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

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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 17, 2026: Employer power has officially returned and workers are accepting things they never would have a year ago — but is that actually a bad thing? Then, teen boys are dating their AI chatbots and experts are warning about what that means for the future workforce. And finally, Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report reveals that global employee engagement has hit a five-year low — and what employees say they actually want from their leaders might surprise you.

Watch the full episode 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/

If you lead people, you design experiences—do it on purpose with The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order now: 8EXlaws.com

April 16, 2026: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7 this morning — a significant upgrade focused on complex coding and self-verification that changes what human oversight of AI actually needs to look like. Bank of America posted near-record earnings and credited AI, spotlighting a new tool for its 18,000 financial advisors that raises important questions about what happens when information advantage disappears from knowledge work. A major new global survey from WalkMe finds 80 percent of enterprise workers are actively avoiding AI tools, and new Gallup data shows Gen Z's enthusiasm for AI is collapsing fastest among daily users — pointing to a crisis of institutional trust that no training program can fix. And the CEO of Indeed argues the entire AI-and-jobs debate is focused on the wrong threat: demographic contraction, not AI displacement, will define the next 50 years of work — and almost nobody is preparing for it.

April 15, 2027: A failed sneaker brand rebrands as an AI compute company and its stock jumps 600% in a day — and that tells us something important about the race for AI infrastructure. Then, OpenAI releases GPT-5.4-Cyber, a specialized cybersecurity model, and quietly rewrites the rules for how dangerous AI gets deployed. The shift from restricting what models can do to verifying who can access them has direct implications for every business leader thinking about AI governance.

April 14, 2026: The Stanford AI Index shows generative AI has hit 53% global adoption — faster than any technology in history — but also reveals a 50-point gap between expert optimism and public fear about jobs. An AI agent in San Francisco opened a store, hired staff, negotiated with vendors, and forgot to schedule anyone on opening day. Meta is building a photorealistic clone of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with employees — raising hard questions about leadership presence at scale. And a new Bloomberg Businessweek investigation finds college students are skipping the broken entry-level job market entirely and founding AI companies instead. Jacob unpacks what each story actually signals for leaders, organizations, and the future of work.