April 29, 2026: Bill Gates is predicting a 2-day workweek. Jamie Dimon says 3.5. Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, says 5 days is over. Fortune just amplified a major study claiming we waste a full day every week procrastinating. The 4-day workweek movement has never had more wind at its back. In this episode, I'm making the bulletproof business case against it.

I'll walk through eight reasons the case doesn't hold up — and why the policy isn't likely to spread broadly anytime soon, even with all the keynote energy behind it. I'm covering the studies that don't measure what they claim to measure, the Iceland myth, the company failures that get scrubbed from the data, the AI rhetorical pivot, why the happiness data isn't actually a business case, the wage math nobody talks about, the competitive reality at the country and company level, and why even the countries running pilots are voting against legislating it.

April 28, 2026: The AI productivity promise is running into reality — and today's numbers don't lie. Amazon just launched an AI system that conducts job interviews without any human involvement, packaging up the same playbook it used to cut 30,000 of its own jobs and selling it to the world. OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and valued at $852 billion — is quietly missing its own revenue and user targets, raising internal questions about whether it can fund its infrastructure commitments ahead of a planned IPO. The Wall Street Journal reveals that tech giants are expected to spend $670 billion on AI in 2026, and they're funding it by eliminating people — 92,000 tech layoffs so far this year. And a senior Nvidia executive admitted on the record that for his team, AI tools cost more than his employees do.

It feels like we are on a fast treadmill because technology and AI are changing work so quickly. It is hard to stay ahead when old ways of doing things no longer work in this new, advanced digital world.

In this episode, Sue Davies, EVP & CHRO of Markel, discusses navigating organizational transformation and how to build resilience in an AI-driven world. We uncover the "ABCS" (Awareness, Buy-in, Competence, and Sustainability) framework for organizational change to guide employees through the anxieties of technological change.

We explore the shift from the traditional career ladder to internal talent mobility and why individual accountability is the key to upskilling for the future of work. Sue also shares how AI tools, like Co-pilot can speed up employee training while keeping human interaction and trust at the center of the business.

From reflections on a 40-year career to modern AI pilots, Sue shares a clear focus on building workforce adaptability without losing the human touch. This episode provides a strategic roadmap for CHROs looking to lead their people through AI transformation with confidence and empathy.

Watch the full video on YouTube

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Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/

Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com

April 24, 2026:

The Wall Street Journal reports entry-level hiring is rebounding — but IBM's HR chief says AI can already do almost everything those jobs used to require, and ZipRecruiter's data shows 73% of grads are now considering gig or trade work because corporate entry roles have dried up. Business Insider investigates "tokenmaxxing" — the new corporate sport where employees at Disney, Meta, and JPMorgan compete to burn the most AI tokens — and a new study of 22,000 developers shows exactly what that's doing to actual work quality. And The Guardian reports Meta cutting 8,000 jobs and Microsoft offering buyouts to 9,000 people on the same day they announce hundreds of billions in new AI investment.

April 23, 2026: OpenAI released GPT-5.5 today — its second major model in six weeks. But while the software accelerates, the physical infrastructure powering it is triggering gunfire at council members' homes, Molotov cocktails at tech CEOs, and a grassroots rebellion that just ousted every incumbent on a Missouri city council one week after they voted yes on a data center. We also dig into the first-ever U.S. Census Bureau data on how AI is actually being adopted across American businesses — and why the real number is very different from what McKinsey has been telling you. And we look at what happened when Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm that advises OpenAI on safe AI deployment, filed a federal court brief riddled with AI hallucinations.

April 22, 2026: What does it actually take to build an organization where people perform at their best? In this episode, I'm breaking down what I call Empathetic Excellence — and it comes down to three things: competence, merit, and empathy. Not one of them. All three. I share two stories that have stayed with me — one about my daughter Naomi on the tennis court, and one about my father's first job in America — that I think capture this better than any research study could. I also get into why calling meritocracy a myth is a trap, what two dystopian novels from the 1950s and 60s can teach us about the workplace today, and why the diversity conversation inside organizations needs to shift from what people look like to how they think. If you lead people — or want to — this episode is for you.

April 21, 2026: Amazon commits $33 billion total to Anthropic in a landmark deal securing 5 gigawatts of compute — the equivalent of five nuclear power plants — while Anthropic's revenue triples from $9 billion to $30 billion run-rate in months, signaling we are past the pilot phase. Meta installs tracking software on employee computers to capture every keystroke and mouse movement as training data for AI agents — examined here against the full context of $73 billion in Reality Labs losses, an AI model that trails its competitors on agentic benchmarks, and a photorealistic AI clone of Zuckerberg designed to replace human management conversations. And the Wall Street Journal goes inside BlackRock's AI transformation, where the world's largest investment firm is rolling out firm-wide agentic platforms and human "squads" to oversee AI — with its own head of AI admitting no one has fully cracked the nut yet.

Technology is moving faster than ever, and many of us feel the pressure to keep up without losing our human touch. We need a clear path to help our teams embrace change while building a culture of trust and growth.

In this episode, Lisa Coulson, SVP and Chief Human Resource Officer at Principal Financial Group, joins me to talk about what it means to build an AI-literate workforce at its core within financial services. We explore how their data literacy and employee training program reached 90% of workers and how internal AI tools helped with their AI adoption.

Lisa shares their step-by-step "funnel" approach to reskilling and upskilling, the impact of AI in leadership development, and how to build an internal talent marketplace to match employee skills with new roles.

We also tackle the necessity of governance in a regulated industry and the ongoing challenge of measuring AI's ROI and productivity gains during a workforce transformation. This episode is every CHRO's clear guide for leading a digital shift while keeping the employee experience strong.

Watch the full video on YouTube

----------

Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/

Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com