Graduation season is a time to reflect. Whether you’re just starting out or continuously learning.. dream BIG and execute with purpose.  Dreams without action are only wishes - it takes determination, consistency, and hard work to bring your goals to life. Now is your time 💪❤️

Scaling gen AI isn’t just about building, it’s about rebuilding smarter. Open architecture, reusable tools, and vendor flexibility are key to keeping up with change. Learn how top orgs are designing for speed and resilience: mck.co/45AfhQH

Agentic AI is here. But the real question isn’t what to automate, it’s which decisions to. Smart leaders are rethinking service ops, blending AI with human judgment where it matters most. Explore the framework that’s changing the game: mck.co/4lc6d9A

My new book, Your AI Life: Foresight, Insight, and Advice to Help You Start Living Your AI Powered Life Today, seems to be striking a chord with people in all stages of life. Hope you get a chance to make it part of your summer reading. a.co/d/33EE6MR

The play right now is to go deep in a vertical and build AI Agents with the context of the critical workflows, domain expertise, specialized instructions, and data of that industry. And build anticipating what’s possible with AI models in a year from now, not just today.

The biggest AI Agent opportunities are going to be in categories of work where there could be a 10X or 100X increase in demand if the cost of executing certain tasks went down dramatically. The key is to find categories of work where there’s a significant amount of

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Tech debt is like other debt: - Longer you hold it, more it costs - Costs accumulate over time - Pay it off ASAP - Sometimes worth taking on debt, to do something important faster - Some take on debt without thinking: can I pay it off - Taking on more debt to pay off debt is bad

Increasingly finding pockets of “deep AI use” where enterprising people have figured out how to use AI to mostly automate very complex, quite valuable tasks in their area of expertise. Diffusion of use cases will be slower than diffusion of AI. The future is unevenly distributed

The challenge in learning using AI is very similar to the same learning issue from search. When we are given answers we think we learn, but we don’t. Learning is work. However, things like the “learning modes” from the AI providers help, as does using AI for tutoring not answers

I keep warning that so many of our systems are still built around the assumption that quality writing and analysis are costly and therefore meaningful signals. Our systems are very much not ready for the revelation that this is no longer true, as this planning objection AI shows

The consensus view of AI researchers that artificial general intelligence is possible in a handful of years has never been clearer. You don’t have to believe them but they appear to be sincere. Even more importantly: we do not need better AI than we have today for major impacts.

Talent stacks

No signs of an end to rapid gains in AI ability at ever-decreasing costs (which is a log scale) yet. I have to update this monthly or more frequently at this point. All AI benchmarks are flawed, but GPQA Diamond has been a pretty good one, though likely close to being maxed out.

The best way to improve is not to focus on results. It’s to focus on habits. 27 studies: Behavior change goals are 3x more effective than outcome goals in boosting performance. Growth depends on altering the actions we can control. A key to progress is concentrating on process.

Where will the next wave of global growth come from? We identify 18 industries – from AI to obesity drugs – that could generate $29–48 trillion in annual revenue by 2040. These 🔟 charts visualize the next big arenas of competition: mckinsey.com/mgi/our-resear…

I wrote about my class where MBAs created startups in a few days, the secret behind working with AI agents (hint: it’s good management), and how to build a process around delegating to AIs in a world where agents can increasingly do many-hour-long tasks. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefult…

Not all adaptation measures are created equal. Air conditioning can remove almost all heat damages for people indoors but has moderate benefit-to-cost ratios. Fans and white roofs protect less yet are cheaper and more cost-effective. Discover more: mck.co/adaptation

People on this site systematically overestimate the speed at which companies can deeply adopt AI & underestimate the impact of AI’s jagged abilities in limiting AI’s utility in the short run. Work will certainly start to change but companies have a lot of inertia & change slower

It was the year, however, where ROI became positive. That, and agents, are why bigger changes are coming.