<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69d7e1579084e2501d889a0c&ss_email_id=69d8e68dff2faf6221fe5fe3&ss_campaign_name=Your+Company+Has+an+AI+PR+Problem&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-04-10T12%3A03%3A01Z> Conor Grennan — April 10, 2026 AI has a PR problem - both among the public and inside your company. Of course it does! People don't care about technology. They care about their jobs. And AI is scary capable. Inside your company, that PR problem is an anchor - dragging down innovation, slowing rapid change, killing potential excitement, and preventing the transformation that AI actually makes possible. OpenAI knows it. This week they bought TBPN - the streaming show every tech CEO has been fighting to get on - and parked it inside their strategy division. They're buying a trusted voice to fix public perception. You have to fix it inside your organization. But how do you move from encouragement to expectation of use? The answer is counterintuitive: less tech strategy, less CEO-veiled-threats-to-use-AI, and even less change management - and more employee engagement. THE NUMBERS CAN LOOK BRUTAL Gallup's <https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx> 2026 State of the Global Workplace report just dropped - subtitled "The Human Side of the AI Revolution." In the US, 18% of employees believe their job will be eliminated by AI in the next five years. In orgs where AI has been implemented, that jumps to 23%. In finance and tech, it's north of 30%. Meanwhile, an NBER survey of nearly 6,000 executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that 89% report zero impact of AI on their company's labor productivity over the past three years. And yet 65% of employees say AI has improved their personal productivity. From the employee's perspective: AI might take my job and it's not even helping the company yet. That's a rough sell. THIS IS AN EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY This is why at AI Mindset we frame AI adoption as an employee engagement strategy. Not a tech strategy. Not even a change management strategy - not in the way most people think about it. Change management implies a new system to migrate to. There's no system here. AI adoption is about getting people to fundamentally change how they show up to work every day. That's engagement. That's meeting people where they are. Gallup's data backs this up. Only 12% of employees in AI-implemented organizations say AI has transformed how work gets done. But employees whose managers actively champion AI use are nearly 9 times more likely to say it has. Less than a third of employees say their manager does that. The technology works. The adoption doesn't. The gap is entirely human. WHAT THE BEST LEADERS DO When we work with leadership, we always start with messaging. It's the first of our four mandates for leaders in the AI era, because if you get messaging wrong, nothing else matters. Most companies are still in encouragement mode. "We encourage everyone to explore AI tools." That's not leadership. That's a suggestion box. AI Champions have a hard time as well - you're asking enthusiasts to convert skeptics, and the moment someone gets good at AI, they develop the Curse of Knowledge. They can't remember why it was hard. So they demo features, and the audience nods politely, and nothing changes. Leaders have to be vulnerable. I know that sounds like a Brene Brown thing, and some people hear "vulnerability" and tune out. But the best leaders we've worked with say: "I was confused by this too. I didn't get it at first. Here's what changed for me." That's what breaks through resistance. Because here's what most leaders don't realize: if you get people genuinely excited about AI - excited because they see how it helps them do their actual work - you barely have to manage the adoption at all. People will run with it. Yes, you have to guide how they work, set expectations, build processes. But you always had to do that. That's just management. The hard part is the front end. The messaging. The emotional buy-in. The moment a skeptical employee thinks, "Maybe this isn't going to replace me. Maybe this is going to make my work better." That's the unlock. Let's get this right, friends. AI NEWS OF THE WEEK 1. Anthropic's Revenue Hits $30 Billion — The Enterprise Bet Is Paying Off <https://www.axios.com/2026/03/11/openai-anthropic-pentagon-google> Anthropic's revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion. If you’ve been paying attention, that’s up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The driver? More than 1,000 business customers spending over $1 million annually. Who’d have thought staying focused on making AI genuinely useful for work, rather than chasing consumer entertainment, would be the right approach?! 2. OpenAI Buys TBPN <https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/> As we’ve covered: if the world's most powerful AI company is buying trusted voices to fix public perception, it’s maybe a sign that AI has a PR problem. 3. Meta Debuts Muse Spark <https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/08/meta-debuts-first-major-ai-model-since-14-billion-deal-to-bring-in-alexandr-wang.html> Meta debuted Muse Spark, its first major large language model developed under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang's Meta Superintelligence Labs. Rebuilt from the ground up over nine months, smaller models here are just as capable as older midsize Llama variants. And with less compute to boot. Meta's stock jumped 6.5% on the news. 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Your Company Has an AI PR Problem
conor@ai-mindset.ai4/10/2026
<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69cd9ba6db54085ef3eeff1e&ss_email_id=69cfba44f53a2310262e6fca&ss_campaign_name=The+Shiny+Road+to+Nowhere&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-04-03T13%3A07%3A12Z> Conor Grennan — April 1, 2026 OpenAI just killed the Sora app. Their AI video generator - the one that had Disney putting up a billion dollars, the one that hit #1 in the App Store, the one that was supposed to change Hollywood - kaput. But that's not all - they also killed their shopping feature. They're pulling back on their browser experiments. They're done with getting "distracted by side quests," as their head of applications put it. Instead, OpenAI is going all in on what actually matters: Enterprise. Coding. The products that change how people work. I love this so much. Because this is exactly what we've found to be the most impactful approach when working with enterprises at scale: Don't go for the shiny thing. Don't lead with demos of the latest AI coding tool. Don't chase the frontier. Focus on the work. I'm telling you, it's so easy to fall into the "curse of knowledge" here - the idea that because you know how cutting edge stuff works, you assume others can get there immediately as well. When you've seen what AI can do - really seen it - you want to show everyone. But that's not how people work. And it's sure not how they work at scale. Organizations don't care about AI for the sake of AI. They care about driving value. And the shiny stuff is a detour. THE SHINY OBJECT TRAP When I work with companies, there is an almost irresistible gravitational pull toward the cutting edge. Somebody gets up there and goes "check out the app I built and I don't even know how to code and I'm saving 45 hours per day now - PER DAY." Yeah, we get it - incredible. All completely irrelevant to 99% of what your people need to do tomorrow morning. You don't need a commercial kitchen to make dinner. It's not gonna make your food taste better. You know what is? Knowing how to cook. My mom is an amazing cook - her kitchen is the most simple thing you've ever seen. You don't need the frontier of AI capability to reinvent how you work. And yet there is a massive temptation to lead with the most mind-blowing demo you can find. AI agents that operate your computer. Code generation that builds full applications. Video from a text prompt. Don't. Not first. Here's what happens: You blow their minds, and then they go back to their desks with no idea where to start. The gap between what they just saw and what they know how to do feels like a canyon. So they freeze. Reinvention doesn't come from the technology. It comes from the person. It comes from someone who has enough reps, enough trust, enough fluency with AI that they instinctively know how to push it, challenge it, iterate with it, and co-create with it. That's the unlock. Not a better model. Not a new feature. A better relationship. And by the way - you don't get people there by a tour of features. You get them there by changing their behavior (that's what we do at AI Mindset <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/courses?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69cd9ba6db54085ef3eeff1e&ss_email_id=69cfba44f53a2310262e6fca&ss_campaign_name=The+Shiny+Road+to+Nowhere&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-04-03T13%3A07%3A12Z> for some of the biggest companies in the world). We massively underestimate how much behavioral change has to happen before people are ready for the advanced stuff. Nobody jumps to the top in this or anything else. But the temptation is enormous. Show them the impossible, yes. But show them that the impossible is already within reach - not because of some new tool, but because of how they learn to work with the one they've got. AI NEWS OF THE WEEK 1. OPENAI KILLS SORA: THE NUMBERS TELL THE REAL STORY <https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/29/why-openai-really-shut-down-sora/> After a splashy launch, Sora's worldwide user count peaked at around a million then collapsed to fewer than 500,000, while the app was burning through roughly $1 million every day. TLDR: video generation is costly to run. The demo was world-class. The unit economics were a disaster. Sound familiar? 2. ANTHROPIC ACCIDENTALLY LEAKS ITS NEXT MODEL <https://fortune.com/2026/03/27/anthropic-leaked-ai-mythos-cybersecurity-risk/> Anthropic inadvertently revealed details about an in-development model named Claude Mythos on its company website, with close to 3,000 previously unpublished assets becoming publicly accessible. According to reports, Anthropic has been privately warning senior government officials that Mythos makes large-scale cyberattacks significantly more likely. To boot, Claude Code source code leaked a few days later for good measure. Eventful week at Anthropic HQ. 3. AGENTIC AI IS NOW THE NUMBER ONE CYBERSECURITY THREAT <https://www.axios.com/2026/03/29/claude-mythos-anthropic-cyberattack-ai-agents> A Dark Reading poll found that 48% of cybersecurity professionals now rank agentic AI as the number one attack vector for 2026. That’s above deepfakes, above everything else. Scary times! WHAT OPENAI LEARNED THE HARD WAY OpenAI wanted to be all things to all people - video, social, a whole operating system. In the process, they lost focus on what mattered most. Meanwhile, Anthropic - laser focused on making AI genuinely useful for work - started lapping them. Businesses began choosing Claude over ChatGPT at an accelerating rate. So OpenAI did what any smart company does when it wakes up. They killed the side quests. They went back to what works. I have huge confidence in OpenAI. Extraordinary talent, massive resources, and a head start that still counts for something. Coming back to focus is exactly the right move. But the lesson is universal: The shiny road goes nowhere. The real road starts with the work in front of you. With the AI you already have. With the behavioral shift that turns a tool into a thinking partner. Stop chasing. Start using. Let's get to work, friends. 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The Shiny Road to Nowhere
conor@ai-mindset.ai4/3/2026
<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69c59f6c1de69a458ee843d6&ss_email_id=69c67fb74caa11649a6d2710&ss_campaign_name=%5BTEST%5D+Behavior%2C+Not+Proficiency%3A+Why+AI+Adoption+Keeps+Failing&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-27T13%3A07%3A03Z> Conor Grennan — March 27, 2026 There's a word that keeps showing up in major AI studies recently. It's not "proficiency." It's not "skill." It's not "competency." It's "behavior." KPMG and UT Austin <https://hbr.org/2026/03/what-the-best-ai-users-do-differently-and-how-to-level-up-all-of-your-employees> used it. Anthropic <https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-fluency-index> used it. McKinsey <https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai> used it. (AI Mindset has been using it for three years. Just sayin'.) You've probably noticed something: Researchers keep analyzing millions of real AI interactions, looking for the holy grail of what makes a great AI user. What you may not have seen is that they keep finding the same thing: This is about behavior. Not how fast they climb a learning curve. And that distinction changes everything about how we should be teaching AI. THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW IN AI ADOPTION Here's the problem: Almost every organization on the planet is teaching AI as if it's another tool to learn. And why wouldn't they? That's how everything else has worked. Forever. Think about how you learned Excel. You started by clicking on a cell and adding things up. Then you learned formulas. Then pivot tables. Then, if you were feeling particularly adventurous, macros. There was a learning curve. You climbed it rung by rung. Think about how you learned French. Single words. Then verbs. Then short sentences. Then longer sentences. Then you ordered a croissant in Paris and felt like a god. Every tool, every language, every piece of software in history has followed this same pattern: basics first, then intermediate, then advanced. AI does not work this way. And that's what's tripping up the entire enterprise world. THE EVIDENCE IS PILING UP Let's look at what the research is actually telling us. KPMG US partnered with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin to analyze over 1.4 million AI prompts from 2,500 employees over eight months. Their findings were published in Harvard Business Review. <https://hbr.org/2026/03/what-the-best-ai-users-do-differently-and-how-to-level-up-all-of-your-employees> The headline finding: only about 5% of users were truly sophisticated. And what separated them wasn't how often they used AI. It was how they behaved. They iterated. They guided the model's thinking. They treated AI like a reasoning partner, not a search bar. Then Anthropic <https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-fluency-index> published their AI Fluency Index. Note the title carefully. They didn't call it a "Proficiency Index." They called it a "Fluency Index." And they explicitly framed their findings around behaviors, not skills. Across nearly 10,000 conversations, the number one behavioral indicator of AI fluency - at 85.7% - was iteration and refinement. Going back and forth. Those conversations showed double the rate of every other fluency behavior. Not a single technical skill made the list. The top indicators were things like clarifying your goal, providing examples, setting the terms of the interaction. These are all things you do when you work with a smart colleague. Both studies arrived at the same place: This is not about climbing a learning curve. It's simply fundamentally a different thing. WHY THIS IS SO DIFFERENT FROM EVERYTHING ELSE With every other tool in history, there was a body of knowledge to master. Buttons to learn, stuff to understand, a prerequisite chain: you couldn't do Step 5 until you'd done Steps 1 through 4. Heck, that's the entire education system. AI has none of that. You can go all-in instantly. Because all it is, at its core, is talking to it like a person. And you already know how to do that. The hurdle is not in the skills. The hurdle is in the behavioral adoption. It's in getting your brain to understand why this is so fundamentally different from everything else you've ever used. Your brain sees a text box, and your brain says: "Gotcha. This is Google." And then your brain does what it's been doing for two decades: type a short command, get a response, walk away. So the gap isn't about what you don't know. You gotta think about the behavior gap. And you don't close a behavior gap with a training manual. WHY TRADITIONAL TRAINING FAILS HERE This is why telling people to "use AI" doesn't work any more than telling someone to eat less and exercise. We know that part! It's also not about motivation - you don't think I wanna look amazing at the beach? Or make sure my heart is healthy? I want those things! And it's not about having the best tool - I have the best treadmill around! Behavior is different. And AI is behavior. It's also why power users can't easily transfer their ability to others. I've seen this a million times. You take your best AI user, put them in front of a room, and they show everyone what they do. And the audience nods along. And then they go back to their desks and nothing changes. Why? Because of what we call the Curse of Knowledge - from the 1990 Stanford study. Power users can't explain why it's easy for them and hard for others - because it's not knowledge they're transferring. It's behavior. And they don't even know they changed their behavior. It just clicked for them one day. This also means there's no such thing as "beginner, intermediate, expert" with AI. Not really. This doesn't follow a traditional learning curve. I've seen total novices become power users literally overnight. Because something shifted in how they perceived what AI actually is, and it was an immediate unlock. AI NEWS OF THE WEEK 1. ANTHROPIC PROVES THE BEHAVIOR ARGUMENT — WITH DATA <https://www.axios.com/2026/03/24/ai-use-inequality-class> Anthropic’s new Economic Index Learning Curves study found that experienced AI users get a 10% higher success rate in their conversations than newcomers. The longer you’ve been using it, the stronger the effect. fluency compounds. 2. GEMINI JUST GOT EMBEDDED INTO EVERYTHING GOOGLE <https://workspace.google.com/blog> Gemini can now synthesize information from a user’s emails, files, chats, and calendar to auto-generate fully formatted documents and build complex spreadsheets from natural language prompts. This is the quiet story of the month. Behavior change just got a lot easier, or a lot more unavoidable, depending on how you look at it. 3. OPENAI IS BECOMING AN ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE COMPANY <https://techstartups.com/2026/03/24/top-tech-news-today-march-24-2026/> The Financial Times reports that OpenAI plans to nearly double its workforce to around 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, hiring across product, engineering, research, sales, and technical ambassadorship. The model race still matters. But so does turning AI into software that enterprises will actually buy, deploy, and renew year after year. The frontier labs are growing up. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION If you're a leader trying to scale AI adoption, you're not going to find your answer in weekly active users. Anthropic just proved that's attendance, not fluency. Someone opening the tool tells you nothing about whether they're using it well. Measure conversation depth instead. Are your people iterating? Are they going back and forth? Are they treating AI like a thought partner or like a search engine? And rethink your training entirely. Stop treating this like a software rollout. Stop building proficiency programs. This is behavioral change. The playbook is closer to Atomic Habits than it is to a Salesforce certification. If your organization is still treating AI as something to learn, you're solving the wrong problem. It's not about proficiency. It's about behavior. Let's change the approach. We got this. 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[TEST] Behavior, Not Proficiency: Why AI Adoption Keeps Failing
conor@ai-mindset.ai3/27/2026
<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69bc46ac9af3807aa46266c5&ss_email_id=69bd45150ce61e74b000a4a7&ss_campaign_name=Why+AI+Champions+Don%E2%80%99t+Work&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-20T13%3A04%3A46Z> Conor Grennan — March 20, 2026 AI champions - we love you, you're amazing. This is not about you. You're working hard. But it's never gonna work - not at scale. Because you're trying to boil the ocean. You've probably already realized this, but let me share what we've learned from working with a couple hundred companies. And I'm going to tell you what does work. Where we can actually put your AI skillzzz to work for reals. We're gonna turn you all into certified AI Process Architects. Lemme explain. Companies have been betting on AI champions for three years now. Pick your most enthusiastic ChatGPT user, give them a title, and let them spread the gospel. We actually used to recommend this ourselves at AI Mindset. We stopped about two years ago. Not because champions aren't great - they are! They know their stuff. They'll happily share their use cases. They're doing everything they can. But it doesn't change people. THE YOGA PROBLEM Imagine you're trying to get everyone on your team to do yoga. You've got one person who's great at it. Every day, that person teaches the team the moves, explains why it matters, coaches them through it. By the end of the month, the whole team can do yoga. Twenty people, all proficient in yoga!! Success, right? Now ask yourself: How many of those twenty people are doing yoga every morning a year from now? Maybe three? If we're lucky. They all know how to do yoga. But they don't do yoga. They climbed that learning curve. But knowing how to do something and actually doing it consistently are two completely different problems. One is a learning curve. The other is a behavioral change. And that's the trap. We're asking AI champions to solve a behavioral problem with a learning solution. Sure, some folks will just start doing it on their own. But most people really need that champion standing next to them every morning, coaching them through it. And guess what? That person has a job. They can't babysit twenty people's AI habits forever. THE ADVOCATE PROBLEM Here's another way to think about it. Let's say you're trying to get your company's insurance premiums down, so you hire health advocates. They walk around the office, hand out apples, give tips on getting in shape, point out the gym on the top floor. Great in the moment. Maybe someone eats an apple. Maybe someone checks out the gym. Does anyone think this will change the health behavior of the firm? Of course not. That's what AI champions are doing. They're handing out apples. And people are loving the apples! But you can't manage everyone's habits. That's why they're called habits. MOVING FROM ENCOURAGEMENT TO EXPECTATION So what actually works? Process change. Here's the distinction that changes everything: AI champions encourage. What you actually need is expectation. Back to the health thing. You could encourage people to take the stairs. Point out the benefits. Put up motivational posters. Have your health advocate stand by the elevator making disappointed faces. Or you could remove the elevator. Now people have to take the stairs. No choice. It's just how things work. Weird? A little. But that's the shift. You move from hoping people use AI to making AI the default way work gets done. WHAT "REMOVING THE ELEVATOR" LOOKS LIKE So what does this look like in practice? This is what AI Mindset does with organizations. We certify AI Process Architects. Not just any process - we've found four processes that work best. None of these require your champion to stand over anyone's shoulder. The process does the work. AI NEWS THIS WEEK 1. OpenAI Releases GPT-5.4 Mini and Nano <https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4-mini-and-nano/> OpenAI dropped GPT-5.4 mini and nano this week. Think the smaller, faster versions of their flagship model, running more than twice as fast as their predecessors. The idea is a two-tier system: a big model does the thinking, smaller models do the executing <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/chatgpt-cheatsheet?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69bc46ac9af3807aa46266c5&ss_email_id=69bd45150ce61e74b000a4a7&ss_campaign_name=Why+AI+Champions+Don%E2%80%99t+Work&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-20T13%3A04%3A46Z> . The tools are getting cheaper and faster every single week. The behavior gap isn't. 2. Anthropic vs. The Pentagon <https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/openai-and-google-employees-rush-to-anthropics-defense-in-dod-lawsuit/> After Anthropic refused to let the Department of Defense use Claude for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons targeting, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk". Over 30 employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, including Google's chief scientist, filed a legal brief saying the move threatens the entire American AI industry. This one is going to matter. 3. A Rogue AI Agent Caused a Security Incident at Meta <https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/897528/meta-rogue-ai-agent-security-incident> An out-of-control AI agent triggered a serious security incident at Meta this week. A Meta AI agent posted inaccurate technical advice to an internal forum without authorization. An employee acted on it, and for two hours colleagues had access to data they shouldn't have seen. Meta says no user data was mishandled, and the agent didn't technically do anything a human couldn't have done. But a human might have double-checked first. The upside of agents is real. So is this. BIG TAKEAWAYS AI champions solve for knowledge. Process solves for behavior. And behavior is the whole game. Champions can teach your team how to use generative AI. That's valuable! But if you stop there, you'll end up with twenty people who know how to do yoga and three who actually do it. Stop investing in encouragement. Start investing in expectation. Remove the elevator, friends. That's how you scale. If you're interested in figuring out how to change your organization at scale, we're ready to help <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/courses?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69bc46ac9af3807aa46266c5&ss_email_id=69bd45150ce61e74b000a4a7&ss_campaign_name=Why+AI+Champions+Don%E2%80%99t+Work&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-20T13%3A04%3A46Z> . 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Why AI Champions Don’t Work
conor@ai-mindset.ai3/20/2026
<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69b22cfd7d48e65531e2369d&ss_email_id=69b40d4ad7af953f19c47580&ss_campaign_name=THE+MILLION+LITTLE+HOCKEY+STICKS&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-13T13%3A13%3A11Z> Conor Grennan — March 13, 2026 I was working with the leadership team of a Fortune 10 company (Fortune 10, man!). Tens of thousands of employees. Massive operation. They had done a lot right - invested in the platform, rolled out the tools. And productivity was going up! Which is great! So why did they bring in my company? Because they were stuck in a place we see pretty much everyone that’s doing AI pretty well: Productivity was edging up, but in a slope. A nice, gentle, upward slope. A slope they would have killed for a few years ago…before AI. But they wanted the hockey stick. So they called us. The promise of AI isn't a slope, friends. The promise is a hockey stick. That explosive curve where innovation takes off. What was going wrong? THE SLOPE TRAP Here's what I found when I dug in: People were using AI to do the same work, slightly faster. Better emails. Quicker summaries. Cleaner first drafts. That's the Google Brain problem I talk about all the time. We treat ChatGPT like a slightly better search engine. A speed boost. And look - speed is nice. But nobody is going to reinvent their organization with a slightly faster email draft. That's a slope. That's incremental. That's a poster of a Picasso. The hockey stick comes from something completely different. It comes from reinventing how you work. WHAT POWER USERS ACTUALLY DO Here's what I've noticed about the people who have truly figured this out: They haven't sped up their old work. They've completely changed what their work looks like. They looked at their processes - the actual way they do things every day - and reimagined them from the ground up. That's the hockey stick. That's where the magic is. But here's the challenge nobody talks about: Your organization doesn't have one process. It has a million processes. The person in HR who handles onboarding has different processes than the person in finance doing forecasting, who has different processes than the marketing team building campaigns. And the people who know those processes best? Not the C-Suite. Not the consultants. Not the AI Task Force. The workers themselves. Which means this can't come from the top down. Leadership can't hand everyone the same playbook and call it a day. That works for a CRM migration. That works for switching from Slack to Teams. But this isn't a digital transformation. It's a behavioral transformation <https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/02/workforce-transformation-ai-jobs/> . So if you want one big hockey stick for your organization, you need a million little hockey sticks. Every employee. Every process. Every team figuring out how to reinvent, not just improve. HOW TO BUILD A MILLION LITTLE HOCKEY STICKS Alright, let's get tactical. STEP 1: STOP OPTIMIZING. START REINVENTING. Most companies invest in the tool, build a prompt library, put together a cluster of AI champions, and hope everyone just kinda picks it up. Worst case is that people don’t use AI at all, or very little. Best case in a lot of organizations I see is that people DO use AI, but they fall into the time paradox - doing more work faster, but not really <https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai> seeing a ton of extra productivity. Because they’re not focusing their time saved on innovation. They’re using it to do more…stuff. That creates a slope. Not a hockey stick. A use case is a one-and-done thing. "Here's how to summarize a document." Great! But a slope. A process change is a flywheel. Once someone figures out how to fundamentally reimagine how they approach their job, they keep going <https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai> . They find the next process. And the next one. It compounds. Your goal isn't to give people better outputs. It's to get them questioning every process they own. STEP 2: UPSKILL EVERYONE. NOT JUST THE ENTHUSIASTS. One power user can't carry an organization of tens of thousands. You need power users everywhere. And I don't mean "show them how to use ChatGPT" upskilling. I mean teach them to think differently about their work. That's the AI Mindset piece. You cannot skip it. This is where most companies go cheap. They do lunch-and-learns. They send around a PDF of prompts. They point to the super user on the team and say "go ask Sarah." That's not training. That's hoping. Real training changes how people see their work. It rewires the brain from "How do I do this faster?" to "Why am I doing it this way at all?" That's the difference between a slope and a hockey stick <https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/future-of-work-trends> . STEP 3: LET THE WORKERS LEAD. This is the one that trips up leadership. You cannot design a million process changes from the top. There are too many processes. They're too specific. They live in the heads of the people doing the work every single day. So your job as a leader isn't to hand down the innovation playbook. It's to create the conditions for a million people to write their own. Train them. Give them permission. Give them time. Then get out of the way. Because once that flywheel starts spinning - once one team reinvents a process and another team sees it and thinks "wait, I could do that too" - it's unstoppable. That's your million little hockey sticks. BIG TAKEAWAYS The slope is doing old work faster. The hockey stick is reinventing the work itself. This can't come from the top down because no one at the top knows all the processes. The workers do. That means you have to upskill the entire organization - not with prompts and use cases, but with a new way of thinking. One hockey stick won't transform your company. A million little ones will. And it starts by investing in your people, not your platform. When you’re ready, AI Mindset can help with that <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/courses?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69b22cfd7d48e65531e2369d&ss_email_id=69b40d4ad7af953f19c47580&ss_campaign_name=THE+MILLION+LITTLE+HOCKEY+STICKS&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-13T13%3A13%3A11Z> . 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THE MILLION LITTLE HOCKEY STICKS
conor@ai-mindset.ai3/13/2026
<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69aa30012b7ce3232878ca62&ss_email_id=69aad0464410ad0e2883a924&ss_campaign_name=The+Tsunami+Is+Real.+But+It%27s+Not+What+You+Think.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-06T13%3A05%3A25Z> The Tsunami Is Real. But It's Not What You Think. Conor Grennan — March 5, 2026 Friends, I want to talk about the job market. Not to scare you. Not to reassure you. Because right now, both the panic and the denial are getting it wrong. Here's the headline you maybe saw <https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/ai-impacting-labor-market-like-a-tsunami-as-layoff-fears-mount.html> : Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund, stood at Davos last month and said AI is hitting the labor market "like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it." And here's the headline from the same week, from Axios <https://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/chatgpt-personal-use-ad-strategy?utm_source=x&utm_medium=owned_social&utm_campaign=editorial> , citing Yale University's Budget Lab <https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/labor-market-ai-exposure-what-do-we-know> : the labor market data since ChatGPT launched shows no widespread AI-driven job losses. The overall occupational mix has barely shifted. Both of these things are true. They're just describing different parts of the same elephant. Let me show you what's actually happening. THE PART THAT ISN'T HAPPENING (YET) The mass displacement story, the one where AI rolls through the economy and millions of workers lose their jobs overnight, is not happening. Not yet. Axios reported that the deterioration in the job market for young workers actually began before ChatGPT was widely available, coinciding with the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate tightening in 2022-23. The Fed cooled a hot labor market. That's a lot of what we're seeing. And Deutsche Bank analysts warned that "AI redundancy washing will be a significant feature of 2026" - companies attributing job cuts to AI that have other causes. So when you hear a company announce layoffs and blame AI, take it with some salt. Sometimes it's real. Often it's cover for decisions that would have happened anyway. (Looking at you, Jack Dorsey.) The broad labor market is not collapsing. That's the truth. THE PART THAT IS HAPPENING Here's where it gets more specific - and more important. The disruption isn't happening through mass layoffs. It's happening through the bottom of career ladders quietly closing. A Harvard University study <https://hbr.org/2024/11/research-how-gen-ai-is-already-impacting-the-labor-market> tracking 62 million workers across 285,000 US firms found junior positions "shrinking at companies integrating AI" since 2023, warning that AI is "eroding the bottom rungs of career ladders" by automating the intellectually routine tasks that junior employees typically handle. Entry-level hiring at the 15 biggest tech firms fell 25% from 2023 to 2024. Employers are projecting just a 1.6% increase in hiring for the class of 2026 compared to 2025 — and employers' rating of the job market for college graduates is now at its most pessimistic since 2020. In Ireland <https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/391b8952/Economic_Insights_Volume_1_2026.pdf> , which has a high concentration of tech and financial services employers and serves as an early warning system for the US — employment among workers aged 15 to 29 in at-risk sectors declined, even as employment for prime-age workers aged 30 to 59 in those same sectors grew by 12%. This is the pattern. Not mass displacement. A closing door at the bottom, and a widening gap between those with experience and those without it. The traditional deal of entry-level work - you do the grunt work, you learn the craft, you climb - that deal is being renegotiated. AI is doing a lot of the grunt work now. Which means the path from "new hire" to "trusted contributor" is getting compressed, complicated, and for some people, simply harder to find. WHY THIS ACTUALLY MATTERS FOR YOU Here's where I want to get behavioral about it, because that's what this newsletter is for. The people who are winning in this environment share one thing: they came in with demonstrable AI fluency. Not theoretical knowledge. Not a certification. Actual daily, practical comfort using AI tools to do real work faster and better. IBM just announced it's tripling its Gen Z entry-level hiring - explicitly betting on the AI fluency of younger workers. The CEO of Cognizant told Fortune <https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/tech-giant-ibm-tripling-gen-z-entry-level-hiring-according-to-chro-rewriting-jobs-ai-era/> : "I can take a school graduate and give them the tooling so they can actually punch above their weight. AI is an amplifier of human potential." And from Dropbox's Chief People Officer, talking about Gen Z's AI skills relative to their older colleagues: "It's like they're biking in the Tour de France and the rest of us still have training wheels." Read that again. An entire generation of professionals - experienced, credentialed, senior - is being lapped by younger workers who grew up comfortable with AI as a thinking partner. That should feel like a wake-up call, not a relief. THE FRAMEWORK: TWO KINDS OF EXPOSURE I think about AI's labor market impact in two buckets, and it helps clarify who's actually at risk. Bucket One: Tasks you do that AI can now do faster and cheaper. This is where the displacement anxiety lives. And it's real - for specific tasks. Data entry. First-draft writing. Basic code generation. Routine research. If your job is mostly these things, the pressure is genuine and growing. Bucket Two: Judgment about which tasks matter, how to apply them, and what good looks like. This is where AI cannot replace you. The ability to brief a complex project. To know when the AI output is wrong. To build the relationship that makes the work matter. To ask the question nobody thought to ask. The people getting squeezed are the ones living almost entirely in Bucket One. The people thriving are the ones who've moved their time into Bucket Two - using AI to handle the former so they can focus on the latter. The behavioral shift the AI Mindset has always been about - treating AI as a thinking partner, not a search engine - is now also career strategy. It's about more than productivity - you have to move yourself into the bucket that AI can't touch. GENERATIVE AI TIP OF THE WEEK If you manage people, especially early-career people, this is the most important thing you can do right now. Give them a real project, a real AI tool, and get out of the way. Not a tutorial. Not a workshop. An actual piece of work that matters, with the instruction to use AI however they need to get it done. Then debrief on what they built, how they built it, and what they'd do differently. Two things will happen. You'll see who already has genuine AI fluency. And you'll create the kind of learning environment where AI skills develop through doing - which is the only way they actually develop. The companies winning the talent war in 2026 are the ones with the best AI habits at scale. That’s a culture thing. And you can do that. REMEMBER THIS The tsunami headline and the "nothing to see here" headline are both incomplete. The reality is more specific, more actionable, and more urgent than either story admits. The career ladder is being rebuilt. The new bottom rung isn't "willingness to do grunt work." It's AI fluency - the ability to use these tools daily, comfortably, and well enough to move yourself up into the judgment work that actually can't be automated. The CEO of Randstad, <https://www.facebook.com/randstad.au/posts/hear-from-our-global-ceo-sander-vant-noordende-about-the-benefits-of-the-workmon/1199542499023996/> the world's largest staffing firm, called 2026 "the year of the great adaptation." Not the year of mass displacement. The year when individuals and organizations have to actually reckon with what integration looks like in practice. That's the behavioral challenge the AI Mindset has always been about. The tools have been available for years. The question - then and now - is whether people will actually change how they work. The ones who do are going to be fine. More than fine. Start there. — Conor AI Mindset helps professionals and organizations close the gap between AI access and genuine daily fluency — through behavior change, not just training.www.ai-mindset.ai/courses <http://www.ai-mindset.ai/courses?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69aa30012b7ce3232878ca62&ss_email_id=69aad0464410ad0e2883a924&ss_campaign_name=The+Tsunami+Is+Real.+But+It%27s+Not+What+You+Think.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-06T13%3A05%3A25Z> View original post <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/ai-mindset-newsletter/the-tsunami-is-real-but-its-not-what-you-think?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69aa30012b7ce3232878ca62&ss_email_id=69aad0464410ad0e2883a924&ss_campaign_name=The+Tsunami+Is+Real.+But+It%27s+Not+What+You+Think.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-06T13%3A05%3A25Z> <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69aa30012b7ce3232878ca62&ss_email_id=69aad0464410ad0e2883a924&ss_campaign_name=The+Tsunami+Is+Real.+But+It%27s+Not+What+You+Think.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-06T13%3A05%3A25Z> AI Mindset, 44 W. 4th St., New York, NY. 10012, United States Powered by Squarespace <https://www.squarespace.com?channel=product_refer&subchannel=customer&source=email_campaigns_button&campaign=64f6ef4231140b2b82431cb9&utm_medium=product_refer&utm_source=email_campaigns_button&ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=69aa30012b7ce3232878ca62&ss_email_id=69aad0464410ad0e2883a924&ss_campaign_name=The+Tsunami+Is+Real.+But+It%27s+Not+What+You+Think.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-03-06T13%3A05%3A25Z> Unsubscribe <https://campaign-preferences.com/unsubscribe/yumjFNZr9DrGPjjtwDCyMxM-HuhTbsc9fCK2OFVxqGOin28ZHka3qvIn5gACtX1sEwiMr65EYmnhojf5eQCkhX35G63UnLPridJDjtnn_lx16sTop0sWnarY__pPPUAoGm3MAHgo83es4OUYr0t6l6C3KdClZmqNgxVCHA-ZUL7lLZAeyiPM4VC8EFVEYHR7S4v8kom65GGQeUNDGFF_NxrGOty0O_yv9dBIk9KYFdg1ZALUrCUU1OUmZF40T_5oPCsrMKT-zxZWC42k7n6BJ2CSRxDpxoO_CJh5gOddeNtN1A9wnf8bpIjS9p7J0I3AmLrZez8-eHpsysCzLeDxk8-l-0c0chfYnD2SILw1QDZsMN01TpEvQ3o=>
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The Tsunami Is Real. But It's Not What You Think.
conor@ai-mindset.ai3/6/2026
<https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6998a26ecfdd5c6a471a29e0&ss_email_id=69a195c29efb073cc5c9c6b3&ss_campaign_name=Some+Personal+News.+And+a+Rebuilt+Course.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-02-27T13%3A05%3A16Z> Some Big Personal News. And a Rebuilt Course. Conor Grennan — February 27, 2026 Friends. Big personal news! Sharing with you because we are all best friends. (And also it’s public.) After twelve years at NYU Stern - first as Dean of Students, then as Chief AI Architect - I'm stepping away. My last official day will be March 1st. I absolutely love Stern - but the truth is that AI Mindset has grown to the point where it needs all of me. Not part of me. All of me. So that's what it's getting. I'll have more to say about what's next in the coming weeks. There's a lot coming. But I wanted you to hear it from me directly, first. Okay. Deep breath. Let's talk about what's happening out there. THE MOMENT WE'RE IN Something shifted this week. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei were both in New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit - on stage with Narendra Modi, Sundar Pichai, and a room full of world leaders. India committed over $200 billion in AI investment over the next two years. ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users in India alone - making it the platform's second-largest market after the US. Ramp <https://ramp.com/velocity/the-ai-digest-february-18-2026> One hundred million people. In one country. That’s, like, so many people. And yet the most interesting thing that happened at the summit was a photo. Modi lifted the hands of Altman and Pichai on stage. Everyone followed suit - except Altman and Amodei, who were standing next to each other. They raised their fists instead. CNBC <https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/openai-sam-altman-anthropic-dario-amodei-india-ai-summit.html> Okay, I know this is weird, but I kinda love this. The two most powerful AI labs in the world, in a room full of heads of state, and they couldn't even hold hands for a photo. The competition is real. The stakes are enormous. And none of it changes the fundamental challenge facing every professional trying to figure out where they fit in all of this. That challenge is behavioral. It always has been. The tools keep getting better. The question is whether we're building the habits to use them. Speaking of which. <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/courses?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6998a26ecfdd5c6a471a29e0&ss_email_id=69a195c29efb073cc5c9c6b3&ss_campaign_name=Some+Personal+News.+And+a+Rebuilt+Course.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-02-27T13%3A05%3A16Z> THE COURSE IS REBUILT. HERE'S WHY. I've been working on something for the past several months. With the world moving this fast, the original AI for Professionals course needed to move with it. So we rebuilt it from the ground up. New videos. New modules. And - this is the part I'm most proud of - a completely new learning experience baked into every single lesson. Not just better content. A different theory of how behavior actually changes. Here's the short version: Watching a video doesn't change behavior. Knowing something doesn't change behavior. The gap between insight and action is enormous - and most courses just leave you there, stranded in that gap. The new course doesn't. Every lesson now has a Practice Lab - a pre-written AI prompt, tabbed for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, ready to copy and use the moment the video ends. There are self-diagnostic questions that help you identify your specific sticking point. The button at the bottom says Complete & Continue - not Next Lesson - because finishing the exercise is what finishing a lesson actually means. Modules 9 and 10 are entirely new. That's where it gets into daily workflows, AI agents, deep research tools, and — a lesson I think about constantly right now - how to stay authentically human while working more and more with AI. If you've already taken the course: welcome back. Go straight to Module 9. If you haven't: perfect timing. Start here. <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/ai-for-professionals?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6998a26ecfdd5c6a471a29e0&ss_email_id=69a195c29efb073cc5c9c6b3&ss_campaign_name=Some+Personal+News.+And+a+Rebuilt+Course.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-02-27T13%3A05%3A16Z> AI NEWS OF THE WEEK 1. Anthropic's Claude Gets Smarter for the Same Price <https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-6> Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6 this week - its second major model release in under two weeks. The new Sonnet approaches the intelligence level of Opus, Anthropic's most advanced model class, but is priced identically to its predecessor. <https://ramp.com/velocity/the-ai-digest-february-18-2026> Early users are reporting meaningful improvements in complex multi-step tasks, coding, and financial analysis. More intelligence. Same cost. That's a genuinely good week for anyone using Claude as their daily teammate. 2. The India Moment <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/business/india-ai-impact-summit.html> At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India committed to over $200 billion in AI investment over the next two years, alongside 20,000 GPUs to strengthen domestic AI infrastructure. Anthropic used the occasion to partner with Infosys and open its first office in Bengaluru. <https://ramp.com/velocity/the-ai-digest-february-18-2026> The global AI race just got a significant new entrant. Pay attention to this one. 3. Practical AI Is the New Hype <https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/02/in-2026-ai-will-move-from-hype-to-pragmatism/> TechCrunch's 2026 outlook puts it well: if 2025 was the year AI got a vibe check, 2026 is the year it gets practical. The focus is shifting away from ever-larger models and toward the harder work of making AI usable - smaller models where they fit, intelligence embedded into real workflows, agents that actually augment how people work rather than just promising to. This is exactly what we've been saying for two years. The technology was never the bottleneck. The behavior was. GENERATIVE AI TIP OF THE WEEK Next time you finish a piece of work — an email, a document, a plan — before you send it, try this. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask: "What's the one thing that's missing from this that my audience will immediately notice?" Not "make this better." Not "fix the grammar." One thing. Missing. Immediately noticeable. You'll be surprised how often the answer is something you already knew but didn't want to deal with. Your teammate has no such reservations. LOOKING BACK Twelve years at Stern. Two hundred billion dollars committed to AI in India. A course rebuilt from the ground up. It's a big week. Here's what I keep coming back to, though. The India investment numbers are staggering. The model releases are relentless. The competition between Altman and Amodei is genuinely fascinating. But none of it changes what matters most for you, right now, in your actual working life. The gap between having access to AI and actually using it - really using it, every day, in a way that changes how you work - that gap is still enormous. Closing it isn't a technology problem. It's a behavior problem. That's still what we're here for. Let's get after it. — Conor AI Mindset helps professionals and organizations close the gap between AI access and AI fluency — through behavior change, not just technology training. For speaking, workshops, and enterprise programs: www.ai-mindset.ai/speaking <http://www.ai-mindset.ai/speaking?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6998a26ecfdd5c6a471a29e0&ss_email_id=69a195c29efb073cc5c9c6b3&ss_campaign_name=Some+Personal+News.+And+a+Rebuilt+Course.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-02-27T13%3A05%3A16Z> <https://www.ai-mindset.ai/?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6998a26ecfdd5c6a471a29e0&ss_email_id=69a195c29efb073cc5c9c6b3&ss_campaign_name=Some+Personal+News.+And+a+Rebuilt+Course.&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-02-27T13%3A05%3A16Z> <https://www.instagram.com/conorgrennan_author/> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorgrennan/> <https://www.youtube.com/@ConorGrennan> <https://x.com/conorgrennan> <https://www.tiktok.com/@conorgrennan_official> AI Mindset, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012, , United States Unsubscribe <https://campaign-preferences.com/unsubscribe/BPAnnc1uUp5uMZB8VwhWTQL0EFD0k3KDdDFSA9CrJRyAL59I3l8YAx7-OBmOjKB-GFJM5x4bI9jjFfPqwNZtLKVftDmF0dNVjh2V3xrWg8vMAfYIzj_ZPc_JnSfWuYt5vRDSze9j-Zc7jgujm__5Q_IkDSrr22GA-WO6vZo-_-krecCPRKHvtna1XOvPBoJlgdTkpTnYg6vwNk9reuPc1hq0g5UCcc9FwuV4tm4H4scn-GmZed00MbOIz3Zk5P_qz7HlXkWbBmv5h2otP2FUk_HU-GaZQvVTHKYOEU3_JJXzKx2J41_KyyFCQg1s6WOsPUjcqu2wFhGLhIvB7tXnfBhs_d3slOBvorFTMflRePeueLLVRI1mC60=>
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Some Personal News. And a Rebuilt Course.
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