Two years ago, The Economist asked what happened to the AI revolution. Today, we’re investing more than ever, still struggling to prove the returns, and discovering that AI’s impact on jobs is anything but predictable. I believe these seemingly contradictory signals are telling us something important about the AI Economy taking shape, and what it will take to lead in it. Investment continues to accelerate, the world’s largest technology companies are building an unprecedented infrastructure for intelligence, and AI agents…
The Future HappensWith or Without You: Why AI, Foresight, and Imagination are Forcing Every Company to Reinvent
I recently had the opportunity to speak with leaders at a global entertainment powerhouse, which was a meaningful full-circle moment for me. Before moving to Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I lived not far from the studios. At the time, I thought my future might unfold in entertainment or technology. Somehow, I found a way to stay connected to both. But the path was through technology and a career in Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valleys around the world. We…
The Financial Brand: Building the AI-Forward Bank
via The Financial Brand Only 18% of banks have integrated AI workflows. Everyone else is automating the past. Most banks and credit unions are using artificial intelligence to make yesterday’s work faster, then measuring the result with yesterday’s numbers. Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, and Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow, call this the iteration trap and argue it is the same failure that has consumed digital transformation. Their new book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform…
The Biggest Risk with AI Isn’t Thinking Too Big, It’s Thinking Too Small
I joined HFS Research in New York for The Services-as-Software Economy: Disrupt or Be Disrupted conference where I delivered a keynote on AI Business Transformation: Optimized + Innovative AI on behalf of ServiceNow. In a room full of business and technology leaders leading AI investments, I asked everyone to press pause on conversations limited to use cases, automation and efficiency gains, and siloed pilots that optimize yesterday’s work. We are entering a phase of AI where the conversation has to…
The AI Dilemma’s Innovator: Why AI Makes You Faster While Still Falling Behind
Every company is now asking some version of the same question…how do we use AI to become more efficient? It’s the right question. But it’s not the only question. If we use AI only to automate existing processes, reduce costs, and accelerate yesterday’s work, we may become faster versions of who we already were. That might improve productivity, but it won’t guarantee relevance. The bigger opportunity is to use AI to challenge the assumptions that define the business itself: what…
AI Is Eating the World. Are We Ready to Think Bigger?
AI is often compared to the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, or even electricity. At first, those comparisons can sound dramatic, even inflated. But they are not entirely wrong. Fire did not change the world simply because it existed. Electricity did not transform civilization simply because someone discovered it. The wheel did not alter the trajectory of humanity simply because it rolled. These were not just inventions. They were enabling forces. Their potential and ultimatle power came…
The Unreleased X Trailer: Designing Experiences People Love in the Age of AI
More than a decade ago, I created this trailer for my book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design. For reasons I can no longer remember, I never released it. It became a lost trailer from the digital era. Yet the idea behind it may be even more important in the AI era. At the time, customers were changing faster than the experiences companies designed for them. Digital, mobile, and social technologies were reshaping how people communicated, discovered, purchased, shared,…
In the Era of AI, Human Experience is the Killer App
I had the privilege of keynoting UserTesting conferences in San Francisco and New York. It was my third and fourth UserTesting event respectively, which I guess makes this a situationship now. 😍 The theme was experience innovation in an era of AI. The real message wasn’t really about AI. It was about people. It was about how human beings are changing faster than the experiences designed for them. It was about why, in this new era of increasingly ‘intelligent’ machines,…
In an Era of AI Darwinism, ROI Now Represents Return on Intelligence
You can’t cut your way to growth. You can’t automate your way to innovation. AI is forcing every organization to reveal what it really believes about people. Do leaders see AI as a way to shrink the company into a more efficient version of yesterday? Or do they see it as a way to expand the organization’s capacity to learn, imagine, decide, create, and grow? That is the fork in the road. I call this moment AI Darwinism: the new…
Featured Presentation: Goodbye digital transformation, hello AI-first business transformation
Maybe we got digital transformation wrong. Not slightly wrong. Fundamentally wrong. Instead of transforming, we digitized. We took legacy models, legacy processes, legacy thinking…and made them faster. We optimized the candle instead of inventing the light bulb. That was the argument I made on stage at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 in Las Vegas, in a keynote I called “Goodbye Digital Transformation, Hello AI-First Business Transformation.” Here’s what the data tells us: 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives. 51%…