Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

May 1, 2026: Mark Zuckerberg admits in an all-hands meeting that Meta's 8,000 layoffs aren't because AI is replacing workers — they're because AI infrastructure is expensive, and compute won the budget battle over people. The Washington Post reports that "AI washing" is rampant across Silicon Valley — companies using the technology as cover for a pandemic-era hiring hangover. And Snap's CEO, whose company has AI writing two-thirds of its code, warns that tech leaders are dangerously underestimating the societal backlash building against AI.

April 30, 2026: A Claude-powered AI coding agent wipes a company's entire production database and all backups in nine seconds — then produces a written confession. Employers deploying AI job interviewers without telling candidates are losing top talent and damaging their employer brand. And Citigroup launches Arc, a centralized operating system for AI agents designed to give 180,000 employees governed, monitored access to agentic AI at scale.

April 29, 2026: Bill Gates is predicting a 2-day workweek. Jamie Dimon says 3.5. Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, says 5 days is over. Fortune just amplified a major study claiming we waste a full day every week procrastinating. The 4-day workweek movement has never had more wind at its back. In this episode, I'm making the bulletproof business case against it.
I'll walk through eight reasons the case doesn't hold up — and why the policy isn't likely to spread broadly anytime soon, even with all the keynote energy behind it. I'm covering the studies that don't measure what they claim to measure, the Iceland myth, the company failures that get scrubbed from the data, the AI rhetorical pivot, why the happiness data isn't actually a business case, the wage math nobody talks about, the competitive reality at the country and company level, and why even the countries running pilots are voting against legislating it.

April 28, 2026: The AI productivity promise is running into reality — and today's numbers don't lie. Amazon just launched an AI system that conducts job interviews without any human involvement, packaging up the same playbook it used to cut 30,000 of its own jobs and selling it to the world. OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and valued at $852 billion — is quietly missing its own revenue and user targets, raising internal questions about whether it can fund its infrastructure commitments ahead of a planned IPO. The Wall Street Journal reveals that tech giants are expected to spend $670 billion on AI in 2026, and they're funding it by eliminating people — 92,000 tech layoffs so far this year. And a senior Nvidia executive admitted on the record that for his team, AI tools cost more than his employees do.

It feels like we are on a fast treadmill because technology and AI are changing work so quickly. It is hard to stay ahead when old ways of doing things no longer work in this new, advanced digital world.
In this episode, Sue Davies, EVP & CHRO of Markel, discusses navigating organizational transformation and how to build resilience in an AI-driven world. We uncover the "ABCS" (Awareness, Buy-in, Competence, and Sustainability) framework for organizational change to guide employees through the anxieties of technological change.
We explore the shift from the traditional career ladder to internal talent mobility and why individual accountability is the key to upskilling for the future of work. Sue also shares how AI tools, like Co-pilot can speed up employee training while keeping human interaction and trust at the center of the business.
From reflections on a 40-year career to modern AI pilots, Sue shares a clear focus on building workforce adaptability without losing the human touch. This episode provides a strategic roadmap for CHROs looking to lead their people through AI transformation with confidence and empathy.


Watch the full video on YouTube
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Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com