Leveraging AI

231 | OpenAI’s Dev Day is showing ambitions for taking over the world, Anthropic’s mega deals with IBM & Deloitte, AI bubble fears vs. fundamentals, and how AI is reshaping the economy - AI news for week ending on October 10, 2025

• Isar Meitis • Season 1 • Episode 231

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Are we witnessing an AI boom… or teetering on the edge of a bubble?

The week’s AI headlines were nothing short of seismic - from OpenAI’s Dev Day domination and Anthropic’s big-league partnerships, to eyebrow-raising corporate debt moves that scream dot-com déjà vu.

In this weekend update, host Isar Meitis pulls no punches breaking down what’s hype, what’s real, and what it all means for business leaders navigating the AI revolution. From Dev Day's tool-heavy drops to strategic plays that could define (or destroy) entire industries, this is your one-stop download of the must-know stories in AI.

Recommendation: If you want to outpace competitors in an AI-powered future, listen to this full breakdown. Understand the tools, spot the red flags, and make better strategic bets.

In this session, you'll discover:

  • The real implications of OpenAI’s Dev Day announcements and why their new “apps” might replace the browser
  • Why Anthropic’s IBM + Deloitte partnerships matter more than press releases suggest
  • Whether OpenAI's partnership with AMD is genius strategy or dangerous bubble-fuel
  • The growing chorus of experts warning: AI may be overhyped and the subtle signs of an investment bubble
  • What business leaders are really thinking: 79% of CEOs are confident, but also bracing for AI’s organizational whiplash
  • Why workforce transformation is about upskilling, not just automation and what KPMG’s CEO Outlook survey just confirmed
  • Who's likely to win the AI agent wars and what this means for tools like Zapier, Make, and N8N
  • Why the workforce shrinkage from retiring boomers could change the narrative around job loss and AI
  • The productivity paradox: why businesses see huge ROI from AI, but the job market isn’t catching up… yet

👉 Want to build an AI committee or AI Center of Excellence at your company?
 Reach out to Isar on LinkedIn or email him directly — he helps teams from startups to Fortune 500s lead confidently in the age of AI.

About Leveraging AI

If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

Speaker 10:

Hello and welcome to a Weekend News episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This Isar Metis, your host, and we have. A lot to cover this weekend. OpenAI held their dev day this week, and there's a lot of stuff to learn from it and to cover from things that they've actually shared and are releasing. There's some really big news from philanthropic. We're going to talk about whether we are in an AI bubble or a boom, or maybe a mix of both, and we are going to cover some interesting new data points when it comes to the impact of AI on jobs. The impact of AI on the economy. The first section in which we're going to talk about open AI and dev day and its implications it's actually a recording from our AI Friday Hangouts, which is an open to the public session that I'm doing every single Friday at 1:00 PM Eastern. It's a community of people who care about AI and how it's going to impact their lives and their businesses. We get together every single Friday at 1:00 PM and we discuss ai. Sometimes it's more tactical, sometimes it's more strategic. Sometimes in this case, somebody asking me about what happened in dev day and can I give them a quick recap in what I think about it? So this is the section you're going to hear. If you want to join us every Friday, like I said, it's open to the public. Just drop me a note on LinkedIn or send me an email, tell me that you're interested in joining us. We usually have about 25 to 30 people every single week, and we just discuss it. It's just as me, other people are sharing. Their findings and things that they have learned and so on. So it's a great way to keep up to date and learn things about AI when it comes to business. So, as I mentioned, just let me know if you want to join, but now let's start with the news. So OpenAI had their dev day this week

Speaker 5:

they had dev day On dev day they usually don't release necessarily new models, even though they kind of had two announcements that are model related. Uh, so the two announcements were. Uh, smaller version of their voice engine and a smaller version of their image engine that are delivering, you know, 85% of the capability at 70% discount on the tokens. Uh, you see that more and more that's happening a lot recently. Uh, you know, the first company we can also doing this is, is deep seek, which didn't start with their model, but they still did the same process. Uh, and since then we've seen this again and again and again with these companies. Uh, the latest one is Grok four Turbo, whatever they're calling the, the smaller Grok four, which achieves like 90% of what GR four can do at like an 80% discount and faster. And like all these models are doing the same thing. So OpenAI came out with the same thing for their voice. Uh, API and for their image generation, API. And so you can, you can now do this, which is gonna save you a lot of money and get, for the vast majority of cases, a good enough solution, uh, which is fantastic. So this is kinda like, was the, the very least interesting stuff that they've released. Uh, usually dev day is around tooling and specifically touring for developers, right? That's the whole point. So they've released several different things. The most interesting one is apps inside of Chachi pt, right? So if you remember, they had plugins way, way back, and then they sunsetted it because it didn't really work. So this is the new version of that, but it's a lot more interesting in the way they've implemented it. So the, the idea here is, first of all, a lot of the infrastructure is already there because behind the scenes it's actually using MCP. So the implementation of MCP allows you to bring any third party software and connect with it in. A very seamless, uh, implementation. And then the idea is that the application can so it, it doesn't take over the chat, but the chat is aware of what's happening in the application, right? And so you can run a search for a travel and it will show you like a travel box, but then you can go and ask questions like, oh, I'm actually looking for a four star only. And they say, oh, okay. And then it's gonna, uh, do the thing. So it's aware of what's happening. Uh, they've shown Can Academy and how you ask for a lesson and it's gonna do the thing. And then you can ask follow up questions that do not appear in the lesson in Can Academy. But because Chachi Pett is aware of what's happening in the Khan Academy lesson, now Chachi PITI takes over and gives you additional guidance or explanations and so on. Um. So that, that's one great example. And they created an abs, DK that any monkey can now create these apps for open ai. So they've, they're in the release. They had, I dunno, like 20 launch partners and they already said that there's another 20 in the queue. And then, but the idea is now that there's abscess, dk, anyone can put their app on chat g pt, uh, this, if it works this time, and it doesn't matter if it's this time or the next time around, eventually will work, which means it's taking over the internet, right? This is replacing the browser. Combine that with slightly more agent capabilities that will allow on its own to use the apps without you having to figure out which apps to use. And it has its tooling becomes everything. So this is a step in the direction of a OpenAI taking over the World B Angen universe that has access to an endless number of tools at its fingertips. And it can pick and choose which one to use for what purpose. So if we take the the trip example, uh, right now, you have to go through the connector and say, uh, look for all the emails that I have about my upcoming travel. And then it will find the emails. Then you copy that and say, okay, uh, for this trip from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I want, but in the future, it would just say, okay, I, I want you to take care of my travel for the next two weeks based on the emails that I, and the things that, and the agreements I've signed. And it will, it will go and find the emails and we'll look for the thing and we'll do the, uh, decluttering of the information. It will figure out the right flights and how long you wanna stay and if it has your. Context, going back to our original conversation somewhere, knowing that you like to stay at Marriott because you collect their points and you like flying red eyes back from the West coast and you don't like flying with spirit for obvious reasons and so on and so forth. Uh, then, then, then it would do the thing like just, and, and you know, if it's really nice, we'll say, okay, here are two options. Which one do you prefer? Uh, that's where it's going. And so, and, and to be honest, that even will require you triggering it because it will be aware of what you're supposed to do. And I'll say, Hey, I'm booking your travel for this thing. Is that okay? You won't even have to say anything because you just sign an agreement that you have to be at so and so place for these two days or something, meaning training, sales, delivery, like whatever the case is. Uh, it, it, it will be aware of that because it has access to your inbox. So it, it's just. From, from open AI's per perspective. When I mean taking over the world, you heard me say that a thousand times. I'll say it a thousand more. Context, context, context, context. It's just more context. They will know. Think about Google. Why is Google one of the largest companies in the world? Because it's into everything we do. It controls our browser, it controls our search, it controls our phones, it controls our videos. It con they just know more stuff about you. OpenAI will are competing on the same thing. Uh, and so this is one thing that they, uh, done is the apps. The second thing that they've done is the whole agent kit, which has several different components. One of them is an agent builder. Then there's different overlays on top of the agent builder that is supposed to help you evaluate and make it safer, uh, kinda like on its own. And this is, you know, a shot right into the gut of, and I then make.com, Zapier, Lindy, like all, all, all of these. Uh, and it's, it's a step in the right direction. Like you see a lot of people saying, yes, this is gonna kill any 10 and it's gonna kill Zapier, and so, and so, so forth. And the answer at least of right now is not yet, uh, whether that's actually gonna happen or not. Time will tell. It is very, very hard to compete with 800 million weekly users. It's very, very hard to compete with. I wanna raise another billion dollars, so I'll do it tomorrow. When, when, when NA 10 just did a huge announcement that they raised$180 million, which two years ago would've been, holy shit, that's incredible round C uh, but now that you're competing against open ai, that's a whole different story. That doesn't sound like a lot of money. Uh, the other crazy thing about this whole agent thing, which again, is not at the level of NA 10, yet they're claiming that they've used open AI codex and a very small team to develop the whole thing from idea to deployment in six weeks. That is insane Now. Yes, it's not at the level of Zapier or. Or, or anytime, whatever. But it's a nice step in the right direction in six weeks, which tells you how crazy good these AI development tools are right now. Now whether they're using a specialized version of Codex or like the general available, it doesn't matter because even if there is using, they are using specialized one, that's gonna be the next version they release. So it's like, uh, the, the, the timelines here are very, very short. And so being able to release a, a gen building tool that raises the question whether it can compete with NA 10 and make that has been around for a long time, tells you how crazy the software world is right now. Um, and then the last thing that I will say about what are the gaps that it has now? That I think are not major. One is connectors to existing tools. So, you know, NA 10 has all the existing nodes make, has even more, Zapier has even more. I don't see that as a big gap, especially in the world of MCP. So if, if you don't have to sit somebody down to write the API to this tool, because you can't just connect to the MCP, then, then the, the timeline to connect to some of these tools become, I'll add a tool every 10 minutes assuming the MCP was done properly, which not a given. I'll give you an example in a minute. Uh, so that's number one. Number two is there's a lot of stuff in Zapier, NA 10 and so on that are not agentic. It's just a regular automation flow. Which has huge benefits. The biggest benefit, there's no statistical question there. It will do the same thing every single time, and an agent won't. That's the benefit of an agent, that it doesn't do the same thing every single time. It actually thinks about what it needs to do. But there are many cases that you wanna mix and match these two things. You want a process that will go step by step exactly the same way every time, and then think about it in one or two of the steps. It doesn't do that at all. Now, will it do that in the future? I dunno if it takes six weeks to do. Probably yes. In six weeks. I don't know that, and so I, I really think that this is a, if I've learned anything. From this dev day, and it was very obvious before, but this made it like crystal clear in the open. We are here to take over the world every time, everywhere in everything, across anything that anybody does. That's basically, if you wanna sum up what they've announced, this is what they've announced. We don't care what you do or we're coming for you. Uh, which, you know, for a company that nobody knew that existed, uh, in 2022 and is now worth whatever, whatever they decide, because that number keeps going up every few weeks, as of right now, half a trillion dollars, uh, and can raise whatever amount they want in whatever pace they want, and has the most talented people and unlimited compute and unlimited capital. I don't know if I wanna bet against them.

Speaker 10:

And now from OpenAI to Anthropic. Anthropic also had a very meaningful week. They have signed two very significant deals, but before we discussed the deals that they've signed, let's talk about something very interesting that they have. Released or announced this week. So they just launched two public beta plugins for their development environment. So this adds slash commands to their development solution that allows to integrate several different capabilities. And these come in four different customization types. Plugin bundles slash commands, which allows to provide custom shortcuts and additional capabilities. Sub-agents, which are specialized task agents that can do specific things within your coding environment. MCP servers, which add tools and data connectors to your environment and hooks, which. Are adding workflow behavior modifiers. Now the idea is that these plugins enable developers to package and share complex setups like debugging, workflows, and deployment pipelines with just a single command instead of an entire setup that was required before. Which means developers inside a company or across open source universes, or just sharing with the world can share a lot of the stuff that they're doing and enhance the. Coding environment very quickly and very easily. Now, in addition to make it even easier to share, anyone can host a plugin marketplace via a Git repository or just a URL. And the idea here is obviously to create a flourishing and fostering community that will develop and share these kind of plugins and additional capabilities for Claude Code. Now examples that they gave is that these plugins can be used to support enforcing team standards, aiding open source contributors, sharing productivity workflows, connecting internal tools and bundling framework specific customizations. oUt of the box, anthropic are sharing four different things. They're sharing plugins for PR reviews, security guidance, cloud agent, SDK development and meta plugin for creating new plugins. I anticipate this thing to catch like wildfire and be something similar to MCP. This might become a new standard on how. AI tools are sharing advanced and more customized capabilities, definitely within companies. I think this will flourish, but I also see like an international open source community coming around this this provides a lot of. But as I mentioned, in addition to this philanthropic sign, two mega deals this week, the first one we're gonna discuss is their deal with Deloitte. Deloitte is going to be providing cloud access to over 470. Thousand professionals that work for it all around the world. In addition, they're going to work together to develop what they're calling the Claude Center of Excellence, which Deloitte will establish together with philanthropic in order to train experts on how to implement and develop frameworks and solutions. Using different cloud tools. They have already created a certification program for 15,000 Deloitte professionals that will become the champions for cloud implementation across the entire organization. This is a very similar approach to what I do with most of the companies that I work with, where we establish a center of excellence, we establish an AI committee. And we create a network of specific individuals who either raise their hand or the organization thinks are the best fit to become the champions across the different departments. What this does is it guarantees that in addition to the top down approach, you're getting a bottom up grassroots implementation and innovation across the entire company. Now in addition to obviously internal work, the goal of this partnership is to create tools and solutions tailored for the clients of Deloitte across multiple industries with a specific focus on regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, public services, which all prioritize compliance, transparency, and security, which is exactly the things that Anthropic are known for. So again, a huge deal for Anthropic. The biggest deal they signed so far from a size of the enterprise client that they're signing. Another really big deal that they signed this week is with IBM in the partnership with IBM that was announced on October 7th. IBM is going to integrate Claude's large language models into their IBM portfolio, starting with the AI IDE that they're developing jointly. Claude will practically be the AI first IDE, also known as in. Integrated development environment, which is the platform that developers use to write code and it is already available for private preview for select IBM clients. It is automating tasks like code modernization, upgrades, migrations, refactoring of code, and so on across the entire software development life cycle. As we just heard, the additional new capabilities to create plugins and so on, all of that is going to become a part of what IBM is offering their clients. In addition, In early testing, internally in IBM with over 6,000 IBM internal users showed an average productivity gain of 45% with Claude generating tasks, code suggestions, and handling security compliance checks. 45% is a very significant number. It means that those 6,000 people, more or less, are working twice. As fast than anybody before that, inside of IBM. And if they can sustain that and obviously deliver that to IBM clients, that is very significant. Now, IBM is also exploring, integrating Claude into some additional software products, including their Watson assistant. They also work together to co-develop what they're calling architecting Secure Enterprise AI agent with MCP, which is a guy that is outlining the agent development lifecycle, A DLC, similar to the concept of SDLC from the software world for building, deploying, and securing enterprise grade AI agents with open standards. tHis, I believe is very good news. I think it's a great partnership. It provides the stability and the reach of IBM together with the innovation and the new AI capabilities of anthropic to a very large audience like Dinish Nimal, who is the senior Vice President of software at IBM said this partnership is giving development teams AI that fits how enterprises work, not experimental tools that create new risks. And I couldn't have said it better. I am certain that IBM clients will be excited to receive these capabilities. IBM investors definitely liked it as their shares rose 7.5% in early trading post announcement. Speaking of jumping stock prices, there is a growing chatter on the fact that we might be in a very serious AI bubble, even though they are people who are thinking the other way around. But the voices who are claiming that the bubble is very clear, are growing stronger. In a very interesting article from Axios this week, they shared several of such opinions, and the main thing that they're highlighting is. Off balance sheet debt that is being used in order to finance some of the crazy investments that we're seeing in the past few months, which feels very similar to what was happening in the.com crash with crazy debt funding that led to eventually the collapse of that very big hype and very similar to the 2007. 2008 financial meltdown were different, not. Totally clear financial tricks were used in order to finance the growth with a lot of debt that was raised in really weird ways. Well, apparently there is a growing phenomena of corporate debt that is quietly ballooning in ways that are not the standard ways of raising money. Which means ways that are less visible to the shareholders. Two examples that were raised in this article. Meta is raising$29 billion in private capital for AI data centers via SPVs, which is allowing the company to avoid reflecting that debt on its balance sheet. A similar approach is being used by Oracle that has issued$18 billion in bonds in order to bankroll its AI infrastructure expansion. Very similar kind of thing. Or as Dario Perkins, the managing director of Global Macro at ts Lombard, which is a global data and investment intelligence company, said, and I'm quoting. It feels much closer to 2000 than 1995, and he continued. I wouldn't touch this stuff. Now what basically he's saying is that what's happening behind the scenes with the amount of kind of like shady debt that is being raised in order to finance some of these things is, feels a lot more like the end of the.com boom versus the beginning or the middle of it. Investor and author Paul Krosky said, and I'm quoting, the market is rewarding them even if it makes no economic sense to spend at this level, because there is no way they can recoup the value of the capital spending. So that's another viewpoint of somebody who thinks we are definitely heading into a big bubble. In addition to these death mechanisms, AXXIS also mentions investment recycling and insider selling basically means people from the inside who started selling their stock because they don't necessarily believe it's gonna go higher, or maybe they know something about where it's going next, which might be the opposite direction. All of these are very obvious red flags. What exactly is in investment recycling? We're gonna talk about a very interesting example later on in this episode. Two other very prominent figures who shared their concerns is Jeff Bezos and David Solomon, who is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Bezos said, and I'm quoting, this is a kind of industrial bubble. Talking at the Italian Tech Week, and he basically says that investors are currently struggling distinguishing between good ideas and bad ideas because of the amount of hype that there's around it. So there's a lot of money going, not necessarily in the right direction. That being said, he was very clear that he believes AI has a transformative impact across industries and across different sizes of companies and across the entire globe. So he's not saying that AI will not transform everything that we know. He's just saying that some and maybe many of the investments are bad investments at this particular point and that many people don't know how to tell between good or bad. And Solomon said, and I'm quoting, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 12 to 24 months we see a drawdown with respect to equity markets. Again, that's coming from the CEO of Goldman Sachs. He knows one or two things about making these kind of predictions and he wouldn't make them unless he actually believes this is where it's going. That being said, he is talking about 12 to 24 months. That's a pretty long timeframe. And to give you an opposing opinion. Dan Ives from Wedbush Securities argues that the AI market that is underlined by huge investment in hardware, real investment in actual goods, and in huge growth in services in companies such as chat, GPT, uh, that is seeing real growth and real demand defers and is dramatically different than the.com bubble. And he's predicting a two or three years tech bull run with accelerating enterprise spending and implementation. So. You can see views to two different directions, But here are a few other data points for you. there was another great article this week by the information. The information is a great source of internal, reliable information from the leading companies in the world. And they shared about the very thin margins that Oracle is experiencing in this crazy expansion that they're going through right now. So we shared with you some of the latest deals by Oracle. Their stock price have jumped through the roof. On the news of the new deals that they signed with projected revenue of$381 billion in the next five years. However, internal documents are revealing that there's a razor thin margin to this revenue, which is raising concerns and questions about A, the sustainability, and B, the level of risk that they're taking in order to do this. So. Oracle Cloud business has generated$900 million in revenue in the quarter, ending on August, 2025, but the gross profit of that was only 125 million, which is 14%. The profit margin of their AI cloud server rentals has ranged between 10% and 20% averaging 16% in the past year. Now, without any benchmark that is meaningless, but the average profit for overall Oracle before this AI expansion was 70% seven zero. So 14 to 16 is a very, very small margin compared to what they are used to. Add to that, the fact that Oracle lost nearly a hundred million dollars on Nvidia Blackwell chip's rentals in this past quarter, partially due to the lag between data center setup and customer usage, but it's still showing you that a lot of the stuff that they're doing right now is not necessarily profitable, which means together with a small margins might be a very high risk. Combine that with the fact that in some of their margins are further squeezed by the fact that some of the leasing data centers are actually from a third party. Meaning they're just the middleman in which they have even smaller margins, which is very different than like AWS Google Cloud, et cetera, which own the vast majority of their facilities. Now to add even further risk to that, Oracle's top AI cloud customers are five companies, ance, meta Xai, OpenAI, and Nvidia. And they together account for 80% of its AI cloud revenue. Which is a very serious concentration, which raises a lot of risks. This, you know, there's a lot of companies who have the 80 20 rule. This is more like the 98 2, where a very small percentage of the clients are holding a very, very large percentage of the revenue. So if the relationship with one or two of them goes south, for whatever reason, it puts their entire operation at risk. Now, earlier we mentioned circular investments and the risk aspect of them, and we got an amazing example of that this week. So this week OpenAI announced a very interesting deal with a MD. Why is it very interesting? It's very interesting for two different reasons. Reasonable. 1:00 AM D is NVIDIA's number one competitor, and Nvidia has been. The number one backer from a technology perspective and from a partnership perspective to OpenAI since day one. If you remember Jensen, Huang personally delivered the first GPU of the first model and then of the second model, uh, to Sam Altman and OpenAI. And so very long lasting, strong partnership between these companies. So going and signing a really large deal with their number one competitor may not be the best idea in the world. But putting that aside for a minute, this deal is structured in a very interesting way. OpenAI are going to get 10% of. These stock as part of this deal. The deal, by the way, is for six gigawatts of chips, which is a huge amount of compute. It's an unheard of amount of compute until the last few months where we've seen similar deals through Stargate and through the partnership with Nvidia. And this is going to deliver this six gigawatts of compute with MI four 50 series chips from a MD. To open AI over the next few years now. This whole deal, if you think about it, is really, really weird because A, how the hell is OpenAI going to pay for the deal with Oracle? And then two, the deal with Nvidia. And then for this, there is no way they can raise this kind of money. But if you remember, they got 10% of a MD stock, a MD stock rose, 43% this week with 11% in a single day, just on Wednesday, October 8th as a result of this news. So the amount of money OpenAI made. On paper at least by just getting this 10% of stock and pushing the stock forward can by itself help them pay for a chunk or maybe all of the immediate investment that they need in order to start paying for this deal. So this is really money being generated out of thin air with. open AI getting stock, stock price jumping through the roof. Now they have the money they can actually pay for the goods that otherwise they did not have money to pay. This sounds like a great way to blow up a size of a bubble without having actual money behind it. That being said, with the amount of runarounds that Sam is doing around the world right now to build international relationship with actual countries and his push to develop data centers all around the world, uh, is showing. Just like we said in the beginning, that they're going for world domination and they're literally trying to get any piece of compute that they can and secure that ahead for the next few years. And if they are successful in doing this, they will have way more compute than anybody else, which is a key for the success in the AI era. So there definitely setting up a very high bar and generating a lot of risk. But on the other hand, if they're successful, they're setting themselves up for world domination. Now Jason Huang related to this topic with two different approaches. One is he was obviously surprised by the deal and even more surprised by the fact that a MD gave 10% of their stock to OpenAI. But he's still very strongly supporting the. Open AI future. And he specifically said, and I'm quoting, my only regret is that we didn't invest more. So he's a strong believer in the future of open ai. And to be fair, he must be a strong believer in the success of open AI because potentially the success of his company depends on it. So where does US leave us? It leaves us with contradicting opinions from some leading people around the world, but there's definitely more and more signs that are not. Smelling very good. I'll just put it, uh, this way and we'll obviously keep on following and telling you how this thing evolves. Uh, but right now there's definitely an explosion in investment, not necessarily only in the right things, and even if OpenAI are successful in everything that they're doing, and that raises all the ships that they're connected to. There are many, many, many different startups who raised crazy amounts of money, and that money may go away. Because OpenAI or Gemini, or Claude or all of the above are going to release features that are going to basically do what these companies do. We saw a great example earlier in this episode with the agent builder by OpenAI that may potentially replace companies like Zapier and NA 10 end. make.com in the future. I don't think it's there yet, but the direction is very clear. And there were many other similar examples in the past few months of a new feature coming out from these companies that killed entire industries of AI startups that did something very specific that is now a part of chat GPT. And from that, let's switch to the topic of the impact of AI on the workforce and the economy at the CNBC Workforce Executive Consult Summit in New York. Malik, who is a Wharton professor and one of the people I really enjoy following, when it comes to talking about ai, he always shares really interesting insights and things that he's learning or things that he's finding from other people. He said, with regards to the impact of AI on the workforce, and I'm quoting, I can tell you no one knows anything. He's claiming for all the right reasons, that regardless of what the big labs are saying about the future or, and so on and so forth, we have very little actual data to really analyze where this might be going. If you think about the Chachi PT moment was less than three years ago. We're coming up on three years, and if you think about real implementation at large scale at the workforce, it started roughly this year. So we have about one year of data and very little to work with as far as making any specific projections. The. Many studies, including ones made by Ethan Molik, together with Boston Consulting Group and others, is showing significant gains from using AI driven productivity tools and which by definition will drive changes in the workforce. In addition to that, Claire McIntyre, the senior Vice President and Chief people Officer at Sims Club said, and I'm quoting, we frankly don't know what the future looks like. This is the worst version of technology we will ever use. And what you mean by that is it's ability to replace. People across a very wide range of aspects of what the company does. And again, this is Sam's Club. It's not like a somebody's side hassle. It's a part of Walmart and a very large organization and capability. And the sentiment is very clear to what this might do to the workforce in that organization. She also mentioned that it requires a very significant cultural shift, and the cultural shift is going from rewarding people from having answers, and that needs to evolve to valuing and I'm quoting, asking brilliant questions, editing information, and making decisions at the speed of TikTok. So this is telling you that the success. This AI era will come from changing the way that people think and work in the workforce, and not just changing the technology around us. Another person that weighed in is Kirsten Barnett, the executive director of the New York Jobs CEO console, who said, everyone knows we will need something a little different from before, but we don't know what that will look like in five or 10 years. And I will say that we don't know how this will look like in two to three years. I think he's underestimating how fast and how dramatic the change it is. What they're all recommending to do is for organizations to develop AI savvy leadership, create internal AI labs and crowdsource innovation across the company, which is exactly what I have been doing with all the companies that I've been working with, establishing AI committees, working with the leadership on developing an AI centric plan and training. Employees and re-skilling employees to allow them to drive innovation with AI across different aspects of the company. If that's something you're looking to do in your business, whether you are at the top of the leadership or something in the middle and you want me to talk to your leadership team, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or send me an email. Uh, this is what I do every single week at medium, small and large organizations from a few millions to billions of dollars. Uh, in revenue and if, again, if this is something that you want to do in your organization and you should, please feel free to reach out. Additional information from the CNBC Workforce Executive Console Summit. Actually revealed some interesting information. The first piece that I really wasn't aware of, came from Kali Yos, the CEO, and founder of Flex Plus Strategy Group, and he said that roughly 6 million workers, primarily Gen Xers and boomers, are expected to retire. Over the next five to seven years without an equivalent replacement from Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which is creating a incredibly contracting workforce. This is the term that he used which basically means that this big retirement may offset whatever job loss is created right now by AI and other factors such, such as the global economy. Uh, and there's definitely a job loss right now. a DP reported private sector loss of 32,000 jobs. Just last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics have shared that. There are only seven point 18 million openings in August, which is the second lowest month since 2020. And there also mentioned that recent college grads are, have the highest issues with finding new jobs. That being said, yos predicts that AI will fuel net job growth. That will amplify demand in what he calls a shrinking pool, which is interesting, right? So there's gonna be a demand for AI capable employees. At the same time, the workforce will be shrinking, and so we will actually increase employment as a percent. The BLS projections are roughly aligned with that and they're forecasting overall LE labor gains of 8.9 million jobs and which is 5.5% of the US workforce between the years 2020 to 2030 and

Speaker 14:

the World Economic Forum Future Jobs report of 2025, estimates 170 million. New tech driven jobs by 2030 netting 78 million after 92 million displacement because of ai. What do I think about this? I think the respectable really smart people at both the Bureau and the World Economic Forum do not really understand ai. They do not really understand what it can do right now, and they definitely do not understand where it's going in the future. Think that their projections are optimistic. That being said, I really hope that they are right and I'm wrong, but from everything that I'm seeing, working with different companies and seeing what the impact can be, the implications of AI right now. Are significant and the only reason we're not seeing very dramatic shifts in the job market is because most people, and most companies don't know how to use AI to its full potential right now, but it is coming and it is coming fast, as we will learn from the next segment. So. KPMG just released their global CEO outlook. It's a survey that they release several times a year the way they do the survey. In this particular case, they surveyed 1,350 CEOs from companies. That generate over$500 million a year in revenue across 11 markets and 12 different sectors. And they did the survey between August 5th and September 10th, so it's very recent. They found a lot of very interesting things. The first thing they found is that 79% of CEOs are confident that their organizations will grow despite the global economic confidence dropping to 68%, which is a five year low, 71% of CEOs, so almost three out of four prioritize AI with 69% allocating 10 to 20% of their budget to ai. Now, the really interesting parameter when it comes to AI implementation is that these CEOs are expecting to see positive ROI in one to three years, which is faster than last year's projection, which was three to five years. What that tells us is that many of these CEOs started implementing stuff last year. They're already seeing results, and hence, the projection for positive ROI has shrunk dramatically again, from three to five to one to three years. 57% anticipate significant impact from agent ai. Now, I personally am not surprised with the next topic. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you shouldn't be surprised as well. 71% of CEO emphasize retraining high potential talent as a key to AI success with 77%. So three quarters noting that AI upskilling as the critical aspect for success in the AI era. And 70% see competition for AI talent as a constraint for their future growth. What does that tell you? It tells you that the biggest hurdle and the biggest opportunity in the AI era is not the technology and the infrastructure. It is the people. And it means that if you are in a decision making position in a company and you do not have. A plan or you have a plan, but you need assistance in how to implement it, uh, across multiple aspects of the business. You need to find somebody to help you to do that. I can be that person, but there's many other great companies and consultants out there that do similar kind of work, but it is a necessity in order for you to be successful in this AI transformation. Another interesting parameter here is that 92% of interviewed CEOs plan to increase headcount over the next three years despite the economic uncertainty. And 59% of CEO are noting increased role complexity due to AI and digital literacy needs. Going back to we need more training, we need more effective training, and we need it now. And as somebody who has been preaching that for. Two and a half years. I'm really excited to see that it's becoming a very clear demand by leadership across multiple industries in multiple places around the world. Steve Chase, the global head of AI and digital innovation at KPMG. Said, and I'm quoting. CEOs are investing in AI with greater confidence, not just because of its promise, but because of the measurable value they are seeing. So again, actual ROI and clear results that help them make clear projections and hence invest more in ai, not just based on a promise, but based on actual tangible outcomes. A final data point that is related to training and the need for additional training. Especially right now, 88% of CEOs see labor market shifts and they're seeing aging workforce impacting recruitment and culture. 30% worry about generational skill gap, so older people are living and younger generations still don't have those skills in order to replace them effectively. And this is something that if you train people properly, AI can help smooth the transition by providing this knowledge and skills through AI to complement what is currently lacking by the younger generation. There were a lot more items in the news this week that you should know. They all appear in the newsletter, including some really grim, scary projections from Jonatan Bengio, who is the godfather of ai, who thinks AI may have catastrophic results within five to 10 years. That's in the very, very near future. There is interesting research from Claude with regards to the self-awareness of their models when it's being tested. And there's Time Magazine who named Figure Three's Humanoid Robot as one of the best inventions of 2025. So this is an old school magazine that is naming a robot, a humanoid robot, as the best invention of this year, which tells you where the world is going. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to this podcast. I don't want you to miss any episode that we're putting out. We're putting a lot of work and effort into the research, into finding guests, into interviewing them, and into doing the summary of the news every single week. And we would like you to enjoy all of them and not miss any of them. So click subscribe, and while you're at it and you have the phone in your hand, please click the share button and think of three to five people that you know that can benefit from this podcast as well. I am 100% sure that you know a few of these people and you can help them learn about AI and help me, and I will be grateful for it and do something to the greater good at the same time. Because the more we know about the potential future of ai, the higher the chances. We can enjoy the benefits and reduce the risks, so you can play a role in that as well. We'll be back on Tuesday with a fascinating how-to episode where we're going to show you the actual step-by-step process on how to take cold lists of potential wannabe maybe, or all leads, and improve the list dramatically while getting the latest information about the decision makers in the companies, including their email addresses, verifying their email addresses, and setting yourself up for sales success. So if that's something you wanna learn and you probably do, if you're running a business, then don't miss this Tuesday's episode. And until then, have an amazing rest of your weekend. Keep on exploring AI and sharing with the world what you learn. And I will see you on Tuesday.

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Isar Meitis

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