via Avasant As companies worldwide grapple with AI implementation, a critical gap has emerged between executive ambitions and organizational reality, revealing the urgent need for a fundamental shift in how we approach AI-driven change. At Avasant’s recent Empowering Beyond Summit 2025, Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow and nine-time bestselling author, delivered a compelling case for why businesses must disrupt themselves to fully realize AI’s transformative potential. His insights illuminate the path forward for organizations seeking to move…
AI Business Reinvention Starts Where Legacy Thinking Ends
I recently sat down with Geoff Nielson on Digital Disruption, produced by Info-Tech Research Group, for a conversation that went far beyond the usual AI headlines. We talked about what AI is actually changing inside the enterprise, why so many organizations are mistaking activity for progress, and what leadership has to do with whether AI becomes a force for optimization or reinvention. Please do watch the conversation (video embedded below). It’s fun and rich with insights from the frontline of…
AI Is Reshaping Business, Yet Most Leaders Are Investing in the Optimization of Yesterday
If AI is eating the world, you could also say that it’s also exposing leadership. The companies that win next will not be the ones that automate the fastest, but the ones that learn to imagine bigger. That’s how we’ll start this story. Also, my keynote is below if you’d like to jump straight to the video. At Integrated Systems Europe in Barcelona, I talked about AI in a way that made some people nod, some people uncomfortable, and others…
Most Companies Are Using AI to Cut Costs, Smart CHROs Will Use It to Rebuild Work
Everyone is talking about AI as if the future of work is just a headcount story. It is not. That framing is too small, too reactive, and too dangerous. The real shift is not that AI will simply replace jobs. It is that AI is forcing companies to rethink what work is, how value gets created, and where human contribution becomes even more important. That changes the mandate for CHROs completely. CHROs cannot stay in a reactive HR role. They…
SXSW 2026: cognitive darwAInism, AI Slop, the Hidden AI Tax, and a Futurist Coming Home
This is a thoughtful piece by Danny Devriendt. Thank you, my friend. 🙏 Brian Solis is far from a neutral observer in my SXSW story; he’s a friend I’ve known for a long time, and one of the people who helped me -and a whole generation- see the social web for what it really was back in the day. Long before social media became a relentless ad machine, he wrote The Social Media Manifesto, arguing that this wasn’t a new…
Worth Magazine Covers Brian Solis Keynote at SXSW 2026 – Augmentation Is the New Productivity
via Dan Costa, Worth My social feed is filled with ads telling me “Most people still use AI like Google….” and then they try to sell me some online course or collection of prompts. But there is truth to the cliche. Here at SXSW, the distinction between the AI-augmented and the AI-clueless keeps coming up. “Most people use AI to do what they already know,” Brian Solis, digital anthropologist and head of global innovation at ServiceNow, said on stage at…
Augmented IQ and the New Human Advantage
I lost a fight with the sidewalk the night before my talk at SXSW. Not exactly the kind of opening line you script for your first SXSW keynote in seven years, but there I was in Austin, cut-up but grateful and energized to be back on that stage talking about something that matters more than most leaders realize right now. The talk was called “Augmented IQ: Scaling Human + AI Potential.” It built on a simple but urgent thesis: the…
The Companies That Win With AI Won’t Just Cut Costs, They’ll Redesign Work
Based on interviews in May 2025 and subsequent, more detailed,, and repeated warnings in 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that artificial intelligence could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next one to five years. Amodei is sounding the alarm to get our attention. If he’s right, leaders don’t get the luxury of debating whether disruption is coming, they’ll have to manage how it lands. Amodei’s advice is to track track where AI is…
Why AI Darwinism Needs a Mindshift, and why You Can’t Automate Your Way to Business Model Innovation
When Richie Cotton asked me on DataCamp’s DataFramed podcast how I stay afloat with everything happening in AI, I joked that I wear “AI floaties.” Thirty tabs open. New “state of AI’ reports I need to read. Breakthroughs I need to understand. Every day, there’s a new model, a new breakthrough, a new viral article with a new “this changes everything” or “this is the end of…” headline. Honestly, I’m struggling to keep afloat too with all the AI advancements…
AI Darwinism can unleash new potential of energy workforce – Enlit Magazine
Coverage of Brian’s keynote at the Baker Hughes Annual Meeting in Florence, Italy, source: Enlit, Kelvin Ross Using artificial intelligence to transform the energy sector isn’t about automation – it’s about augmentation, says Brian Solis An AI digital futurist has urged energy leaders to see the full potential of artificial intelligence and not simply use the technology to cut corners cheaply. “The future doesn’t belong to companies that use the most AI,” said Brian Solis. “It’s those who reimagine their…