The Work Has Changed, Has Your Business?

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I spend a lot of time in rooms with enterprise leaders navigating what AI means for their organizations. I get to do the same thing with 90 to 120 small business owners a year who are working through Levership cohorts. I also spend time with our own portfolio figuring out the same thing.

The conversations look different depending on the size of the room. But the question underneath all of them is the same.

What is actually happening here?

You may have gathered my opinion on this question already, but let’s get blunt about it.

This is not an IT transformation.

AI is not a tool you buy and hand to your team. The organizations treating it that way are the ones watching their performance get worse, not better. They throw tools at people, say go play, and wonder why nothing changes. That era is done.

What's actually happening is a fundamental shift in the nature of work itself.

The IMF was clear about this in January. 60% of jobs in advanced economies will materially change in the next 24 to 36 months. The WEF says we'll lose 92 million jobs and gain 170 million. They're both pointing at the same thing.

The biggest shift is this:

We are moving from doing work to framing and verifying work. From contributing to conducting value.

Read that again.

We are moving from individual contributors of value to conductors of value creation.

That's not a small thing. Every job in your organization that involves doing, you need to rethink.

What does it look like as a frame-and-verify job? One where you choreograph a series of agents doing the work and then verify the output? What does your org chart look like when your team is no longer just human?

Your team is changing. It is now a sentient, non-sentient team.

At every level of your organization, your people are now CEOs of hybrid teams, human and non-human, and most of them have no idea that's what they've become.

The leaders getting ahead of this are not the ones chasing every new model release. I said in my last email that OpenAI shipped a new feature every three days in 2025.

I'm not asking you to keep up with that. What I am asking is that your sign shop is ahead of the other sign shops. Your HVAC company is ahead of the other HVAC companies.

We now have a billion people with access to unmetered intelligence.

And AI can be one of two things depending on how you use it. It can be an answer machine that makes you stupider. Or it can be a thinking partner that gets you to better answers.

People always ask me which one it is. My answer is yes.

It's both.

It depends entirely on how you intentionally integrate it.

The smart are getting smarter. The creative are getting more creative. The k-curve divergence is happening now, and it's widening fast.

There are only 4% to 6% of organizations on the right side of that curve right now.

Nobody asked for this 4D matrix to navigate. Privacy, security, human mastery, market redefinition, social license, the question of whether this makes us more capable or less.

But we've got it. And the answers to those questions look dramatically different depending on the size and type of your organization.

Society moves at the speed of social license, not at the capability of the technology. And Anthropic has shown us clearly just how much more capable the models are than we’re currently accessing.

There is a lot to navigate.

The leaders who get through it well are the ones who own this at the CEO level, understand their constraint, and redesign the workflows before they hand anyone a tool.

That's the work.

Matt

P.S. We’re hosting a free 1 hour session on May 21st on the state of AI. If you’re dipping your toes into what it takes to be a leader in the age of AI, you should be there.

P.P.S. The next AI Leadership Advantage cohort starts May 26th. Four weeks. Your leadership team. A real plan for what AI means for how you operate.

If you've been following our content for a while, you already know whether this is for you. The free call on the 21st is a great starting point, but if you're being honest with yourself, you don't need another few months of thinking about it. You need to get on top of it.

We already have 5 team spots filled pre-launch. Don't let your seat slip. [Register here.]​