{{first_name | Hi}}, your strategic AI update is here.
The C-suite thinks AI is saving time because they don’t see the work, OpenAI is now taxing the innovation it sells, and the very definition of a job is being rewritten. Meanwhile, 75% of CEOs are now in charge of AI. The disconnect between the strategy in the boardroom and the reality on the ground has never been more expensive.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
— Charles Darwin.
In today's lineup:
Robots
Your neglected tech will kill your AI
Real ROI from Gen AI
The architect's choice: Databricks vs. Snowflake
People
How Aravind Srinivas built the anti-Google
Love
Start innovating with a party
Transformative Reads: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
ROBOTS 🤖
How are robotics and AI changing industries? We break down the latest news, tools, and innovations for you.
Top Insights
Microsoft’s $360bn correction proves the market is finished funding innovation that doesn't print immediate revenue.
Dow is trading 4,500 legacy roles for a new autonomous operating model.
If Anthropic’s own engineers aren't writing code anymore, your software strategy is already outdated.
Google proved that proprietary data walks out the front door faster than hackers can break in.
DeepSeek accessing Nvidia chips confirms that borders cannot contain the global demand for compute.
Your neglected tech will kill your AI
The rush to scale AI is exposing a deep-seated risk many leaders have ignored. While investment soars, a recent report found nearly 25% of mission-critical systems are nearing end-of-service. This is not a maintenance issue. A new Protiviti survey of 1,540 executives found legacy IT has jumped to become the third-highest business risk, up from 12th last year.
Your next moves:
Audit your core systems for AI readiness.
Create a clean data layer instead of slow migrations.
Redesign workflows before you automate them.
Tie tech spending directly to business outcomes.
When legacy tech creates friction, which area feels the most immediate impact?
Real ROI from Gen AI
How human-centric AI delivers business results
LOOM achieved 99.1% accuracy on property valuations using FoxyAI to analyze photos for quality, accelerating bank loan approvals.
Ryanair uses an AWS algorithm to forecast in-flight demand for everything from coffee to ham and cheese paninis, while also running predictive maintenance on its aircraft.
Unilever's AI tools now create marketing assets 30% faster, doubling key metrics like video completion and click-through rates.
Tool Spotlight
Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage
The architect's choice: Databricks vs. Snowflake
The data wars are heating up. Snowflake just launched its Energy Solutions suite to help accelerate grid optimization and emissions reduction, while Databricks continues to strengthen its position in training large language models.
Best for: Enterprises that need a unified platform for complex data engineering and machine learning. Databricks champions the "lakehouse," combining the scalability of data lakes with the performance of data warehouses.
Choose if you need to:
Manage the entire AI/ML lifecycle, from data prep to model deployment, in one place.
Support advanced analytics and AI workloads on massive unstructured datasets (e.g., text, images).
Give data science and engineering teams a collaborative, notebook-first environment.
Best for: Organizations that prioritize a fully managed, easy-to-use cloud data platform. Snowflake decouples storage and compute, offering flexibility for business intelligence and analytics at scale.
Choose if you need to:
Enable business users with fast, reliable SQL-based analytics and BI.
Securely share live data across departments and with external partners.
Scale your data warehouse with minimal administrative overhead.
3 other platforms to explore
Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft Fabric are the go-to choices for teams deeply integrated within their respective cloud ecosystems.
PEOPLE 👥
Meet the innovators turning bold ideas into real-world impact.
Transformation Champion
How Aravind Srinivas built the anti-Google
The world runs on search, but traditional engines force users to sift through ads to find answers. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, saw this not as a search problem but a knowledge problem. He built an "answer engine" that uses AI to directly answer questions with cited sources, bypassing the list of blue links entirely. This transforms information retrieval from a chore into a conversation. The approach is working: with recent enterprise partnerships, Srinivas is scaling his vision to give organizations a new, more direct way to access knowledge.
LOVE ❤️
Practical wisdom, growth tactics, and a must-read book that will challenge the way you think.
Start innovating with a party
Under pressure, companies add controls. It kills innovation. If you want your team to take risks, make it safe to fail. Start by celebrating the work, not just the wins.
If your team fears punishment for failed experiments, they won't run them. Separate rewards from outcomes. When you celebrate the attempt, risk-taking becomes normal.
Treat small wins like major victories. At Ozmo, even minor feature improvements get celebrated. This creates a feedback loop where consistent effort is recognized and repeated.
Celebrate the lessons from your failures. Google treats shutting down a major project as a lesson, not a defeat. That is how they avoid stagnation.
Transformative Reads
One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore provides a framework for marketing disruptive products. Moore identifies the "chasm" between early adopters and the mainstream market as the critical failure point for tech ventures. He offers strategies for bridging this gap by dominating a niche beachhead market before expanding.
Perfect for: Tech marketers and product leaders scaling new technologies.
In Culture
That look on your face when "pre-revenue" stops being a strategy and starts being a problem.
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Much Love,
Matt and the Future Works team
