Friday, November 28, 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. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Sound Waves: Podcast Highlights
This coming week, I’m joined by Egor Olteanu, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Volt AI and former founding member of Google X’s Project Loon, where we discuss the counterintuitive math behind physical security: why fewer cameras plus smart AI outperforms more cameras plus people in seats. This approach is reshaping how organizations protect their people and worth a listen for anyone rethinking how AI changes the ROI on physical assets. Hit one of the below links to check it out:
Subscribe for free today on your listening platform of choice to ensure you never miss a beat. New episodes release every two weeks.
2. Algorithmic Musings. The Resistance Is Real (and Growing)
Thirty months ago, I stood on stage and made three predictions about AI:
- It will be the most disruptive General Purpose Technology humanity has ever seen.
- It will become an election cycle issue.
- It will catalyze agitation, disruption, and even violence from people who feel threatened by it.
Well, two out of three ain’t bad. And I’m still holding to that election prediction. I was just off by a cycle or two.
What brought this to mind? A recent article about STOP AI’s threats against OpenAI. So I asked my friend Perplexity a simple question: How many anti-AI groups are currently active in the United States?
The answer: somewhere between 170 and 200.
Not ten. Not fifty. Hundreds of organized groups pushing back against artificial intelligence right now.
Here’s the unique take for business leaders: This isn’t a fringe phenomenon to dismiss. It’s a leading indicator.
Every major technological shift, from the printing press to the power loom to the assembly line, generated organized resistance. The Luddites weren’t irrational; they were skilled workers watching their livelihoods evaporate in real time. Today’s anti-AI movement carries that same DNA.
Accelerated Opposition
Here’s another component I didn’t fully appreciate back in 2023: AI isn’t just spawning innovation; it’s also accelerating the formation, coordination, and amplification of its own opposition. In previous technological revolutions (industrial machinery, electricity, automobiles, personal computing) the backlash typically lagged years behind adoption. With AI, the backlash is building in real time.
Why? Three reasons:
1. AI compresses time. Technologies that once took decades to mature now evolve monthly, sometimes weekly. Humans aren’t wired for this tempo, and organized resistance emerges as a coping mechanism.
2. AI threatens identity as much as economics. People can rationalize a job changing, but not a worldview collapsing. That’s when movements form.
3. AI enables the exact rage-bait hype machine anti-AI groups rely on. More AI content flooding every platform (slop or otherwise), plus AI dominating news cycles, means the ground is perpetually tilled for opposition to grow.
The real story isn’t that anti-AI groups exist. It’s that they’re scaling at the same speed as the technology they oppose. And that tells us something important: AI’s disruptive power isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s cultural. It’s political. And it’s accelerating – whether we’re ready for it or not.
What does this mean for you?
If you’re leading an organization through AI adoption, understand that resistance isn’t just external. It’s likely brewing inside your walls too. Your employees read the same headlines. They have the same fears.
The question isn’t whether pushback is coming. It’s whether you’re prepared to address it with transparency, empathy, and a clear narrative about what AI means for their future and not just your bottom line.
How are you preparing your people for this conversation? I’m genuinely curious what’s working. Hit reply and tell me.
3. Research Roundup: What the Data Tells Us
This week I’m giving you a pass on your research reading and homework. Instead, spend some time pondering the above piece about AI opposition. It’s real. It matters. And it’s worth a big think while you work through your post-Turkey day tryptophan-induced haze.
Next week, we’re back with fresh data. For now, explore our full research archive at AI for the C Suite.
4. Radar Hits: What’s Worth Your Attention
ChatGPT Voice now works inline with your chat, adding transcripts and visual aids. OpenAI’s voice mode no longer launches into a separate interface. You can now talk to ChatGPT while staying in your existing conversation, with live transcripts and visual aids like maps and photos appearing as you speak. For executives already using ChatGPT, this removes friction from voice interaction and makes it practical for work contexts where you need a record of what was discussed. If you’ve avoided voice mode because it felt disconnected from your workflow, this changes that.
Google DeepMind hires former Boston Dynamics CTO as it pushes to make Gemini the “Android for robots”. Google isn’t building robots. It’s building the operating system every robot will run. That’s the real story behind DeepMind’s recent hire and if your automation strategy assumes you’ll pick the best hardware and figure out the software later, flip that assumption. The AI brain layer is where the value will concentrate. When evaluating robotics vendors, ask what AI platform they’re building on.
OpenAI launches shopping research in ChatGPT ahead of Black Friday. OpenAI is now directly competing for product discovery with Google search. If you sell online, this matters: results are organic, not paid, and merchants can “allowlist” their sites for inclusion. Your e-commerce and SEO teams should investigate this process now. The shift from traditional search to AI-mediated shopping is accelerating faster than most marketing strategies account for.
5. Elevate Your Leadership with AI for the C Suite
If AI opposition is brewing inside your walls (and it probably is), let’s talk about how to address it before it becomes a problem. A 30-minute call could save you months of internal friction. Hit reply to schedule a convo.
Until next week,
Chad