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Friends,
If you haven’t noticed yet. CEOs aren’t announcing the shift. They’re implementing it. Quietly. In plain sight. The most important workplace transformation of 2025 hasn’t been launched at a conference or come with a white paper or keynote.
It started with a memo.
I’ve worked across enough teams to know: when the real decisions shift from PowerPoint to email, something deeper is happening.
I shared it last month, so you know about it already. On 7 April, Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lütke, emailed his staff five words:
“AI is the new default.”
Within 48 hours, it had been shared thousands of times. Not because it was catchy. Because it said what others hadn’t dared to. That memo became the trigger for a series of internal declarations from other CEOs who didn’t wait for permission to redesign how their companies work.
Within a month, similar memos had surfaced from Duolingo, Box and Fiverr. None of them required board approval. None triggered a regulatory update. And yet, they are reshaping the future of work faster than any policy or product launch.
Shopify told managers not to hire unless they could prove a machine couldn’t do the job. Imagine - one week you are hiring engineers. And overnight, you are building a prompt library instead.
Duolingo began phasing out contractors. Their internal systems can now produce lessons that match the quality of paid writers. Duolingo launched 148 new AI-generated language courses, marking the largest expansion in the company’s history. Full-time staff are being re-skilled. Not in language instruction, but in reviewing machine output.
Box, led by Aaron Levie, asked teams to rebuild how they work. Agents are now expected to run tasks around the clock. Human input is still required, but in review and oversight. Not repetition.
Fiverr took a direct approach. CEO Micha Kaufman told his team: “AI is coming for your job. And mine.” It wasn’t a threat. It was a prompt.
All four moved with speed. No fanfare. No stakeholder theatre. The rewiring didn’t need permission. It only needed conviction.
I’d like to introduce the AI Memo Test
Every organisation now faces three practical questions:
Have you made tool fluency a basic requirement across roles?
Are your job descriptions written to avoid tasks software can already handle?
Are your managers accountable for system-led productivity, not just team output?
Here’s where you stand:
3 out of 3: you’re ahead of the curve.
2 out of 3: you’re holding on.
1 out of 3: you’re exposed.
0: you’re already behind.
Small changes in how we describe work create large shifts in how work gets done.
When Lütke wrote “AI is the new default,” he wasn’t describing the future. He was deciding to lead it.
To make the AI Memo Test practical, I’ve mapped it into a 2x2 matrix.
It charts two factors that define whether a team is falling behind or moving ahead: Tool Fluency and Systems Mindset.
Those low on both are Vulnerable. They are often reliant on outdated workflows and unsure where to begin. High fluency but no systems thinking leads to Technical but Limited teams. They are good at automation but bad at orchestration. Teams with a strong mindset but low fluency are Intuitive but Unstructured. They see what’s changing but can’t yet act on it. Only those strong in both become Future-Ready. They build faster, adapt quicker, and know when to let software lead.
This simple matrix is a mirror. Most teams can locate themselves immediately. The question is whether they stay where they are or move.
For me, the real barrier isn’t infrastructure. It’s a mindset. The SuperSkills framework I’m working on identifies one core capability that separates those who adapt from those who stall:
I call it “The Augmented Mindset.”
Unlike traditional leadership, which prioritises task execution, the Augmented Mindset focuses on orchestrating AI to amplify human creativity and judgment. This means knowing when to step back from doing and focus on directing. It’s the ability to work with technology, not just on top of it. It requires you to recognise the shift, adjust to it and lead through it. Not someday. Now.
Too many people are waiting for instructions. The leaders who move fastest are the ones who change their beliefs about humans' role in a digital workplace.
It’s not just from these memos. There are wider signals beyond these four companies.
Uber wants every employee trained on tools by the end of the year
Zapier has publicly committed to becoming a fully AI-integrated organisation and reports extensive use of automation in daily operations.
Salesforce paused engineering hires after seeing gains from software-led delivery
Jamie Dimon has stated that AI and digital transformation are core to JPMorgan’s strategy, calling it “critical to our future” and saying they are “aggressively deploying it” across the firm.
Stripe has emphasised deploying AI in high-impact areas aligned with human value, with leadership stating they prioritise “developer-first” and “ethically applied” use cases.
I think it’s also worth looking at what markets think. While not every memo moved share prices, companies seen as serious about AI transformation, like Palantir, IBM, and Salesforce, have all seen gains or renewed investor interest tied to their strategic use of automation and systems thinking. This is what the future is all about.
The memos don’t cover areas like upskilling budgets, mental health impact on employees, intellectual property risk, or role clarity in a blended workplace. That silence is telling. There’s no cell in the spreadsheet for cultural transition. The memos rarely mention people leaders. HR isn’t shaping the strategy, it’s reacting to it. This shift isn’t just operational. It’s cultural. And yet the culture builders are being bypassed. No budget line for belief change. No agent in FP&A to calculate who gets left behind. And that’s precisely why capability, not compensation, will define who stays relevant.
As AI ethicist Timnit Gebru has highlighted, “the people most harmed by AI systems are the least likely to be at the table when decisions about its use are made.” To avoid leaving workers behind, companies must pair AI adoption with upskilling programs and inclusive governance, as ethicist Timnit Gebru urges.
I like to go back to the history books to see analogous actions. When VisiCalc launched in 1979, it sped up accounting and quietly redefined what office workers were for. It marked the beginning of automation in white-collar work, reducing the need for manual data entry and reshaping finance roles across industries. Clerical tasks shrank. Roles shifted. The people who advanced weren’t the fastest at sums. They were the ones who could ask better questions of the data.
That same shift is happening again. Only this time, it applies to everyone who types for a living, including me and you. My prediction is this: By the end of the year, don’t be surprised if a Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 firm announces a large-scale redeployment of knowledge workers, not as layoffs, but as transformation. The same work will be done by fewer people, working more broadly, supported by systems. It won’t be called downsizing. It’ll be called evolution. However, companies that rush AI adoption without cultural buy-in risk employee pushback by 2026, as trust erodes faster than systems scale.
Every company now exists in one of two states. Those who have written their memo. And those that will be restructured by someone who has. The question is not whether this moment will come for you. The question is whether you’ll write the memo. Or receive it.
If you haven’t received your AI memo, forward this email to someone who needs to write it. Or write it yourself.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Here are my recommendations for this week:
One of the best tools to provide excellent reading and articles for your week is Refind. It’s a great tool for keeping ahead with “brain food” relevant to you and providing serendipity for some excellent articles that you may have missed. You can dip in and sign up for weekly, daily or something in between - what’s guaranteed is that the algorithm sends you only the best articles in your chosen area. It’s also free. Highly recommended. Sign up.
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How losing all my free time forced me to rethink productivity - When a busy schedule left behavioral scientist Danny Kenny with no free time, the scarcity brought his priorities into sharp focus. The experience helped him develop the concept of “Value-Aligned Productivity,” which involves aligning your work with your core values. For Kenny, real productivity isn’t just about doing more, it’s about knowing why you’re doing it.
Everyone is cheating their way through university and college - Nearly 90% of students use AI tools for assignments, with Chatgpt writing essays, summarising texts, and completing STEM assignments. Universities must shift to in-person assessments as policies against AI use are ineffective. Higher education faces an existential crisis, balancing academic integrity with market pressures in a neoliberal system that prioritises degrees over learning.
Bryan Johnson wants to start a new religion in which “the body is God”
The multimillionaire longevity influencer thinks his new faith could save humanity from superintelligent AI.
AI Is Not Your Friend - How the “opinionated” chatbots destroyed AI’s potential, and how we can fix it.
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Amazon makes ‘fundamental leap forward in robotics’ with device having sense of touch - Vulcan device ‘capable of grabbing three-quarters of items in warehouses’ fuels fears of mass job losses
Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again - Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high. No wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.
Can we make AI less power-hungry? As AI models surge in size and complexity, power consumption is skyrocketing. Data center electricity use jumped from 76 TWh in 2018 to 176 TWh in 2023, potentially reaching 6-12% of US power consumption by 2030. Researchers are tackling this through model pruning, quantization, and workload-balancing software like Perseus, which can cut energy use by 30%. Transparency remains problematic as major AI companies withhold actual power consumption data.
US losing edge in AI talent pool - The US risks losing its edge as the best place in the world to work in tech, according to new reports. Top minds and big money are mobile, while the White House cuts federal science funding and discourages immigration.
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