Secret agents Last year, I wrote that more than 75% of the AI startups I saw were explicitly pitching job replacement in their fundraising decks (but not always in their sales decks). The majority of these were building some kind of agentic AI. Fast forward to today, and where are we? AI agent as change agent Agentic AI is designed to act autonomously to complete tasks without continuous human oversight. It is typically focused on completing a domain-specific task. For instance, agentic AI...
8 days ago • 3 min read
Turtles all the way down Every big mistake I've made in my career has been a people mistake. The same is true for every leader I know. Contrary to what you might think, the rise of AI is going to make this truer than ever. Case study lies It's common for business school students to analyze business successes and failures. The goal is to identify the patterns that drive success and failure respectively. Typically, B-school case studies focus on the most impactful levers, such as new products,...
15 days ago • 3 min read
Fight, flight, or freeze They say that most of us, when faced with difficult conflict, tend to fight, flight, or freeze: Fighters are energized by the conflict and dive in to hash it out directly People who take flight disengage at the first sign of discord, trying to avoid the conflict entirely Freezers become mentally stuck, unable to take action while waiting for the conflict to pass For most of my life, I've been a fighter. As an adult, I've had to work to channel that instinct into...
22 days ago • 4 min read
📣 PSA: If you're a parent with teenagers, please take my anonymous survey on kids and entrepreneurship! 📣 Results coming soon to a nerd processor near you. Thank you and on to this week's nerd processor! Three Minutes of Fame Back when he worked at Microsoft, Jensen Harris (Textio's current CEO) used to do this thing with his monthly all-hands called Three Minutes of Fame. The idea was simple. Every month, he chose five people in his organization at random. A few days before the all-hands, he...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Welcome to the AI job fair A few weeks ago, I published new data showing that AI job posts vary significantly across different tech hubs. No one talks more about responsible AI than Seattle, while SF spikes highest on AI hype language. NYC is enterprise central. This week, I'm analyzing AI jobs through another lens. We're looking at how AI job posts have changed over the last year, and what that tells us about how businesses are evolving their approach to AI. AI transformation by any other...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Call me maybe Over the last 12 months, I've gotten 48 different job reference calls about 41 different people who once worked at Textio. I don't know if people are especially actively looking for jobs this year or what, but this is almost twice as many as I've received in any prior year. I love doing job calls for Extios. If someone spent a long time doing great work building my company, they have me in their corner forever. This year, I've found it striking that, among all the people I've...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Your favorite robot Everyone is talking about the impact of AI on the job market. The headlines say things like, "Jobs getting replaced by AI" or "Your Favorite Company just laid off another 1,000 people thanks to AI." Though the downsizing stories are real (and get all the clicks), this is just one part of what AI is doing to workforce planning. The jobs landscape is changing rapidly right now. Remember 2023, when everyone was hiring prompt engineers? These days, not so much. But some new...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
A modern way to fail Here's the stereotype about your worst manager: They're harsh, impatient, lose their temper. They yell a lot. They are defensive and dismissive. Intolerant of others. Sometimes they're just mean. If you've had a manager like that, I'm sorry. I haven't seen very many of them. In most workplaces, abusive managers aren't allowed to stick around. By contrast, most modern managers care about you and want you to grow. They’re understanding when you have personal emergencies....
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Easy as A-B-C In my first job at Microsoft, I made it possible for Windows, Office, and other applications to put words from any language in alphabetical order. I know, you're thinking: That was a whole job? Any eight-year-old can put words in order! But at the time, Microsoft was expanding into languages that had never been encoded on computers before. Many of them didn't have traditional dictionaries and had no unified concept of alphabetical order. I'll never forget the weekend I spent in...
2 months ago • 3 min read