In today's lineup: 

Robots

• AI pilots are the new dead end

• Real ROI from Gen AI

• Glean or Hebbia for your enterprise AI search?

People

• Hayden Brown turns a threat into a high-value service

Love

• The antidote to a disconnected strategy

• Transformative Reads: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Top Insights

• The AI productivity payoff has started showing up in GDP numbers.

• OpenAI's move on healthcare begins the race for regulated industries.

• China is making Meta's AI talent acquisition a national security issue.

• Elon Musk's price for AI sovereignty is a $20 billion data center.

• A jury will now decide if OpenAI's mission was a promise or a sales pitch.

AI pilots are the new dead end

The market has moved on from scattered, low-impact AI pilots. Reports from Deloitte, PwC, and the MIT Sloan Review show 75% of large companies are deploying autonomous agents into core operations this year. The focus is no longer on experimentation but on surgical, outcome-driven AI that solves a specific business problem.

Your playbook for the post-pilot era:

• Solve one expensive problem with automation instead of launching another broad AI initiative.

• Let the business units who feel the pain lead AI deployments, tying results directly to their P&L.

• Demand 90-day ROI for every AI pilot before committing any resources to scaling it.

• Establish clear rules for operational risks like data use and decision oversight from day one.

Real ROI from Gen AI

How human-centric AI delivers business results

• BMW Group uses NVIDIA's Omniverse platform to create digital twins of its factories, allowing them to simulate and optimize robotics and logistics for new vehicle launches 30% more efficiently.

• Recursion Pharmaceuticals accelerated its drug discovery process, identifying five promising drug candidates in-house by using its proprietary AI platform to analyze massive biological datasets.

• JLL launched a proprietary generative AI tool that gives its 50,000 brokers and analysts instant access to internal data, reducing research and analysis time from hours to minutes.

Tool Spotlight

Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage

Glean or Hebbia for your enterprise AI search?

Glean 

Just raised $150 million at a $7.2B valuation, signaling massive enterprise demand for AI search.

Best for: Teams needing a turnkey solution to instantly search across all company apps and find institutional knowledge.

Choose if:

• Need to connect to dozens of apps like Slack, Jira, and Drive on day one.

• Want to equip non-technical users with a powerful, universal search tool.

• Prioritize speed-to-value and ease of use for immediate operational wins.

Hebbia 

Best for: Ops and innovation teams performing deep, complex analysis on massive document sets (legal, finance, R&D).

Choose if:

• Need an AI analyst to reason over dense, unstructured data in financial reports or legal contracts.

• Require verifiable, fact-checked answers with citations directly from source documents.

• Want to build automated workflows based on the information found in your files.

3 other AI knowledge tools to explore...

• Coveo: A powerful, composable AI platform for building search applications tailored to specific business needs.

• Vectara: A developer-focused API for building grounded generation applications with retrieval-augmented generation.

• You: A conversational AI search engine that offers customized experiences for consumers and enterprises.

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Transformation Champion

Hayden Brown turns a threat into a high-value service

Generative AI threatened to make Upwork's freelance marketplace irrelevant. CEO Hayden Brown’s response was to integrate the technology directly into the platform. She launched an AI Services hub and new tools designed to augment, not replace, human skill. This move was a bet on a future where AI makes human expertise more valuable, not obsolete, giving freelancers a way to deliver higher-value work and protecting the company's core business from automation.

The antidote to a disconnected strategy

Most AI projects fail because they are disconnected from the business. A company's strength comes from three sources working together: the expertise of its people, its operational data, and its intelligence tools. When these are isolated, they just create more work.

Three shifts to connect your strategy:

1. Start with your people. Turn your top performers' undocumented knowledge into a system everyone can use.

2. Connect your data. Get your systems talking so marketing, finance, and operations all see the same reality.

3. Add intelligence last. Build AI that learns from your team and your data, so it solves real problems.

Learn more in my article.

Transformative Reads

One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman breaks down the two systems that drive how we think. "System 1" is fast and intuitive, while "System 2" is slow and logical. Kahneman shows how relying on gut feelings often leads to major errors in judgment and reveals the cognitive biases that shape our decisions.

Perfect for: Tech, data, and innovation leaders.

In Culture

The definition of "for the benefit of humanity" is now a legal question of fraud for a jury to decide.

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