AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics

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Matt Fitzpatrick is the CEO of Invisible Technologies, an AI platform used to improve models for more than 80% of the world’s leading AI companies, including Microsoft, AWS, and Cohere. The company has raised $100 million and scaled to $134 million in revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally.
Before joining Invisible, Matt was the Global Head of QuantumBlack Labs at McKinsey, where he led large-scale AI and data engineering efforts and helped enterprises move from experimentation to production.
In this episode, Matt draws on years spent inside enterprise AI deployments to challenge the gap between model progress and real-world adoption, and to explain why most organizations still struggle to turn AI into measurable business outcomes.

In this conversation, we discuss:
Why enterprise AI adoption lags far behind model performance improvements, and why most organizations still struggle to turn technical progress into real business impact
The hidden role of messy, fragmented legacy data, and why decades of accumulated systems make it nearly impossible to deploy reliable AI at scale
Why defining “good” output in generative AI is far harder than expected, and how unclear standards stall deployment across high-stakes enterprise workflows
The case for redesigning workflows from scratch, and why layering AI on top of existing processes fails to create meaningful efficiency gains
Why most AI initiatives fail due to lack of business ownership, and how separating technology teams from operators prevents projects from reaching production
How fear-driven narratives about job loss are slowing adoption, and why AI is more likely to shift work toward higher-value tasks than eliminate roles entirely
 
Explore this conversation: 
00:00 Intro and Fun Fact 
03:57 Matt Fitzpatrick's Path From McKinsey to Invisible Technologies 
09:56 Scaling Enterprise AI with Modular Platforms and Clean Data 
12:44 The Crucial Role of Expert Human Feedback in Model Training 
17:56 Why 95% of Enterprise AI Projects Never Reach Production
21:38 The Missing Link: Why True AI Transformation Requires Business Ownership 
26:54 Overcoming AI Fear and the Reality of Jevons Paradox 
32:24 Responsible AI: Governing Outcomes Over Technology 
39:05 The Future of Work: Moving From Administration to Innovation 
44:12 Where to Connect with Matt Fitzpatrick and Invisible Technologies

Resources:
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Your employees are already ahead of you on AI. The data is in and the question is no longer whether this is happening, but what leaders choose to do about it.
That is one of the key findings from Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, and it is the starting point for this week's special episode. PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin sits down with Matt Firestone, General Manager at Microsoft leading product marketing for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agents, to unpack what trillions of anonymized signals across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem reveal about how AI is actually changing work right now.
What pairing telemetry with survey responses and in-house research reveals about the gap between where employees actually are and where their organizations think they are is striking. And the numbers on how organizations reward, or fail to reward, the people already doing this work will make most leaders uncomfortable. The bottleneck, it turns out, isn't where most people expect it.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the job of a leader has shifted from designing transformation strategy to changing systems and culture
How the report reframes agentic AI collaboration, not as a threat to human agency, but as an expansion of it
What "frontier firms" and "frontier professionals" actually means, and why it's a mental model and rallying cry, not a marketing term
How building in the open, leaders experimenting visibly and removing the stigma of getting things wrong, is one of the most quantifiably impactful things a manager can do
Why agent adoption on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is growing at a rate that will surprise even the optimists
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro
01:14 Inside Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index
02:22 Telemetry, Not Just Surveys: What the Data Reveal
03:09 Employees Are Ahead of Their Managers on Agentic AI
04:37 The Transformation Paradox and Broken Reward Systems
06:15 More Agentic AI, More Human Agency: The 49% Finding
09:28 How Leaders Should Respond: Build in the Open
11:26 Safety, Trust, and Responsible AI at Microsoft Scale
13:36 Building a Manager Equity Dashboard in 25 Minutes with Copilot
17:31 What Frontier Firms and Frontier Professionals Actually Do
20:04 AI, Toil, and the Fear of Becoming Obsolete
22:52 The 1 Billion Agents Prediction and What Comes Next

Resources
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Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index

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Emmanuel Daniel is an author, advisor, and global thought leader on geopolitics, the future of finance, and their intersection with business and society. 
As the founder of the research and consulting house TAB Global and a recognized top 10 global influencer in the Fintech Power50, Emmanuel has spent decades looking under the hood of the global economy to understand how nations and institutions truly interact. 
In this episode, Emmanuel draws on 25 years of building relationships with central bankers, policymakers, and fintech leaders across 157 countries to make the case that the disruption most financial institutions are bracing for is not the one that is actually coming, and that the leaders asking the wrong questions today will have no runway left when the real inflection point hits.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why financial markets distracted everyone from the real AI disruption, and what happens to large organizations when agentic AI finally reaches the Internet of Things.
Why the end user no longer interacts with your bank's app directly, and what that means for every institution investing in UX.
Why Emmanuel argues that debt is the economy, and why the conversation about U.S. debt-to-GDP is asking the wrong question entirely.
Why state-promoted digital currencies are structurally designed to fail, and what China's eCNY after 8 years in pilot reveals about the limits of government-driven innovation.
Why stablecoins have enabled a parallel global economy that traditional banking missed, and what that signals for the institutions still holding the rails.
Why originality of thought is the one human capability AI cannot replace, and why Emmanuel says AI is of no use to you if you cannot form the right questions yourself.
Resources:
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Connect with Emmanuel on LinkedIn
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Other episodes mentioned:344: Can Decentralized AI Fix Banking? Crypto, Brain OS, and the Future of Finance with Paolo Ardoino, Tether CEO
358: Inside Mastercard’s AI Adoption Journey: CTO George Maddaloni on Building Trust, Detecting Fraud, and the Future of Payments

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Tom Scott is the CEO of Wrike, the work management platform trusted by over 20,000 customers including Walmart Canada and Sony Pictures Television, across more than 140 countries and nearly 2 million end users.
Tom's path to the CEO seat is anything but conventional. He spent over 20 years leading finance and operations across some of the most hardware-intensive sectors in tech, from building cell towers to running finance at Zebra Technologies and autonomous robotics company Fetch Robotics, before joining Wrike as CFO and transitioning to CEO in July 2023.
In this episode, Tom draws on that rare vantage point (having led through multiple waves of technological disruption) to make a case that the leaders and companies that treat organizational intelligence as a combination of human judgment and AI capability, rather than a replacement of one by the other, are the ones building something that lasts.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why transformation remains stubbornly hard in the AI era, and what leaders consistently underestimate about the real blockers to change
Why the biggest career risk today is not AI itself, but the decision to stop moving up the value stack of your current role
The two words Tom's customers and team use most to describe the current moment: pace and noise, and what that means for leaders trying to drive transformation.
How Tom coaches his leadership team to hire for intensity and ownership over domain expertise, and why that philosophy matters more now than ever
Why a deterministic career plan is no longer a viable strategy, and what curiosity and experience-chasing actually look like as professional operating principles
What Tom believes will be table stakes in the workplace well before 2031, and why the building blocks are already visible today
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and Fun Fact
04:08 Scaling Work Management with Tom Scott, CEO of Wrike 
04:47 From Cell Towers to the CEO Seat at Wrike 
05:51 How Wrike Helps Teams Connect and Accelerate Work 
10:21 The Hardest Part of Transitioning to the CEO Role 
14:13 Wrike's Origins: Building Scalability for Complex Workflows 
17:04 Managing Pace and Noise During AI Transformations 
21:20 Why True Organizational Intelligence Requires Human Judgment 
25:54 Embracing Technology to Move Up the Value Stack 
28:11 Why Curiosity Outweighs a Deterministic Career Plan 
31:25 Hiring Empowered Teams: Selecting for Ownership and Intensity 
34:31 The Future of Work: When Agentic AI Becomes Table Stakes 
36:32 Where to Connect with Tom Scott and Wrike
 
Resources:
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Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn
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In this special April compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we’re bringing back six great former guests who published popular books about how AI is redefining humans at work. 
The future of work isn't about competing with algorithms. It’s about how we use technology to increase our capacity for trust, express our vulnerability, and discover meaning.
This episode brings together insights from authors who explore how AI is reshaping work and what it means for individuals and organizations. 

What You’ll Learn
Why delegating routine tasks to AI frees us to explore our human superpowers like empathy, rational thinking, and compassion.
How the future of knowledge work lies in navigating ambiguity and expressing entirely new ideas.
Why leaders must move beyond monitoring and productivity theater to build cultures of trust and give teams the space to experiment.
How the traditional, contract-based employment model is failing the next generation and what replaces it.
Why the era of the “superhuman” leader is over, and how showing your human side earns loyalty in times of disruption.
How the AI revolution is sparking a massive work quake, and why only you can write your own story and decide what gives you meaning.
Featured Guests
Bernard Marr, Futurist and Bestselling Author of Generative AI in Practice - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/15441666] 
Atif Rafiq, Former Fortune 500 Executive and Author of Decision Sprint - Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/14507445] 
Brian Elliott, Executive Advisor and bestselling author of "How the Future Works". - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/17282891] 
Josh Drean, Co-founder of the Work3 Institute and Co-author of Employment is Dead - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/16473644] 
Linda Rottenberg, CEO and Co-founder of Endeavor, and Author of Crazy is a Compliment - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/8356582] 
Bruce Feiler, Bestselling Author of The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/14158168] 
💬 Inspired by something you heard in this episode? Share your favorite insight about redefining work, building trust, or finding meaning in the AI era, and tag us on social. 
We’d love to hear what resonated with you. And don’t forget to subscribe to AI and the Future of Work for more conversations with the authors and leaders shaping what comes next.