investing in people, by contrast, can feel like a softer, less measurable bet.

The paradox is that the more powerful AI becomes, the more critical human skills like judgment, collaboration, and adaptability are to realizing its value. AI can automate tasks, but it cannot build trust, navigate ambiguity, or lead a team through change.

When organizations cut training, coaching, and leadership development, they are not just trimming a budget line; they are hollowing out the very capabilities they need to make their AI investments pay off. The result is a workforce that is stressed, disengaged, and unprepared to manage the complexity that AI introduces.

Quote of the Week: Valid or not, why broadcast this?

"The best leaders don't just hold their people accountable. They hold themselves accountable for their people's success."

—Jim Harter, Chief Scientist, Gallup

Reading List:

Why leaders lose the room in high-stakes meetings

Most advice on leadership communication focuses on presentation skills. But the most consequential communication happens in meetings where tough issues are being discussed. An MIT Sloan analysis finds that under pressure, leaders tend to lean too hard on their natural thinking process, inadvertently making it harder for the audience to follow, contribute, and align. The key is not to change your style, but to recognize how your style is experienced by others and build in safeguards to protect shared understanding.

Women are avoiding the technology that threatens them most

The jobs women hold are three times more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25% lower than men on average. This is not a competence gap; it is a confidence and trust gap. A Fortune analysis warns that if this trend continues, we are at risk of creating a two-tiered AI economy, where one group reaps the benefits of augmentation while the other is left behind. The solution is not to push for blind adoption, but to address the underlying issues of bias, psychological safety, and equitable design.

Why talent lifecycle alignment quietly breaks after hiring

Organizations have invested heavily in improving hiring accuracy. Yet for many, the talent lifecycle quietly breaks down in the first year. A Talent Culture analysis argues the issue is rarely flawed hiring science. It is a measurement gap between what organizations hire for and what they reward. When performance evaluation systems reward different signals than those used during selection, the accuracy of hiring science stops mattering. This is a governance issue, not just an HR program.

Data Point: “Performance” reviews

14%

Number of employees that strongly agree performance reviews they receive inspire them to improve.

In Other News

• Toxic managers dehumanize employees, leading to extreme burnout. (HR Dive)

• JPMorgan monitoring keystrokes and video calls of junior bankers. (Fortune)

• Leaders report a ‘growing gap’ between what’s expected of them and the support they receive. (HR Dive)

• How compensation teams can become strategic finance partners. (HR Dive)

• Highly skilled workers have been training AI — that comes at a cost. (Financial Times)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Intelligence offers keys to win in an accelerating world

The world is moving faster than ever, but most companies…aren't. The rise of AI, shifting market structures, and a flood of information create a fog of uncertainty that leaves many leaders paralyzed. Winners in this new environment are those with the clearest and most compressed ‘informational supply chain.’ Accurate and complete information, delivered faster, means decision makers can avoid noise and act decisively while competitors are still trying to figure out what’s going on.

In most companies, intelligence is scattered. Market research lives in marketing, competitive analysis in strategy, and financial forecasting in finance. Each function provides a partial view, but nobody owns the full picture. This leads to rework, thin accountability, and a chronic inability to see the whole board. A true intelligence capability centralizes this function, giving leaders a single, unvarnished view of the competitive landscape.

Building this capability is a leadership imperative. It requires a relentless focus on what matters, a willingness to challenge your own assumptions, and the courage to make bets with incomplete information. The alternative is to watch from the sidelines as others build the future.

The key to making AI work? ‘Old school’ leadership

The hardest part of AI adoption isn’t the technology; it’s the people. The tools are here and they work (some better than others, granted). The bottleneck is the messy, human work of getting your team to actually use them. The companies that are seeing real ROI have better managers, not better models. They understand that AI adoption is a change management problem, not a technology problem.

This isn’t about hype or cash prizes for “innovation.” It’s about the unglamorous, day-to-day work of leadership: setting clear expectations, providing the right training, and holding people accountable. It’s the reason Accenture’s CEO has made AI skills required for promotion. It’s what Gartner is getting at when they say managers, not HR, are the key to company-wide adoption. And it’s about recognizing that employee resistance isn’t irrational; it’s a predictable response to a poorly managed change process.

Quote of the Week: Valid or not, why broadcast this?

“Part of working hard is sending emails to the team on a Saturday. And if I don’t get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark. What’s going on?”

—Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber

Reading List:

Employees and executives drift further apart on AI

The disconnect between the C-suite and the rest of the organization on AI is getting wider. A recent survey found that while 86% of executives believe AI use is mandatory, only 49% of middle managers agree. The C-suite is selling a vision of AI as a transformative teammate, while employees are experiencing it as a helpful but limited tool. The result is a stalemate. The companies that have narrowed the gap find that empowered managers are key to translate C-suite vision into day-to-day reality.

Most companies lack real plans for change communications

61% of companies have no formal approach to change communication, according to a recent Gallagher survey. During ongoing disruption, communicating change effectively is a core competency. Without it, every new initiative is dead on arrival. The fact that most companies have six or fewer people in a communications role, regardless of size, shows how undervalued this function is. If you don’t have a real plan for communicating change, you don’t have a real plan for executing it.

Ask not what your COO can do for you…

The COO is no longer just an operator; they are the CEO’s strategic partner in execution. As CEOs spend more time focused externally, the COO is the one who has to translate vision into reality. Yet the COO’s success increasingly depends on their ability to build strong relationships with their C-suite peers more than abstract “operational excellence”. They are the connective tissue of the organization, but if they lack the time and space to “grab a beer” across the organization, they can quickly go from effective partner to inefficient enforcer.

Data Point: Mandatory to use, option to learn?

35%

Number of businesses that report having data and AI upskilling programs available to all of their employees.

In Other News

• Mastercard bots target C-suite roles: Card giant offers SMEs a virtual chief financial officer through artificial intelligence technology, with other C-suite roles to follow. (Computer Weekly)

• Workers who are receptive to ‘corporate BS’ may struggle with analytical thinking. (HR Dive)

• How AI Is Accelerating Skills-Based Hiring and Upskilling. (Talent Culture)

  US companies say they plan to accelerate global hiring despite hurdles. (HR Dive)

• Shadow AI rises as leaders choose speed over governance. (CIO Dive)

• AI Job Loss Is Breaking the Psyche of Workers, Psychiatrist Warns. (Futurism)

• Washington state wants to keep employers from microchipping workers, before anyone even gets the idea. (Fortune)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

What skills does the modern workflows actually need?

An important note for hiring managers - there is not really as an “AI skill.” The rush to find people with this discrete, magical new competency misunderstand both the tech and the skills that can make it work. The ability to effectively use and even build generative AI tools are the same ones that have always mattered, just magnified: clarity of thought, precision of language, curiosity, and the bravery to change yourself. These are human skills. A-players already have them. The challenge isn’t finding new people; it’s supporting your people as they learn to apply their existing talents to a new class of tools.

The ManpowerGroup report that found “AI skills” are the hardest to find is better understood as a shortage of adaptability, not a shortage of coders. This is not just a philosophical point; it’s a practical one with huge ROI implications. A recent DataCamp report found that organizations with mature data and AI upskilling programs see double the return on their AI investments. That return isn’t coming from hiring a few expensive prompt engineers. It’s coming from a workforce that is empowered to think critically and experiment.

Look at Walmart. They are training 1.6 million employees not to become AI experts, but to use AI to be better at their jobs. The CEO takeaway is this: stop chasing a mythical beast. Your best people already have what it takes. Your job is to give them the tools, the permission, and the support to amplify their innate curiosity and judgment. The bottleneck isn’t talent; it’s a failure of leadership to trust the people you already have.

Managing change and attention budgets as real resources

The current volume of change organizations are facing is spurring a lot of calls to change everything—key functions, org charts, training. But the “budget” of leaders and employees for change and the intentional work it requires is being tapped out. Every new tool, process, or pivot draws down from a finite organizational capacity for change, and that budget is now deep in the red.

This a leadership mandate masquerading as a tech problem. The shift to new operating models isn’t free; it consumes a finite budget of attention and energy. That requires deep, disruptive change that consumes the very attention your team needs to do their actual jobs.

If you treat your team’s attention and their capacity to adapt as free and infinite resources, you will burn them out and your most important initiatives will fail. You have to budget for change as you budget capital. It’s a real asset, and it’s nearly depleted.

Quote of the Week: Failure as an absence of effort

"The worst thing is not to take a decision, because then nothing happens.”

Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of Hitachi Energy, on why he pays his team to make decisions, not to wait for permission.

Reading List:

A HCI foray into parenting advice

Advice on dealing with kids is like managing with higher stakes and lower pay, which is why we normally avoid the subject. But a WSJ piece on how tech execs are raising their kids shows how much today’s kids won’t be educated by curriculums or schools. From leaders at Anthropic to Microsoft to Wharton, parents “in the know” are taking control of their education and emphasizing empathy, adaptability, critical thinking, and the ability to be in rooms with other humans (not GenZ/A’s natural strong-suits) as technical skills become table stakes.

Don’t plug legally questionable things into ChatGPT

If you or your team are plugging confidential information into a public AI, you’re committing malpractice. A federal court just made it clear in U.S. v. Heppner: your conversations with AI are not confidential. A CEO used Claude to research his own fraud case, and the court ruled those chats were not privileged and were fully discoverable. While a silly example, multiple studies have found that executives are the most likely group in organizations to break AI policies. Consider every AI prompt as if it will be read aloud in a deposition, because it just might.

Workplace gossip has an unappreciated upside

Your team is probably gossiping, and it might be holding them together. New research in the Journal of Business Ethics found that while employees avoid their boss after gossiping, they also report a greater sense of belonging and collaboration with their peers. This informal channel can be a powerful, if risky, tool for building team cohesion. The challenge is to foster an environment of psychological safety where the energy spent on negative gossip can be channeled into open, constructive feedback. If your team is gossiping, it's a signal they don't feel safe talking to you.

Data Point: An indicator of financial stress

6%

The share of workers in 401(k) plans who took a hardship withdrawal in 2025—a record and from 4.8% in 2024.

In Other News

• RIP résumés: Slop is killing the résumé. Job hunters are scrambling for new ways to stand out. (Business Insider)

• Why pay-for-performance programs don’t always work. (HR Dive)

• Women Show Stronger Employee Engagement Amid Higher Burnout. (Gallup)

• Australian state to give legal right to work from home 2 days a week. (Financial Times)

• What if AI just makes us work harder? Employees have reported increased momentum, but also a feeling of having more to do. (Financial Times)

• Frictionless AI comes at a human cost to learning, growth and connection. (AAAS)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

We’re talking about AI…because work is now tools + people

Many of our readers are in the middle market, where AI is an idea, a promise, or a nuisance more than a reality. And yet… the most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it. That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it.

A new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that argument to its actual conclusion, and what it finds that AI supercharges the intensity of work, rather than reducing it.

In companies with strong AI adoption, nobody was told to hit new targets, people just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

The CEO takeaway: your best people are at the highest risk. The research shows that the first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most. The productivity gains are real, but the company captures them, not the employee, breeding resentment.

This a utilization problem. You’re burning out your most valuable asset—human judgment—on low-value review tasks. The companies that get this right will not be the ones with the most tools. They will be the ones that figured out how to make people and tools work together without burning both out.

Critical markets are rapidly breaking down, that’s a leadership problem

We hate saying things that make it feel like there’s more on the to do list. But in this case, three markets that every business depends on are deteriorating at the same time. Digital attention costs are soaring as platform saturation drives down engagement and drives up CPM.

Cost-per-hire climbed sharply in 2025 despite 1.8 million Americans searching for jobs for over 6 months and AI-d applications flood job platforms. Meanwhile, 74% of employers now call pharmacy costs unsustainable, with GLP-1 drugs alone reshaping benefits strategy from an HR decision into a board-level conversation.

Treating these as separate functional problems—a marketing problem, an HR problem, a finance problem—is the mistake. The rising costs and declining effectiveness across these domains demand a unified strategic response. The CEO takeaway: every dollar spent on employee retention is also a marketing dollar.

Every decision about benefits is also a decision about your cost of talent acquisition. Leaders who continue to manage these in silos are being be picked apart by converging crises, while those who see the connections and make the trade-offs will build a structural advantage their competitors won’t understand, and can’t, replicate.

Quote of the Week: Low hire, low dynamism

“The fact that it is low-hire, low-fire is actually not a great state to be in. The churn is important to the productivity growth.

You want to see the most talented go to the places where that talent is the most rewarded. And if we are in this really stable period, that means that talent is not being repositioned to its best use.”

— Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP

Reading List:

CFO turnover reaches new high as flux extends across the C-Suite

CFO turnover hit a seven-year high last year, with one in nine CEOs at top public companies also being replaced. The churn is being driven by a combination of burnout, heavier workloads, and the need for a different kind of leader in a rapidly changing world. Boards are more impatient, and the playbooks of the past no longer apply. The new class of leaders is younger and less experienced, a sign that companies are prioritizing adaptability over tenure. The message is clear: the C-suite is in flux, and the pressure to perform has never been higher.

A white-collar labor shortage is quietly brewing

Headlines are sending high schoolers away from college on mass, with computer science enrollment plummeting and 60% of Gen Z reportedly pursuing skilled trade work. As white-collar workers contemplate a future where their skills are devalued, many are looking to trades that can’t be automated. This migration is overdue but could potentially create gaps in some area of white collar talent like finance and data analysis.

Nobody is prepared for retirement, here’s how to make that work for you

Americans aren’t ready for retirement. The average person thinks they need $2.1 million to retire comfortably, but 62% have less than $150,000 saved. As Gen X, the first generation primarily dependent on 401(k)s, begins to retire, the crisis will only get “harder and nastier.” For employers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. With so many people unprepared for retirement, there is a growing pool of experienced workers who are willing and able to keep working.

Data Point: HR turns to AI

82%

The percentage of HR leaders who say they’re comfortable using AI to perform some parts of their jobs, according to the Hartford Business Journal.

In Other News

• Why the Smartest Leaders Respond to Crisis By Saying Less. (Entrepreneur)

• JPMorgan analysis finds Trump’s tariffs are working on China—at a huge cost to American small business. (Fortune)

• People Trust Websites More When They Know a Human Is on Standby. (Wall Street Journal)

• What CEOs Mean When They Say Leading Is Complex. (WSJ/Mercer)

• The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents. (Fortune)

• SHRM: Demand for HR workers is down amid AI adoption. (HR Dive)

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By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Leadership lessons from software: What got you here won’t get you there

The recent software industry meltdown offers an important lesson for today’s leaders. For anyone not familiar (after watching their 401ks drop) the stock market has wiped billions of value off after Claude maker Anthropic released a tool that can automate coding tasks like cloning the entire salesforce platform.

But the real story isn’t about software. It’s about what happens when the advantages you’ve spent decades building start rapidly eroding. Companies that built empires on recurring revenue watched their value proposition evaporate in a single trading session.

This is the new reality across industries, including in middle market businesses that you’d never suspect are being disrupted by AI and the broader pace of general change alike. The skills that made you successful, the business models that seemed unassailable, the competitive advantages you’ve cultivated can become liabilities faster than your planning cycle.

The companies surviving this transition aren’t the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones willing to abandon what worked yesterday. Leaders who wait for clarity before acting will find themselves managing decline rather than growth. Your next competitor isn’t improving on your model…they’re making it irrelevant.

Trust and skills are the growth engine leaders keep stalling

The gap between employer optimism and employee reality is offering a map to how growth plans are break down. While 96% of employers forecast growth in 2026, only 51% of workers agree. The disconnect is more about investment priorities than anything ephemeral. Companies historically reinvest productivity gains into more technology rather than the people who must use it, then wonder why workers don’t share their confidence.

High performers offer a lesson of how to approach this differently. They convert saved time into strategic capital for upskilling, collaboration, and judgment work, achieving double the ROI as a result. The pattern repeats in reorganizations: 88% of leaders believe their new structure will succeed, but only 36% of employees agree because only 22% receive adequate support to adapt.

Leaders overemphasize design while underinvesting in the transition itself. This isn’t a communication gap. It’s a trust deficit created by resource allocation choices that tell employees they’re secondary to the technology meant to help them.

Quote of the Week: Change is the beginning, not the end

"The announcement of a redesign isn't the finish line, it's the starting gun. Leaders who plan for how people will actually work in the new model, and who support them through that transition, are the ones who unlock results others never reach."

— Tracy Thurkow, partner at Bain & Co.

Reading List:

Gen Z’s “admin nights” reveal what’s missing at work

Finally a positive story about Gen Z! The FT reports how 20 somethings are turning tedious logistics tasks into social events, gathering with friends to collectively tackle bills and budgets. The trend works because of “body doubling,” where shared accountability makes hard tasks easier. But the deeper insight is what it reveals about work: people crave connection around difficult challenges, not just efficiency. Mixed-age groups add life experience that transforms admin into mentorship. When someone says the best part was “knowing I’m not alone,” they’re describing what’s absent in most workplace transformation efforts.

Deloitte's job title overhaul signals strategic intent

Deloitte is changing job titles for nearly 182,000 US employees by June to reflect its AI transformation priorities. The firm is "modernizing our talent architecture to provide a more tailored experience reflective of our professionals' broad range of skills and the work they do," a spokesperson told Business Insider. Experts say clear job titles can benefit employees by creating status and clarifying advancement paths, but warn that major changes imposed without consultation breed resentment. "Too often, senior leaders make these changes without inviting employees into the conversation," said Joe Mull, founder of Boss Hero School.

The HR-C-Suite divide on AI is a strategy failure

64% of execs agree AI is essential for competitive talent pools but nearly half say HR and C-Suite aren't aligned on its use. CHROs are simultaneously the most enthusiastic about AI's potential and the most concerned about job security impacts. This isn't contradiction, it's realism about managing a transition that leadership hasn't funded properly. The division means organizations will fall behind not because they lack AI tools, but because they lack agreement on how humans and AI work together.

Data Point: Think twice about the ROI of bye bye

45k

The average cost of turnover for a single worker.

In Other News

• Have you considered hiring a chief bullshit officer? (Financial Times)

• Learning through tiny bits: Why microlearning is the future of employee development. (London Loves Business)

• Employees say compliance training is ‘disconnected’ from real life. (HR Dive)

• Private-Sector Job Growth Cooled in January: America’s private sector added 22,000 jobs last month, according to human-resources firm ADP, well below estimates. (Wall Street Journal)

• What HR needs to know about hiring in the wake of a layoff: A reminder of the dos and don’ts when reorganizing your workforce. (HR Brew)

• AI is breaking the job application process — and forcing recruiters to rethink hiring and building the bench of talent. (Business Insider)