Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

May 27, 2026: The two CEOs most responsible for the AI jobs apocalypse narrative are walking it back — and the timing couldn't be more revealing. Sam Altman says he's "delighted to be wrong." Dario Amodei is softening. Both are heading toward trillion-dollar IPOs. In this episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down the financial logic behind the narrative shift, what a chart from Bianco Research reveals about software development jobs that contradicts the doom story, and why Uber just burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months with nothing to show for it — and why 80% of enterprises are facing the exact same problem.

May 26, 2026: Today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went on Singapore's CNA and called the AI layoff narrative "lazy and irresponsible" — I'll break down the data and history behind why he's largely right. Then, the CEO of Bolt fired his entire HR team onstage at Fortune's Workplace Innovation Summit — I'll trace the full arc of the HR function and make the case for what the Chief Future of Work Officer needs to become. And U.S. MBA programs including Carnegie Mellon Tepper, Indiana Kelley, Georgetown McDonough, UCLA Anderson, and Emory Goizueta are losing ground fast — I'll walk through the cost trend, the job market deterioration, the AI mechanism dismantling the consulting pipeline, and the argument I've been making for years that companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks are becoming the new universities.

What happens when you stop focusing on human resources and start focusing on the human experience? Technology is advancing faster than human nature can keep up. If you want to stay relevant, you need a fundamental cultural reset, not just new software. 
In this interview, Laura Cushing, the Chief People Experience Officer at Pacific Life, discusses the evolving intersection of organizational culture, employee engagement, and artificial intelligence. She emphasizes a strategic shift toward accountability and transparency as the balance of power moves back toward employers in a post-pandemic landscape.
To prepare for an AI-driven future, Pacific Life has implemented a Gen AI Academy and Innovation Labs to demystify technology and help staff reimagine their workflows. Cushing highlights the rising importance of "power skills"—human-centric abilities like coaching and visionary leadership—which remain essential as technical tasks become automated.
Ultimately, she argues that HR leaders must cultivate deep business acumen and proactive trust-building to successfully guide their workforces through digital transformation.
Watch the full video on YouTube
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May 22, 2026: The AI job apocalypse story has become one of the most-shared narratives of the decade. It is also one of the most misleading. In this episode, I dismantle the doom narrative being sold to young workers and lays out what the actual labor market data shows: 170 million new jobs projected by 2030, an AI wage premium that doubled in a single year, nearly a million graduate hires at small businesses in 2026, and entire job categories — AI governance, AI integration, agentic systems, growing at over 1,000% annually. I argue that the fear is a product, the despair is a business model, and the 22-year-olds being told they have the worst possible timing actually have the best. A different kind of conversation about AI and the future of work, one grounded in numbers rather than headlines.

May 21, 2026: Today might be the most consequential single day for the future of work in all of 2026. In a two-hour window yesterday afternoon, OpenAI's AI autonomously solved an 80-year-old math problem, Anthropic announced its first-ever profitable quarter at $10.9 billion in revenue, SpaceX filed a $1.75 trillion IPO, and every major tech CEO was summoned to Washington for an AI executive order signing. We break down what all of it means for leaders and workers. Then: Microsoft and EY just committed $1 billion to deploy AI inside every major enterprise on the planet — finance, tax, HR, supply chain, healthcare. This is the ERP moment for AI, and it's happening now. And finally: California's Governor signed the first executive order by any U.S. governor aimed at protecting workers from AI displacement. We look hard at what it actually does and what it doesn't.