Latest / Uphoff on Media Podcast / Motion Is Not Transformation

Transcript

Motion Is Not Transformation · Uphoff on Media Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, before we get into this week's episode, I want to start with the hard part.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Leading a company through disruption doesn't feel like strategy while you're in it.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like the laws of physics changed underneath your business overnight
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: and nobody handed you the new rulebook.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Employees want answers,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: customers want the answer, your board wants the answer now in the next meeting.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is the ground hasn't settled yet.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody actually has the answer, not the clean one you can put on a slide and call finished.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've been through enough of these waves to tell you managing through one is messy.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's trial and error dressed up as a plan.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is confusing.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is frustrating.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: It is disorienting.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And some days it'll make you question a decision you were completely certain
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: about just a month earlier.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the other half of it though, the part that people don't talk about enough.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Leading a business through a disruption like this out the other side,
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: stronger than when it started is one of the best feelings you'll have
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: in your career.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've had it, it's real.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not for the faint of heart.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Eugenic AI is gonna test every B2B leader listening to this
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: and it's gonna keep testing you for years.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: How you respond matters more than almost anything else you'll do this decade.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I make the case that the answer isn't one skill.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's managing two completely different challenges running on two different clocks at
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: the same time.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's get to work.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is called Motion Is Not Transformation.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are two ways to be wrong about a technology wave.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, the less obvious one is doing more damage than the one everyone worries about.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: There are two ways to be wrong about a technology wave.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: The first is kind of obvious.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: You move too slow.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: You dismiss the shift,
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: protect legacy revenue,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: and by the time you look up,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: a competitor with worse products and better timing owns your category.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: The second failure mode gets less attention and right now it's doing more damage.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: You'll see the wave coming,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: you paddle toward it, you catch it, then you misread what's required to write it in.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: You mistake motion for transformation.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: You confuse deployment for strategy.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: You restructure for a world that isn't here yet.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived both,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: and watching B2B information,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: marketing,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: and technology leaders respond to agentic AI right now,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'd argue the second failure mode is winning.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen this one before.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: In the mid-1990s, I was running a large B2B media business when the internet arrived.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: We did exactly what you're supposed to do.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: We moved to digital early,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: websites,
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: email newsletters, reporters, shipping from monthly deadlines to daily posting.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Against everyone we were used to competing with, we looked like the future.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what I learned in hindsight.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: We were early on the technology and late on
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: the business model transformation it actually required.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: We treated digital as a new delivery channel for the content
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: and advertising model we already had.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: We never asked the harder question,
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: does digital change the fundamental value we create, and if so, for whom?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: We hired web editors and kept print-era revenue logic.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: We launched online properties and priced digital ads against print CPMs.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: We moved, then stopped moving before the transformation was actually complete.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: The companies that got through that era best weren't the ones who moved first.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: They were the ones who understood that the first wave of digital,
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: getting content online, didn't create bigger profit pools.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Wolters Kluwer CEO Nancy McKinstry put it plainly years later on an HBR podcast.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The shift from print to digital didn't create any bigger profit pools.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I would argue that the profit pools shrunk, end quote.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: The winners understood what wave two required, a different business model, not a new channel.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: The lesson applies directly to what's happening right now.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't the mandate or weight debate.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: A few weeks ago,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: I made the argument in How Do We Move
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: that agentic AI's near zero trial cost makes weighting its own mistake.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Structured experimentation,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: one workflow,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: run in parallel, measured honestly, should start now, and I still believe that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is a different question, one of direction, not speed.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The leaders making the second mistake right now aren't standing still.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're moving fast in ways that don't reverse.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Cutting headcount, ripping out tech stacks, risking revenue that still works.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing it before the market is confirmed where this wave is actually going.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: The pattern is repeating.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Agentic AI is a new operating environment.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It will eventually restructure how buyers buy,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: sellers sell, content gets made and distributed, and companies get organized.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Today, it still looks like faster software.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's the trap.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: The word eventually is the key.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: The gap between what agentic AI will do
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: and what it's actually doing right now inside most B2B organizations is enormous.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: The hype curve and the adoption curve are not the same line.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Leaders that are making structural,
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: irreversible decisions off the first one are making the second mistake.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: They're moving.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're just moving in the wrong directions.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: What the data actually says.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: The ROI problem.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: MIT's project Nanda put a hard number on it in the 2025 gen AI divide report.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Despite 30 to 40 billion in enterprise investment,
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: 95% of generative AI pilots produced no measurable business return.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: A Gartner study of 350 global executives published in May 2026 found
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: that 80% had reduced headcount and the companies that cut
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: the most showed financial returns nearly identical to the companies that cut
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: the least.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Cutting people didn't buy performance.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It bought a smaller company.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The rehire pattern, Forrester's predictions 2026 report goes further.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Half of AI attributed layoffs will be quietly rehired offshore or at lower pay
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: because the capabilities companies bet on aren't ready.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: 55% of employers already regret the AI layoffs they made.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Among the people actually running AI investment decisions,
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: more expected To increase headcount over the next year,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: 57%, then expected to shrink headcount, 15%.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: The people closest to the technology are the least convinced by the layoff narrative.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Klarna story updated.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Klarna is the case study everybody cites.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what actually happened.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: The company replaced 700 employees with AI,
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: watched service quality drop, and began rehiring in 2025.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: In mid-2026, it had settled on a hybrid model.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: AI handles roughly two-thirds of customer inquiries.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: The remaining third routes to human contractors.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: CEO Sebastian Semekowski's new framing,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: once AI can handle the simplest service interactions,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: human service becomes close to a premium offering.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: This may well be the model of the future, but certainly not the path to get there.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: The readiness gap.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Forrester's AIQ research found the share of workers with high AI readiness moved
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: from 12% in 2024 to only 16% in 2025,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: even as 68% of organizations reported generative AI running
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: in production applications.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Deploying the tool and building the competency are not the same investment,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: and most companies are only making one of them.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: By March 2026,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Forrester was reporting that workers had grown reluctant
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: to use AI tools they'd been given,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: afraid that visible proficiency would mark them for the next round of cuts.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Call that what it actually is, not resistance to the technology.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Fear of what using it well will cost them.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: The adoption gap.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Gartner's 2026 CIO and Technology Executive Survey found only 17%
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: of organizations have deployed AI agents to date.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Gartner expects 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled outright by the end of 2027.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: The hype and the deployment data are wildly out of sync.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the buyer gap.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Buyers, meanwhile, have already moved.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: 94% now use large language models during B2B research,
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: and Forrester's Buyer's Journey research found 89% have adopted generative AI as
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: a top source of self-guided information.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: The Content Marketing Institute's 2026 research puts a number on that gap that matters.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: B2B buyers worked through roughly 13.4 pieces of content
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: before ever contacting sales and 60% of the buying journey now happens
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: with no vendor interaction at all.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, only 19% of B2B marketers say they are fully integrated AI into daily workflows
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: and fewer than four in 10 see a real performance lift from what they've adopted.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Buyer behavior moved first.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing execution is still catching up.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not uncommon for the narrative and the data to be in conflict in
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: the early stages of a technology wave.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Part of leading through disruption is knowing when and how to move.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: There are three overcorrections that are already underway.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Based on what I'm seeing across B2B marketing,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: technology, and media, three patterns are standing out.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, eliminating human judgment before AI judgment is proven.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: The jobs being cut fastest aren't the most automatable.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're the most visible on a cost line.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Content teams,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: editorial staff,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: mid-level marketing managers,
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: customer success,
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: In B2B media specifically,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: the people being cut often hold the institutional knowledge,
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: client relationships,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: and editorial voice,
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: precisely the assets that get more valuable in an environment saturated
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: with AI-generated content.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Klarna case study makes the point better than any warning could.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Human judgment didn't get eliminated.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: It got repriced as a premium.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Companies cutting that capability now are selling the asset right before
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: the market reprices it upwards.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, rebuilding the tech stack before the use cases are proven.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: The MarTech landscape spent 15 straight years compounding every year more tools than the last.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: In 2026, that finally stopped.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Chief MarTech's May 2026 count found
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: the landscape had reached 15,505 solutions up just 0.79% year over year,
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: essentially flat after a decade and a half of expansion.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: The more instructive number is underneath.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: 1,488 new tools were added and 1,367 were removed.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And new entries dropped 40% from the year before.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's a correction, not growth.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: A market working through the hangover of accumulating technology, it never fully integrated.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: The lesson from the print to digital era repeats.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Adding technology is not the same as transforming the business.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Leaders ripping out and rebuilding their stacks under agentic AI pressure before
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: the data, talent,
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: or use cases can support it are about to relearn that lesson at a worse price.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And number three, adding AI features without adding customer value.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: This one is the easiest to miss because it looks like progress.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: In the print to digital transition,
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: plenty of publishers ran their print layout through a PDF generator,
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: calling it a digital edition and counting it as transformation.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: The reader's experience never actually changed.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: The equivalent today is B2B software companies bolting a chat panel or
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: a co-pilot badge onto an existing product without integrating it into
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: a real workflow.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: MIT's project Nanda found
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: that narrow workflow integrated AI tools succeed roughly twice as often
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: as generalized AI layered on top of an existing product.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: A separate 2026 survey of 230 B2B software and AI companies found
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: that AI spend mostly comes out of customers' existing technology budgets,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: not new ones,
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: and higher still among the SaaS companies adding AI features specifically.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Most of what's shipping isn't expanding customer value.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's repackaging the value that was already there.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: A feature list is not a business model.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, two clocks, not one.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the closest thing I have to a framework for leading through this correctly.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Disruptive technologies run on two clocks at once,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: and confusing them is where most leaders get into trouble.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Clock one is the technology clock.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: The rate at which the capability itself develops.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Agentic AI is moving fast on this clock.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Models are improving.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Agent frameworks are maturing.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Infrastructure is being built.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Urgency is appropriate here.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's exactly what I argued for in the post, how do we move?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Start the cheap, reversible experiments now.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Clock two is the market clock.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: The rate at which behaviors,
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: business models, buying patterns, and organizational capability actually shift.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: The market clock always runs slower than the technology clock.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Always.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: The internet was inevitable in 1996.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: It took until 2004 for Google's ad model to actually reshape B2B marketing.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Mobile was transformative in 2007.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Enterprise mobile first design became a real B2B requirement around 2014.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Cloud was the future in 2010.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Most mid-market B2B companies were still on premise in 2018.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: The leaders who destroyed value in each of those waves restructured for clock one
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: while ignoring clock two.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: They killed businesses that still had runway because they confused this will happen
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: with this has happened.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: The leaders who created value invested in capability on clock one's timeline,
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: building expertise,
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: running experiments,
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: developing talent while managing existing revenue on clock two's timeline.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: They held the profitable present while building the necessary future.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: That discipline is rarer than it sounds.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: It requires resisting the performance pressure to show bold action.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: It requires a board that understands the difference between strategic patience
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: and strategic paralysis.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it requires enough intellectual honesty to say,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: we don't know exactly how this plays out,
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: so we're building optionality instead of betting everything on one timeline.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: What right looks like The operating environment has shifted.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's not in question.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: What's in question is the pace and nature of the response.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And getting the pace wrong cuts both ways.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: The gap between how fast the technology is moving
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: and how fast most companies are actually applying it isn't closing.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's widening.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that widening gap is its own risk.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting still doesn't put you on the sidelines.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: It puts you further behind a moving target.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Restructuring against a signal that hasn't arrived yet is still the wrong move.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: So is doing nothing while the gap grows.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Here are four moves that separate the leaders getting this right from the ones about
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: to get it wrong.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, build AI fluency, not just AI adoption.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Fluency isn't a login counter, a completed training module.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's employees demonstrating use that improves the quality and efficiency of a workflow.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: The same bar I'd apply to any other skill on a team.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: 68% of organizations already run generative AI in production,
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: but only 16% of workers have high AI readiness by Forrester's measure.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that gap is widening,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: not narrowing,
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: because people afraid the AI acts stop volunteering to get good at the tool.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Make it concrete.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Pick two or three workflows where the win is measurable.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Name an owner for each and track output quality and time to completion before and
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: after, not usage logs.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Build the competency deliberately or watch the Forrester rehire prediction happen
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: to your own arc chart.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Measure the new models without abandoning proven ones.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: The print to digital playbook's real lesson, the first wave rarely creates bigger profit pools.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Run the existing revenue model as efficiently as you can
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: while funding genuine experiments at the margin.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Don't burn the runway to look transformed.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Preserve the assets that get more valuable in an AI-saturated world.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Editorial voice,
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: human judgment,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: taste and expertise, earned audience relationships, in-person community.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: These are not legacy liabilities.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: In a market flooded with AI-generated content and AI-mediated buyer journeys,
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: they're the scarce commodity.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: The leaders who understand this will hold them.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: The ones who don't will sell them at exactly the wrong moment, the way Klarna nearly did.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And measure what's actually happening in your market,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: not what the hype curve says should be happening.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Buyers have already moved.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: 94% use LLMs in their research.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Two-thirds of the buying journey happens without you.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Your own data,
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: open rates,
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: event attendance,
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: pipeline conversion,
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: content performance will tell you where your market's clock actually is.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don't let someone else's prediction replace your own observation.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where I'll add my own personal perspective.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much coverage,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: analysis and hand-waving about AI right now that it would be easy
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: to assume it's wildly overhyped.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: In 35 years of having a ringside seat at every major and minor technology wave,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you agentic AI will change everything.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: How we learn and educate,
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: how products and services get built and delivered,
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: how companies are organized, how business models work, and how careers are managed.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: It will eventually redefine scale entirely.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: If this podcast feels like it's handing you two instructions at once, that's because it is.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot sit this one out no matter where you are in the org chart.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do what Daniel Kahneman described in his book,
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Fast and Slow, just applied to a market instead of a mind.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Fast and slow at the same time about different things.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Move fast on staying current.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Track the technology itself and how competitors
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: in your industry are actually applying it and watch for the AI native competitor
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: who shows up with no warning.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Move slowly and carefully on commitment.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing gets restructured,
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: cut, or shipped until it clears the bar this piece keeps returning to.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Does it improve the quality or efficiency of what someone actually gets,
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: not just how fast you moved?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Build for what's coming.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Manage what's here.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Know the difference.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: I never said running both clocks at once was simple.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: I said it was the job.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's the episode.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this useful, please do one thing.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Follow the Uphoff on Media podcast on Apple or Spotify and leave a rating.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's the single best way to help another operator find this.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Tony Uphoff, back at it next week.