Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

May 6, 2026: The Wall Street Journal reports a genuine split emerging among CEOs — Coinbase and PayPal cutting aggressively while Spotify, IBM, and Axon hold headcount and bet on growth instead. Business Insider goes inside Disney and JPMorgan to show how AI adoption pressure has shifted from C-suite memos to manager dashboards and performance reviews — and why measuring token usage instead of outcomes may be building a very expens...

A massive wave of retirements known as "Peak 65" is creating a serious crisis for organizations as decades of institutional knowledge begin to walk out the door. This shift in workforce demographics means we must act now to secure our talent pipeline before these experts leave for good.

In this episode, CHRO Robin Benoit shares how she and her team at FM are tackling this challenge at its core. We explore their unique mentorship pr...

May 1, 2026: Mark Zuckerberg admits in an all-hands meeting that Meta's 8,000 layoffs aren't because AI is replacing workers — they're because AI infrastructure is expensive, and compute won the budget battle over people. The Washington Post reports that "AI washing" is rampant across Silicon Valley — companies using the technology as cover for a pandemic-era hiring hangover. And Snap's CEO, whose company has AI writing two-thirds ...

April 30, 2026: A Claude-powered AI coding agent wipes a company's entire production database and all backups in nine seconds — then produces a written confession. Employers deploying AI job interviewers without telling candidates are losing top talent and damaging their employer brand. And Citigroup launches Arc, a centralized operating system for AI agents designed to give 180,000 employees governed, monitored access to agentic A...

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 again...

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 questio...

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) fram...

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...

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...

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...

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 aga...

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 h...

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 act...

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...

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 ever...

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 — raisin...

Companies today are rushing to build an AI strategy, but they often forget to create a human strategy to match it. As technology takes over daily tasks, keeping the human element alive at work is a huge challenge for business leaders.

In this episode, Kathie Patterson, Chief Human Resources Officer at Ally, joins us to explore how to balance new AI tools with human emotional intelligence. We uncover how to roll out AI to employees ...

April 10, 2026: Andreessen Horowitz just released hard data showing nearly a third of the Fortune 500 has live AI deployments — and the pattern underneath reveals exactly which jobs and functions are next in line. Then: Gallup says global employee engagement just hit a five-year low, and I'm going to argue that metric is fundamentally broken and why your board should stop asking for it. Plus, Microsoft Research coins a term you'll ...

April 9, 2026: Meta had a big week. The company launched Muse Spark, its first model from a completely rebuilt AI team, framing it as the opening move toward personal superintelligence. And internally, employees were competing on a secret leaderboard tracking exactly how many AI tokens each of the company's 85,000 workers consumed — with titles like "Token Legend" awarded to the top users. Their CEO didn't crack the top 250. We bre...