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AI data centers drove US electricity up 76%, HSBC upgraded Cisco on AI orders that tripled to $5.3B, and Cerebras raised $5.5B in the year's biggest chip IPO. Buying the tools is the easy part. The real risk is your board: 61% of CEOs say boards are rushing AI transformation, and the least-informed are pushing fastest.
In today's lineup:
Robots
Board FOMO is your biggest AI risk this year
Real ROI from Gen AI
Build your voice stack or buy it whole
People
Minna Song rewires leasing before scaling AI everywhere else
Love
The best AI is the AI your board never sees
Measure What Matters by John Doerr
Reading time: 3 min.
ROBOTS 🤖
How are robotics and AI changing industries? We break down the latest news, tools, and innovations for you.
Top Insights
AI data centers drove US electricity prices up 76%, with America's largest grid watchdog warning the consumer cost impact is not reversible.
HSBC upgraded Cisco to Buy as its AI infrastructure orders tripled, with orders hitting $5.3B year-to-date and management raising the full-year target to $9B.
Runway adds $40M ARR in one quarter and expands into world models, moving beyond AI video to challenge Google on generative media infrastructure.
JPMorgan names Taiwan the world's purest AI buildout play, lifting its bull-case target 20% as AI monetization concerns ease and institutional capital rushes in.
Cerebras surges 68% in the biggest AI IPO of 2026, raising $5.5B on Nasdaq and minting two billionaires in the AI chip race.
Board FOMO is your biggest AI risk this year
CEOs say 35% of their performance evaluation depends on AI ROI. Their boards estimate 27%. The gap lives in the corridor.
A new BCG study of 625 CEOs and board members finds 61% of CEOs say their board is rushing AI transformation. Three-quarters of those boards believe their AI knowledge matches peers. Four in ten CEOs disagree. The gap lands hardest in capital allocation and performance reviews: CEOs weight AI ROI at 35% of their scorecard; boards estimate 27%. Speed without architecture is expensive noise.
How leaders close the gap
Translate board FOMO into a 90-day roadmap with unit economics attached before the next capital cycle.
Require AI proficiency for new directors and brief existing ones on the distance between hype and the actual deployment stack.
Sequence workflow redesign ahead of every board-approved pilot so FOMO capital stops automating broken processes.
What is the biggest cause of the "AI expectations gap" in your organization?
Real ROI from Gen AI
How human-centric AI delivers business results
BMW Group extended its Figure humanoid robot programme to its Leipzig plant, with the Spartanburg pilot already delivering 30x faster simulations and 25% better overall equipment effectiveness on the X3 line.
Citi Wealth rolled out CitiScribe to every North American advisor and unveiled Citi Sky on Google Cloud's Gemini stack, turning AI into a permanent member of the wealth team handling client documentation and real-time financial guidance.
Mass General Brigham studied ambient AI scribes across 4,000 clinicians and reported a 10% drop in EHR documentation time plus a 42% reduction in after-hours work under a hybrid human-AI scribe protocol.
Tool Spotlight
Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage
Build your voice stack or buy it whole
This past week the platform closed a $50M Series B at a $500M valuation after Amazon Ring picked it over 40 competing voice AI vendors.
Best for: Engineering teams that want full control of the voice stack and refuse single-vendor lock-in.
Choose if you...
Want to swap LLM, TTS, STT, and telephony components independently as the stack matures around you.
Run a structured vendor bake-off and need an iPaaS-style orchestration layer underneath every option.
Treat voice AI as a portable workflow, not a sealed appliance, and value modularity over managed convenience.
Best for: Operations leaders who need unit economics on paper before the next pilot goes to the board.
Choose if you...
Need transparent flat-rate pricing the CFO can underwrite before scaling beyond a single contact centre.
Want sub-600ms latency out of the box without engineering a custom telephony pipeline.
Prefer a managed stack with enterprise compliance baked in rather than gluing best-of-breed parts together.
3 other tools to explore
Bland AI is the vertically integrated low-latency option with a proprietary phone infrastructure. ElevenLabs Agents is the voice-quality leader, riding the post-Series-D platform expansion. Deepgram Voice Agent API is the builder-friendly pick if your team already runs Deepgram speech-to-text.
PEOPLE 👥
Meet the innovators turning bold ideas into real-world impact.
Transformation Champion
Minna Song rewires leasing before scaling AI everywhere else
Property management runs on a stack of legacy systems most software teams refuse to touch. EliseAI CEO Minna Song spent six years rewiring leasing, maintenance, and renewals before she let the platform expand. The MIT computer science graduate weathered 100 VC rejections and now serves 1 in 6 U.S. rental units across 75% of the top-50 property managers at a $2.2B valuation, with healthcare next. She redesigned the workflow before she scaled the AI.
LOVE ❤️
Practical wisdom, growth tactics, and a must-read book that will challenge the way you think.
The best AI is the AI your board never sees
Boards reward visibility. They love the demo, the chatbot, the screenshot in the quarterly deck. The trouble is, the highest-returning AI deployments rarely look like that. GE's flagship system monitors 7,000 turbines worldwide and surfaces failures weeks ahead of time. Its operators describe the dashboard with one word: underwhelming. The boring deployments are the ones quietly compounding capital efficiency while the flashy ones eat the press release.
Three moves:
Audit every pending pilot for visible-vs-invisible value and reprioritise the silent ones.
Reframe board metrics from new launches to fewer failures, lower latency, less rework.
Brief the board on the turbine standard so the next AI demo is not the gate to funding.
Build the invisible operating systems that compound efficiency in my book, 100x.
Transformative Reads
One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:
Doerr's account of OKRs is built from Andy Grove's Intel playbook and Google's earliest scaling years. He shows how boards, CEOs, and operators stop fighting over scoreboards once objectives are ladderable, time-bound, and shared. The case studies span Bono's ONE Campaign to YouTube's billion-hour goal.
Perfect for: CEOs and CIOs being asked by their board to attach hard AI ROI numbers to next quarter's roadmap.
In Culture
$297 billion in, and half the boardroom is still 'exploring AI's potential.
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Much Love,
Matt and the Future Works team
