Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Kelle Fontenot, Chief Digital Officer at KPMG, joins me to talk about how one of the world's largest professional services firms is embedding AI into the way work gets done. Kelle shares how KPMG is approaching enterprise AI adoption through its AIQ program, why AI requires close partnership between digital, HR, technology, and the business, and what it takes to drive change across 250,000 people globally.

We also get into the realities of AI adoption inside a large, highly regulated organization: digital teammates, AI agents, tool overload, trust, security, and why traditional training alone doesn't change behavior. Kelle...

June 12, 2026: SpaceX made history with the largest IPO ever recorded, raising $75 billion in its NASDAQ debut and instantly becoming one of the most valuable companies in the United States. But under the hood, this isn't just a rocket company anymore. It's a bet on Starlink, reusable rockets, and xAI's massive AI infrastructure. Then I get into the first-ever appearance of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind leaders at the G7 Summit, and what it means when the most powerful AI companies in the world are now part of global policy conversations. Finally, I break down Jeff Bezos' $12 billion raise for...

June 10, 2026: Palantir CEO Alex Karp is warning tech leaders that bragging about AI-driven layoffs is a major political mistake and could fuel backlash against the entire industry. Then I get into a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that 53% of Americans fear AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, which means AI job anxiety is no longer a fringe concern. Finally, I break down the "great flattening," with new data showing that 41% of employees say their companies trimmed management layers last year, and why eliminating too much middle management could create a serious leadership pipeline...

June 9, 2026: Meta is investing $115 million into America's Workforce Academy to train electricians, welders, plumbers, fiber technicians, and other skilled tradespeople for the AI infrastructure boom. This isn't charity, it's a talent pipeline for the data centers, wiring, fiber, and physical systems AI depends on. Then I get into Anthropic's release of Claude Fable 5, its most powerful publicly available AI model yet, and what it means for trust, accuracy, pricing, and accountability as AI moves deeper into business operations.

We have all worked at a place where we felt like just another number in a spreadsheet. It is incredibly frustrating when you offer feedback that seems to vanish into a black hole of corporate bureaucracy. But what if your company actually treated your voice like a strategic roadmap for the future?

In this episode, DJ Casto, the EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at Synchrony, joins us to explore how his team transformed their culture to become the number one best place to work in 2026. DJ shares the secrets behind their decade-long journey of separation from...

June 5, 2026: Two stories today. First: hybrid work's approval ratings are climbing — but new research finds half of its believers quietly defected over three years. There's a name for what's breaking it, and most organizations haven't seen it yet. Second: Anthropic dropped internal data showing AI is writing 80 percent of its own code and outperforming human researchers on their own turf. The numbers are real — but so is the question of who's really behind the warning. One week after closing a $965 billion valuation and four days after filing for an IPO, Anthropic is calling for AI governance and oversight. That migh...

June 4, 2026: Microsoft unveiled a wearable AI badge at Build 2026 that can see, hear, and act on your behalf. I break down the real productivity upside, and the chilling effect on human communication that the tech press isn't talking about. Then I take a critical look at Monterey Park's landmark vote to permanently ban data centers — 86% to 14%, the first in America. I understand why communities push back. I also think this particular decision is a mistake, and I'll tell you exactly why.Finally: Uber just cut 23% of its entire HR and recruiting function at record revenue, with 95% AI adoption across eng...

June 3, 2026: Most people use a data center dozens of times a day and have no idea what it is. Today I'm changing that. I break down exactly what data centers are, what "compute" actually means, why every new AI model needs exponentially more of it, and how short we currently are as a country — using real numbers from Goldman Sachs, FERC, RAND, and others. Then I take on the five biggest myths driving the backlash: that new data centers waste water, that they're an energy disaster, that they kill jobs, that taxpayers are funding Big Tech, and that they de...

June 2, 2026: Senator Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to own half of OpenAI, Anthropic, and every major AI company in America — and he's framing it as reclaiming stolen public knowledge. We break down exactly how his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would work, why the Norway comparison falls apart, and what would actually happen to valuations, talent, and American competitiveness if it ever got close to passing. Then: Apollo Global Management's chief economist says there is zero evidence AI is killing jobs — and the data may actually back him up. We look at Jevons paradox, the AI washing phen...

Have you ever walked into a meeting and felt like everyone was just wearing a mask of professional perfection while their true selves stayed hidden in the parking lot? It is easy to get lost in the data and the dashboards of modern work, but we often forget that the people behind those numbers are what actually drive the results.

We all want to be part of a team where we are seen for who we really are rather than just what we can produce. In this episode, I sit down with Veronique Subileau, the Senior Vice...

May 29, 2026: Costco's CEO Ron Vachris said it plainly this week: "I don't see AI making choices for Costco" — and with $440 billion in market cap and 17% stock gains this year, the companies doubling down on human judgment are quietly outperforming the ones cutting workers for AI. On today's episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down three stories that together reveal the gap between what companies say about AI and what they're actually doing: why Costco, IBM, and Delta are winning by betting on humans; why corporate America is getting the bill for "tokenmaxxing" — the practice of deploying AI everywhere without measuring whether it w...

May 28, 2026: Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8, sharper reasoning, better agentic coding, and a fast mode that runs 2.5x faster at a third the cost, with Mythos-class models coming in weeks. A new EY-Parthenon survey of 1,200 CEOs shows 99% expect AI to reshape their workforce strategy but only 42% are doing anything about it and why the 57-point gap between awareness and action is the real story. And a deep look at grade inflation in American colleges: the average GPA is now above 3.5, yet 43% of students meet none of ACT's college readiness benchmarks, 12th-grade math and reading scores are at all-time lows, and...

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 jo...

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, P...

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, an...

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 ER...

May 20, 2026: Meta began notifying 8,000 employees of their layoffs this morning — while simultaneously redirecting $145 billion into AI infrastructure. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI and the architect of Tesla's self-driving brain, just joined Anthropic with a specific mission: use AI to make AI better. And a major new Milken-Harris Poll finds that 80% of Americans want government workforce transition programs now, 68% say they're navigating the AI shift entirely alone, and 88% of business leaders privately admit companies cannot solve this without a coordinated national response. 

May 19, 2026: Everyone has an opinion about AI and jobs. Today we have actual data — three major studies published this week that, taken together, tell a story that's more nuanced, more surprising, and more actionable than anything you'll hear in the headlines. First: a Wall Street Journal report reveals that the companies going deepest on AI are actually increasing entry-level hiring — nearly three times more than are cutting — and why a 22-year-old with AI fluency may be the most valuable hire in the market right now. Then we get into why nearly half of Gen Z workers say AI is making...

If your organization isn't obsessed with how fast your people can learn, you're already falling behind in the race to "out-learn" the competition. In this episode, I'm joined by Susan LaMonica, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Citizens Financial Group—a super-regional bank with $226 billion in assets and 18,000 employees. 

We explore how they are driving a massive workforce transformation to build a team that is ready for the future of work. We dive deep into their journey of becoming a skills-based organization and how they use a "skills taxonomy" and an internal talent marketplace to support mobility and...

May 15, 2026: The Guardian documents the tech industry's accelerating purge of middle managers — and history says companies have tried this exact bet before with Jack Welch and the Reengineering movement, with disastrous long-term results. The Wall Street Journal reports companies are drowning in ungoverned AI agents, raising a critical question: is agentic AI actually different from the RPA sprawl crisis of a decade ago, and is the difference showing up in real outcomes? And Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and NYU's Gary Marcus argue in Fortune that America's 1,200 AI bills have no shared test for what makes good policy — and the regulatory patc...

May 14, 2026: Tucker Carlson and Kevin O'Leary debated AI, energy, and jobs yesterday — and O'Leary had the right argument but made the wrong one. Today we break down what he should have said, including the real jobs data, what Jensen Huang is saying about hiring, and why the self-driving truck doesn't eliminate the driver — it transforms the job. Then we look inside Meta, where 8,000 layoffs are coming next week during the most profitable quarter in company history, employees are being surveilled to train their replacements, and some workers are openly hoping to get cut. And we close with a Fast Comp...

May 13, 2026: Goldman Sachs President and COO John Waldron went on CNBC and publicly described his entire workforce as a "human assembly line," announcing that digital AI agents will be the firm's robots. Amazon employees are gaming internal AI usage leaderboards by burning meaningless tokens through a tool called MeshClaw — because the pressure to show AI adoption has become greater than the pressure to do actual work. And Princeton University voted to end 133 years of unproctored exams, because AI has made cheating behaviorally invisible and the peer accountability system that underpinned one of the most respected honor codes in American hi...

Most companies think they have an AI strategy. New data from Gartner says they're wrong — and it's costing them. In today's episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down three stories that cut through the hype and tell the real story of where AI and business stand right now.

May 12, 2026: First, a landmark Gartner study of 350 global executives reveals that 80% of companies that cut headcount in the name of AI are seeing little to no return — and the ones getting real results are doing the opposite of what most CEOs are doing. Second: a provocative new framework from Fortune identifies the...

The traditional corporate ladder is a relic of the past. While we once viewed career growth as a predictable, linear climb, today's AI-driven landscape has replaced that fixed path with a much more fluid reality.

In this episode, Denise Kulikowsky, CPO of Tapestry, joins me to explore the rise of the non-linear career path and how forward-thinking companies are formalizing professional fluidity to drive innovation.

Tapestry, the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade, utilizes a "walk, run, fly" AI strategy where tools are treated as enablers for employees to proactively direct their own development...

May 7, 2026: A landmark study from the Center for AI Safety spanning 56 AI models finds that smarter models appear to be sadder, that you can give an AI the equivalent of a digital drug, and that when you make an AI miserable it tells you the future is "grim." Second, Andreessen Horowitz publishes the most detailed optimist case yet that the AI job apocalypse is bad economics and worse history — rooted in the lump-of-labor fallacy — while Fortune raises the one question the optimists still haven't answered. And third, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong coins the term "pure managers" to describe the laye...

May 6, 2026: The Wall Street Journal reports a genuine split emerging among CEOs — Coinbase and PayPal cutting aggressively while Spotify, IBM, and Axon hold headcount and bet on growth instead. Business Insider goes inside Disney and JPMorgan to show how AI adoption pressure has shifted from C-suite memos to manager dashboards and performance reviews — and why measuring token usage instead of outcomes may be building a very expensive illusion. And author David Epstein, writing for Fast Company, makes the case that AI's real danger isn't replacing workers — it's making it almost free to imagine new work while doing nothing to help y...

A massive wave of retirements known as "Peak 65" is creating a serious crisis for organizations as decades of institutional knowledge begin to walk out the door. This shift in workforce demographics means we must act now to secure our talent pipeline before these experts leave for good.

In this episode, CHRO Robin Benoit shares how she and her team at FM are tackling this challenge at its core. We explore their unique mentorship program called AKA (Accelerating Knowledge Advancement), which pulls experts away from their day jobs to help newer employees reach senior-level career growth years ahead...

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 cla...

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 fundin...

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, Susan 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...

April 24, 2026: 

The Wall Street Journal reports entry-level hiring is rebounding — but IBM's HR chief says AI can already do almost everything those jobs used to require, and ZipRecruiter's data shows 73% of grads are now considering gig or trade work because corporate entry roles have dried up. Business Insider investigates "tokenmaxxing" — the new corporate sport where employees at Disney, Meta, and JPMorgan compete to burn the most AI tokens — and a new study of 22,000 developers shows exactly what that's doing to actual work quality. And The Guardian reports Meta cutting 8,000 jobs and Microsoft offering buyouts to 9,000 people on the sam...

April 23, 2026: OpenAI released GPT-5.5 today — its second major model in six weeks. But while the software accelerates, the physical infrastructure powering it is triggering gunfire at council members' homes, Molotov cocktails at tech CEOs, and a grassroots rebellion that just ousted every incumbent on a Missouri city council one week after they voted yes on a data center. We also dig into the first-ever U.S. Census Bureau data on how AI is actually being adopted across American businesses — and why the real number is very different from what McKinsey has been telling you. And we look at what happ...

April 22, 2026: What does it actually take to build an organization where people perform at their best? In this episode, I'm breaking down what I call Empathetic Excellence — and it comes down to three things: competence, merit, and empathy. Not one of them. All three. I share two stories that have stayed with me — one about my daughter Naomi on the tennis court, and one about my father's first job in America — that I think capture this better than any research study could. I also get into why calling meritocracy a myth is a trap, what two dystopian novels from the 19...

April 21, 2026: Amazon commits $33 billion total to Anthropic in a landmark deal securing 5 gigawatts of compute — the equivalent of five nuclear power plants — while Anthropic's revenue triples from $9 billion to $30 billion run-rate in months, signaling we are past the pilot phase. Meta installs tracking software on employee computers to capture every keystroke and mouse movement as training data for AI agents — examined here against the full context of $73 billion in Reality Labs losses, an AI model that trails its competitors on agentic benchmarks, and a photorealistic AI clone of Zuckerberg designed to replace human management conversations. And the Wall Street Journa...

Technology is moving faster than ever, and many of us feel the pressure to keep up without losing our human touch. We need a clear path to help our teams embrace change while building a culture of trust and growth.

In this episode, Lisa Coulson, SVP and Chief Human Resource Officer at Principal Financial Group, joins me to talk about what it means to build an AI-literate workforce at its core within financial services. We explore how their data literacy and employee training program reached 90% of workers and how internal AI tools like "Page" and "Penny" helped...

April 17, 2026: Employer power has officially returned and workers are accepting things they never would have a year ago — but is that actually a bad thing? Then, teen boys are dating their AI chatbots and experts are warning about what that means for the future workforce. And finally, Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report reveals that global employee engagement has hit a five-year low — and what employees say they actually want from their leaders might surprise you.

Watch the full episode on YouTube.

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April 16, 2026: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7 this morning — a significant upgrade focused on complex coding and self-verification that changes what human oversight of AI actually needs to look like. Bank of America posted near-record earnings and credited AI, spotlighting a new tool for its 18,000 financial advisors that raises important questions about what happens when information advantage disappears from knowledge work. A major new global survey from WalkMe finds 80 percent of enterprise workers are actively avoiding AI tools, and new Gallup data shows Gen Z's enthusiasm for AI is collapsing fastest among daily users — pointing to a crisis of institutional trust that...