Friday, June 13, 2025
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Hi, it’s Chad. Every Friday, I serve as your AI guide to help you navigate a rapidly evolving landscape, discern signals from noise and transform cutting-edge insights into practical leadership wisdom. This week’s edition is packed with AI goodness and runs a bit longer than normal beginning with a sneak peak at the year 2028. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Algorithmic Musings. The Zombies of 2028 (aka Three Ways Leaders Will Spend Their Days)
Let’s take a time travel adventure together. No DeLorean required – just your imagination and a willingness to peer three years into the future.
Picture this: It’s June 13, 2028. How will successful leaders spend their days?
Spoiler alert: They won’t be buried in spreadsheets or sitting through mind-numbing status meetings. Leave that for the zombies shambling around like extras from Night of the Living Dead.
The Near Future (That’s Closer Than You Think)
Even modest AI evolution will dramatically transform leadership roles, shifting from operational management to philosophical guidance and human potential development.
The most successful leaders won’t out-think AI. They’ll fluidly navigate between AI-generated insights and irreducibly human needs.
Here’s what your future workday may look like:
Orchestrating Human-AI Team Dynamics (The Conductor Role)
Remember the scene in Dawn of the Dead where the survivors had to figure out how to work together despite their differences? OK, that’s every zombie movie, ever. Regardless, by 2028, you’ll be orchestrating a similar dynamic – except half your “team” will be AI agents handling complex workflows autonomously.
Forget managing tasks. That’s zombie work. Instead, you’ll focus on:
Setting Ethical Guardrails Your AI systems will make increasingly consequential decisions. Someone must program the moral compass, and that someone is you. Imagine your AI suggesting laying off 30% of your workforce because it’s identified automation opportunities. Who decides if that’s the right call?
Playing Referee Between Silicon and Soul When your AI proposes a counterintuitive strategy backed by analysis of 50 million data points, you’ll need to ask: “But does this align with who we are?” You’ll spend hours mediating between cold, hard data and warm, human judgment.
Cultivating the Uniquely Human While AI handles the heavy analytical lifting, you’ll be doubling down on developing your team’s creativity, emotional intelligence, and ethical reasoning. Think of it as preparing your workforce for the skills that can’t be downloaded or programmed. Your HR pros will have tools specifically designed to bolster EQ and what we traditionally referred to as “soft skills.” (More on this below).
Example Day Slice: Tuesday, 9 AM. Your AI strategic advisor presents three growth scenarios, each considering millions of variables. The “optimal” path shows 47% revenue growth but requires entering a market that conflicts with your company values. You spend the next hour not crunching numbers – the AI already did that – but taking an actual walk in the park with your top lieutenant and soul-searching about what your company stands for.
Real-Time Strategy Adaptation (The Jazz Improviser)
Remember when strategic planning meant annual retreats and five-year plans? By 2028, that’ll seem as quaint as using a physical Rolodex.
Here’s what replaces it:
Living, Breathing Dashboards Your AI systems will continuously analyze everything – market conditions, competitor moves, customer sentiment, supply chain hiccups. You’ll get alerts about emerging opportunities or threats within hours, not quarters. It’s like having spidey-sense for business.
Daily Micro-Pivots Strategy sessions become daily 15-minute stand-ups where you review AI-simulated scenarios and make rapid adjustments. Think of it as the difference between steering an oil tanker and piloting a speedboat.
Developing “Strategic Intuition” Here’s where my projection gets a little weird. You’ll need to develop a sixth sense for when to trust AI recommendations based on patterns you can’t fully comprehend. It’s like learning to trust your gut, except your gut is augmented by artificial intelligence.
Example Day Slice: Wednesday, 2 PM. Your AI flags an unusual pattern in Southeast Asian consumer behavior that suggests a 72% probability of demand surge for your product category. You have four hours to decide whether to redirect inventory. The data is compelling but incomplete. This is where your experience – your human experience – becomes invaluable.
Purpose Architecture and Human Connection (The Chief Meaning Officer)
As AI handles the operational heavy lifting, you’ll spend most of your time on what remains fundamentally, irreducibly human.
Crafting Purpose That Inspires Both your human employees and AI systems need meaningful constraints and direction. You’ll spend hours crafting and communicating purpose that resonates across silicon and soul. It’s not just about mission statements anymore – it’s about creating north stars that guide both human and artificial decision-making.
Building Trust in the Age of Automation Your employees are scared. Hell, you’re probably scared. They see AI capabilities expanding daily and wonder, “What’s my value?” You’ll spend significant time in one-on-one conversations, helping people navigate career transitions and find dignity in their evolving roles.
Creating Meaning-Making Frameworks This is PhD-level leadership: helping humans understand their place in an AI-augmented world. You’re not just managing change; you’re helping people make sense of it.
Example Day Slice: Thursday, 10 AM. Sarah from accounting sits across from you, tears in her eyes. An AI tool now does in 10 minutes what used to take her team a week. Instead of discussing severance, you explore how her deep understanding of financial patterns could guide AI implementation across the organization. You’re not saving her job – you’re helping her reinvent both her career and the organization’s trajectory.*
* This is important. Like, REALLY important. Automating human work is table stakes. Instead, leaders of growth-minded, dynamic organizations will continually ask some version of this question: After Event (E) occurs, how do we leverage Circumstance (C) to elevate and reinvent Value (V)? Think of it as E x C = V.
The Missing Pieces (What Won’t Matter Anymore)
Notice what’s absent from these 2028 leadership days?
Deep technical expertise: Your AI knows more than you ever will
Performance management theater: AI tracks real-time performance with deadly accuracy
Process optimization: Zombie-level busywork handled entirely by AI.
The rules of the Great Game of Business will have fundamentally changed.
The Zombie Organizations (And Your Opportunity)
Here’s my 100% guaranteed prediction: On June 13, 2028, a shocking number of leaders will still be in denial. They’ll be running zombie organizations – shambling through the motions, slowly decomposing while refusing to adapt. These walking-dead companies will be easy to spot:
- Still doing annual strategic planning
- Measuring productivity by hours worked
- Treating AI as just another IT tool
- Wondering why their best talent keeps leaving
This next part sounds harsh, yet these zombies represent your opportunity. You can:
- Acquire them (at fire-sale prices)
- Poach their talent (who are desperate for real leadership)
- Convert their clients (who crave innovation)
Because if you don’t act, they’ll keep shuffling along until all their parts fall off. And unlike movie zombies, there’s no cure for organizational rigor mortis.
Your Starting Moves (Because 2028 Starts Now)
Don’t wait for the zombie apocalypse. Here are three things you can do THIS WEEK:
- Audit Your Current AI Understanding: Where are your blind spots? What scares you about AI? Start learning now—not to become a programmer, but to become AI-literate.
- Practice Ethical Decision-Making: Start documenting your values-based decisions today. You’ll need this muscle memory when AI presents you with ethically complex scenarios.
- Invest in Human Connection: Schedule those one-on-ones. Build trust now. The relationships you forge today will be your lifeline in an automated tomorrow.
The Bottom Line
The future isn’t about humans versus machines. It’s about humans with machines versus humans without them. And the leaders who thrive won’t be the ones who can out-compute AI—they’ll be the ones who can out-human it.
The clock’s ticking. 2028 will be here faster than you can say “braaaains.”
Ready to zombie-proof your leadership and prepare for the AI-augmented future? Wondering how to start building your strategic intuition or crafting meaning-making frameworks? Drop me a line—let’s figure out how to keep you among the living (and thriving) leaders of tomorrow.
2. Sound Waves: Podcast Highlights
Why Your First AI Project Will Make or Break Everything. Our latest episode features my conversation with Steven Bryant from Avitel where this former Wells Fargo AI leader reveals the hidden checklist that separates AI winners from the 60% who fail – and it’s not what most consultants tell you. Subscribe for free today on your listening platform of choice to ensure you never miss a beat.
New episodes release every two weeks.
3. Research Roundup: What the Data Tells Us
Fine-Tuning Large Language Models Reduces Hallucinations in Legal Document Processing
New research just validated something the insurance and legal industry should already understand: fine-tuned AI can replace weeks of manual document review- but only if you do it right.
The numbers that matter: Fine-tuned LLaMA-2 70B achieved 79.4% accuracy extracting disability percentages and compensation amounts from legal documents, crushing traditional methods at 39.5%. More importantly, fine-tuning cut hallucinations by 47.78% – that’s the reliability breakthrough executives have been waiting for.
What this means for your Monday morning: If your legal or claims teams are manually processing court decisions, you’re burning cash on work that AI can now handle reliably. The research showed lawyers spending over a week per month on tasks that fine-tuned models complete in hours with 80% accuracy.
The catch: This isn’t plug-and-play. You need quality training data and robust preprocessing. Poor document segmentation caused a 19% performance drop, proving that implementation details matter more than model selection.
Action item: Calculate how many hours your team spends extracting data from legal documents monthly. If it’s more than 40 hours, this represents immediate ROI potential. Launch a 100-200 document pilot now — rapid testing beats endless debate. Don’t wait. Every month of delay locks in unnecessary cost and risk.
AI Agent Teams: Your Values or Theirs?
If you’re AI experience still consists mainly of dabbling with chatbots, know this: single AI chatbots are just the beginning. The real game-changer is AI agent teams working together – and the companies getting this right might consider using a simple three-level value system that’s producing measurably better results.
The numbers that matter: Organizations using structured value frameworks (universal principles + industry standards + company rules) see fewer ethical failures and stronger competitive advantages compared to ad-hoc approaches. Most tellingly, when AI agents cooperate toward shared goals, they stay aligned with company values 40% better than when they compete for resources.
What this means for your Monday morning: If you’re planning any AI deployment beyond basic chatbots, you need a value blueprint before you need the technology. Think of it like org charts for humans—without clear reporting structures and behavioral expectations, your AI teams will develop their own culture, and it might not match yours.
The catch: The complexity isn’t in the AI models – it’s in the organizational design. Specialized teams (finance, healthcare, manufacturing) must juggle multiple value layers simultaneously, requiring dedicated governance that most IT departments aren’t equipped to handle alone.
Action item: Create a one-page AI values document this week. Three sections: universal principles (safety, fairness), industry requirements (your regulations), and company-specific rules (your culture). Post it everywhere and make it part of every AI conversation from day one.
Read our full analysis of each of these research papers at AI for the C Suite.
4. Radar Hits: What’s Worth Your Attention
University of Florida professor tests AI stock-picking against human analysts—and ChatGPT is crushing it. Alejandro Lopez-Lira’s real-money experiments show AI-selected portfolios beating 93% of human fund managers over decades of backtesting. This matters because if you’re still manually reviewing investment research, you’re probably missing out on what your competitors are already capturing through AI-assisted analysis.
Toma’s AI voice agents win over car dealerships after founders lived in Bible Belt showrooms for weeks. This startup discovered dealers only answer 45% of customer calls, then spent months on dealer floors understanding the pain points. Translation: if your customer service has similar gaps, AI voice agents aren’t just nice-to-have anymore—they’re competitive necessities.
Apple opens its on-device AI models to developers through new Foundation Models framework. Developers can now integrate Apple Intelligence features with just three lines of Swift code, accessing the same 3-billion parameter model Apple uses internally. The takeaway: if you’re building iOS apps for business users, ignoring this API means your competitors will ship smarter features first.
5. Elevate Your Leadership with AI for the C Suite
Ready to turn these insights into action? I’m onboarding three new clients next quarter on AI strategy and implementation. If you want to move beyond pilots to real business impact, reply with ‘STRATEGY’ and let’s talk.
As we navigate this unprecedented fusion of human and machine intelligence, remember: the best leaders aren’t just adapting to change – they’re actively shaping it. Until next week, keep pushing boundaries.
Chad