Shama Hyder's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Answer Share and your Prompt Discovery Index will become two of the most critical KPIs in your entire go-to-market stack. (hint: https://lnkd.in/eZ2DcvnJ)) Here is why. At my keynote earlier this week, someone asked an excellent question about how to show up in AI-based answers (AEO). I immediately had a flashback to when I was first teaching people about SEO 15 years ago. The reality is, the tech has changed, but the math hasn’t. Visibility still boils down to two things: What you say about yourself. What others say about you. The difference today? You can't just check "keyword volume" to see if that second part is working. Millions of decisions now happen inside the "black box" of LLMs before anyone ever visits your site. That is why Zen Media built the system to track this. They are using a 1,000-Prompt Discovery Index (natural language prompts mapped to your ICPs and validated by humans) to see exactly what is happening inside generative search. It allows you to calculate your Answer Share. If AI systems determine what people read, trust, and buy, every brand has two mandates left: • Become the answer where you’re currently invisible. • Protect the places where you are already the answer. Don't go into 2026 blind. #AEO #GenerativeSearch #MarketingStrategy #SEO #AI

Let me translate the latest PwC announcement for you. “We’re building community” means “we need 30% fewer entry-level people and we found a way to make that happen without a hiring freeze.” PwC is consolidating new advisory hires into 13 major hubs (down from 72 offices). The official line? Rebuilding in-person connection and learning. I’ve been in media and communications for over 20 years. “Community” is beautiful language. But that’s a cloak word. Here’s what PwC actually did: They found a way to reduce entry-level headcount without announcing layoffs or hiring freezes. Think about traditional entry-level consulting work: research, data collection, synthesis, slide decks. Work that AI now handles faster and cheaper. PwC has already announced they’re reducing campus hiring targets by about 33% through 2028 and shifting junior responsibilities up the chain. Instead of saying “we’re cutting entry-level hiring” (PR nightmare, recruiting disaster), they said “we’re consolidating locations.” By restricting roles to 13 expensive cities, they let geography do the cutting for them. Same result. Way better optics. What this means for young professionals: - Remote work is disappearing for early-career roles. If you’re starting out or moving up, you need to be in the office. I ran a remote company for 17 years. Proximity is power. - Competition is about to intensify. Thousands of ambitious graduates competing for slots in 13 cities instead of 72. - Geography matters again. These hub cities will see an influx of young talent. Cities not on the list have a choice: court these companies and create ecosystems that give local talent a chance, or watch your young people leave. The bigger pattern: We’ve seen this before. Where artisans went to find patrons. Where creative talent clustered around studios. Where tech workers moved to Silicon Valley. Hubs emerge when the nature of work changes. AI is redefining what entry-level work means. PwC is already saying juniors will need to do manager-level work within three years. PwC won’t be the only one. Watch for other firms to follow this playbook. This is one of the signals I track: talent movement. Where are companies concentrating people? What does that tell us about what skills they think matter? What work are they protecting versus automating? This goes beyond consulting. Every industry is asking: what do we actually need humans for? The answer is reshaping where we work, how we work, and who gets access to opportunity. When you see a headline about “rebuilding community,” look deeper. By 2040, it will be a flex to say the majority of our workforce is human.

I learned the hard way that I can’t want more for employees or clients than they want for themselves. I used to lose sleep over people who were sleeping just fine. For years, I was a "Saver." If I saw potential in someone, I would pour my own life force into them. I’m talking about: • Writing their college essays at midnight. • Calling in favors to get them jobs. • Standing in front of their Board of Directors to defend them when they couldn't defend themselves. I thought this was "Servant Leadership." Actually, it was just poor boundaries. I realized that you cannot loan someone your ambition. You cannot want the win more than the player. When you try to overcompensate for their lack of hunger, you don't empower them. You drain yourself. And you disrespect their choice to be exactly where they are.

PwC: "We're building community" = We're going to need fewer entry-level people, so we're hiring in 13 hubs instead of 72 offices. Google: "We want alignment on AI" = If you're not all in, here's a buyout. I call this the Soft Layoff. Both companies know AI means they need fewer people. But mass layoffs look bad. So they're getting creative. PwC lets geography do the cutting. Can't move to New York or San Francisco? That job just vanished. Google lets culture do the cutting. Not enjoying the pace? Here's your check. Same move: they need fewer people, but you choose to leave. What this means: - Remote work is dead for juniors. You need to be in the room. - Culture fit now means AI fluency. - If your city isn't an AI hub, your talent is gone. This is spreading fast. Talent movement is one of the key signals I track when working with organizations on strategic timing. When companies move people like this, it tells you where entire industries are heading.

A viral AI report. 4,000 layoffs. And the headline everyone is getting wrong. Jack Dorsey just cut Block’s workforce nearly in half. 10,000 down to under 6,000. Stock surged 24%. Is he really doing this because of AI? A lot of smart people say no way, AI isn’t good enough yet to justify cutting half your workforce. And they might be right about today. But that’s not the point kids. Don’t let the layoff headline distract you from what’s actually happening. This isn’t about whether AI can do the work of 4,000 people right now. It’s about the restructuring of work itself. And that is the future, whether it happens at your company this quarter or next year. We saw this with PCs. They didn’t just eliminate jobs. They changed how every company operated. AI is doing the same thing, faster. I was on a panel with Jack years ago when Twitter had fewer than 2,000 users. We were the only ones saying social media was the future. His pattern hasn’t changed: read the signal early, move first, let the world catch up. Could I be wrong? Sure. But I’d rather be prepared and wrong than unprepared and right.

This morning I woke to this message: "Thanks so much for everything!!!! It was fabulous. I was nonstop on my laptop from the moment I got in the car to arriving back to Salt Point. I never do that! Got so much done. 🤗" It was from one of the 8 leaders I hosted around my dining table in Miami yesterday. It was the inaugural workshop for Rewired. A full day of hands-on AI building for CEOs, nonprofit leaders, founders, people responsible for teams and big ideas. Here's just some of what happened: - One attendee used AI to analyze their customer data. It spotted that a specific product was being purchased heavily by behavioral health institutions looking for safety-compliant options. That's niche industry language the seller would never have thought to search for. Not only did AI surface it, it WROTE the product page to match exactly what those buyers were looking for in seconds. - Another attendee watched an Excel project that would have taken hours, maybe days, get completed in minutes. - Someone built a website for their business. - One person started planning a wedding with AI. (Yes, really.) But the biggest shift was funnily this. People walked in typing everything. By the afternoon, they'd ditched their keyboards entirely. Voice-first AI workflows changed how they thought about getting things done. Emails sorted automatically. Drafts created before they asked. Opportunities surfaced from their own data that they'd been sitting on for months. The stack we worked with: OpenClaw, Claude, Whispr Flow, Warp. These aren't toys. These are the tools reshaping how work gets done. Here's what I know in my bones to be true: One week in AI right now is a year in normal time. If you haven't tried OpenClaw or explored Claude Co-Work, if you're still doing things the old way and you're not learning this on your own, you are falling behind. I am considering doing another in April because there were folks who wanted to attend but couldn't. If you want in, DM me. I am going to limit it to 8 again.

Atlassian just laid off 1,600 people. 10% of their workforce. The CEO said it would be "disingenuous" to ignore how AI shifts the skill sets and the number of roles required. Meanwhile, their stock has been hammered…down 50% in a single year because investors fear AI will disrupt traditional software companies entirely. Enter "The Double-Edged Sword" of the AI era. They are cutting people because of AI, and losing market value because of AI at the same time. This is the Next Great Divergence. PwC analyzed nearly a billion job ads across six continents. The data is clear: AI-exposed industries are seeing 3x higher growth in revenue per employee. Same economy. Same tools. Wildly different outcomes. But, you might say, “Shama, Atlassian didn’t ignore AI. They built it into their products early. And they are still cutting 10% of their team.” Why? Because the shift demands different skills, not just more tools. Is "AI" just a convenient scapegoat for financial restructuring? Maybe. Block cut thousands using similar logic. Oracle did it, too. Two things can be true at the same time. The divide is no longer between companies. It’s between individuals. And, that gap compounds every single week. Which side of the divide are you building for?

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Most business leaders still believe the myth. The myth says: if you craft the right message, position the right way, and persuade the right audience, you win. The reality? You win by being remembered. Look at American Eagle. Their Sydney Sweeney campaign didn’t “convince” anyone. It triggered cultural chatter, political commentary, and endless think-pieces. What actually moved the stock wasn’t persuasion. It was presence. For a week straight, American Eagle was everywhere. Love it or hate it, people remembered the brand. Same with Levi’s jumping into the moment with Beyoncé. No persuasion required. Just riding the wave of memory. The lesson is simple: most success doesn’t come from changing minds. It comes from occupying them. 3 rules leaders should keep in mind: ↳Reach beats frequency. Light touches across more people matter more than heavy engagement with a few. ↳Consistency beats creativity. Memory structures build when assets repeat, not when they’re reinvented. ↳Familiarity beats preference. Customers buy what they recall first, not what they claim to like best. Boring is the unfair advantage. Because boring builds memory. And memory drives markets. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eu_Z7rrt #leadership

I've seen this movie before. When social media emerged, regulated industries needed a completely different playbook than consumer companies. Same rules, different game. AI is no different. That's why I invested in Knapsack. Mark Heynen (5x founder, ex-Google/Meta) and Cooper Lindsey (ex-Lambda) get that regulated industries can't just copy what works in consumer tech. Mark and Cooper met at PayJoy, so they've both seen firsthand what it takes to build in regulated environments. As someone who founded and built Zen Media into one of the country's leading B2B marketing companies, I know the difference between solutions that sound good in theory and what actually works in practice. Here's what they're building differently: ↳ Human-in-the-loop automations vs autonomous agents ↳ Compliance-first design vs move-fast-and-break-things ↳ Augmented decision-making vs replacement If you're in wealth management, legal, or another regulated industry and want to see this approach in action, send me a DM. I'll connect you with the team. The companies that adapt AI to their regulatory reality will win. The ones trying to force-fit consumer AI solutions will struggle. Remember: the best technology isn't always the flashiest - it's the one that actually works in your world. #RegTech #AICompliance #WealthTech

One of the things I love about what I do is I get to sit across industries, from tech to entertainment to finance, and watch the same patterns show up in completely different places. The creator economy reshaping Hollywood? That’s the same signal I see in B2B, in tech, in how companies build trust. The companies that win aren’t the ones with the most information. They’re the ones connecting the dots fastest. Case in point. I just moderated a conversation with Matt Belloni (Puck News) at Faena Rose on the future of entertainment. A few things he said that I haven’t stopped thinking about: 👉🏼 The experience flip is real. We used to pick a venue, then find a movie. Now people choose the film and decide how they want to experience it. The whole model just flipped. 👉🏼 The creator-studio marriage is coming. MrBeast + Amazon isn’t the exception. It’s the early signal. 👉🏼Hollywood still can’t talk about its losses. Startups celebrate failure publicly. Entertainment hides it. There’s a massive opportunity in that gap. 👉🏼 YouTube is the most-watched channel on television right now. And most brands are still treating it like a bonus platform. This is exactly what the Hyder Index tracks. The gap between when a signal hits an industry and when companies actually respond. Because the pattern is always the same: the signals are there. Most companies just move too slowly to act on them.

We are 300,000 years old, pretending to be 5,000. Read that again. For most of history, we processed the world through the "Campfire Era": We followed the loudest voice. We moved with the tribe...reacted to the heat of the moment. We survived. Then came the Literacy Era. We learned to be linear, abstract, and evidence-based. We built vaccines and calculus by separating feeling from fact. We moved from surving to thriving. But here is the danger: Social media is "Ancient Media." It has dragged us back to the campfire. In many boardrooms today, we aren't making strategic decisions anymore. We are making tribal ones. In what Scott Barker calls the "Acceleration Decade," moving fast isn't the skill. Staying literate is, and I call this Strategic Urgency: the discipline of creating distance between the "fire" and your "fuel." The leaders who win won't be the ones who move the fastest. They’ll be the ones who can straddle both worlds. Which era is your leadership team living in right now?

Anthropic spent $8M on a Super Bowl ad to say “we don’t have ads.” Sam Altman’s response? “We have more users in Texas than you have in the whole country.” Same industry. Wildly different strategies. Both winning. What’s actually happening is that they’re riding different Tailwinds. OpenAI: Tailwind of Mass Scale. Anthropic: Tailwind of Trust. Your effort matters way less than your direction. If you’re working 10x harder than your competitor but moving half as fast, they may just be riding a Tailwind. Drop the oars. Look around. Where is the wind actually blowing in your industry?

The real lesson in that Timothée Chalamet Zoom call isn’t what you think. Everyone is talking about it, but let’s look at it through the Strategic Urgency lens, because the real insight is not about a clever campaign. That misses the plot. This is about building a habit into your teams: see the signal, interpret it through six questions, and act while the window is open. Here’s how it works in practice. The signal they saw: Customer behavior has shifted. We live on Zoom now. The format is instantly recognizable, relatable, and we feel included in the joke. Everyone has been in a chaotic Zoom brainstorm with increasingly unhinged ideas. That shared experience is the signal. How they interpreted it: Let’s run this through my six interpretation questions. 1) Would we be upset if our competitor did this first? Yes. Imagine a competing Christmas release capturing this moment first. That’s a problem. 2) What unique advantage makes this more valuable for our organization? They have Timothée Chalamet and the movie’s tone is playful, so they can take risks others cannot. 3) Does this help us reach our stated goal? Yes. Build heat for Marty Supreme ahead of the Christmas Day release. 4) What is the realistic downside versus the cost of being slow? Wrong equals one more asset that moves the needle a bit. Slow equals missing the moment entirely. 5) Is there a time window, and are we within it? Absolutely. The release date is fixed. The promotional window is closing. 6) Does this align with how we want to operate? Perfectly. The material is not serious. The tone fits. A24 is culturally fluent. They acted on it: Over 10 million views. The internet talking about Marty Supreme. They saw the signal and moved while the window was open. This is a learnable framework. Notice the behavior shift. Run it through six questions. Act decisively. Most teams saw the same signals. Even fewer acted on them. Strategic Urgency is the system that closes that gap.

The LinkedIn algorithm is dead. Meet the reasoning engine. Most marketers are still optimizing for an algorithm that doesn’t exist anymore. A few months ago, I started noticing something odd. High-engagement posts were getting buried. Thoughtful essays with modest likes were surfacing for weeks. The pattern didn’t match LinkedIn’s historical behavior. So I went looking for the technical explanation. LinkedIn replaced its engagement-counting system with a 150-billion-parameter AI called 360Brew. This isn’t a feature update. It’s a complete architectural shift, and it represents a massive Incentive Arbitrage opportunity that’s closing fast. Here’s what changed: The platform no longer just tracks likes and comments. It reads your prose. LinkedIn needed high-quality content to train its AI, so it temporarily repriced distribution to reward exactly that. The mechanics: 1. Front-Loading AI models suffer from “Lost-in-Distance.” Your headline and first 200 characters carry 90% of the weight. If you don’t signal expertise immediately, the engine limits distribution. 2. Profile Coherence The AI treats your profile, content, and interactions as a single dossier. Inconsistency between what you claim and what you publish kills your authority score. 3. Conceptual Depth Over Viral Velocity 360Brew performs zero-shot reasoning. It analyzes substance, not just engagement metrics. Quality content now surfaces for weeks instead of hours. If you want to work with this system: Do: ∙ Put your strongest expertise signal in your headline and first sentence ∙ Write with depth and precision. The AI rewards authoritative prose ∙ Keep content aligned with your profile. CFOs should post about finance, not productivity hacks ∙ Engage meaningfully in your domain. Thoughtful replies outweigh random likes Don’t: ∙ Bury your main point in paragraph three. The AI has already categorized you ∙ Post unrelated trending topics. Incoherence tanks your authority score ∙ Use engagement pods. The engine reads substance, not metrics ∙ Deploy generic bait (“Tag someone!”). It signals low value The simplest test: Read your last five posts. Do they reinforce the same expertise? If not, the AI is confused about who you are. The window: Right now, most users chase likes while the platform rewards narrative quality. In 6-12 months, everyone will understand this shift and the arbitrage closes. Companies who recognize this now have a structural advantage in reach that competitors will pay full price for later. This is Incentive Arbitrage: spotting when platforms temporarily reprice distribution to solve their own problems, then acting before the window closes. Coherence is the new currency. Have you adjusted your strategy, or are you still optimizing for the old system? #LinkedIn #AI #ContentStrategy #StrategicUrgency

Instacart is under the FTC microscope for their AI pricing tool today. If a massive tech company with thousands of engineers is facing scrutiny over their "blueprint," what makes you think your internal "vibecoded" side project is safe? I see so many leaders falling into the Builder’s Trap right now. They think because AI makes coding faster, they should build their own internal tools for everything. This is a dangerous (and expensive) mistake. 99% of the time, the answer is BUY. Here is the physics of why: 1. The Liability Gap: When you buy enterprise software, you buy their compliance, their security, and their R&D. When you build it, you own the risk. 2. The Obsession Gap: The vendor selling that software eats that problem for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Your internal team treats it as a "side project." You cannot compete with their depth of focus. And let’s be honest about "Vibecoding." Thinking AI replaces a structural architect is like thinking a Pinterest board replaces a blueprint. It looks pretty, but the foundation will crumble. Stop trying to be a software company. Buy the tool. Build your business.

I’d bet anything someone on the OpenAI team sat through one of my keynotes, because what OpenAI just ran is my interpretation framework, question by question. Storytime! Why OpenAI built Sora…and then killed it. OpenAI built Sora because they spotted a real signal. AI video was exploding. Runway raised $141 million. Pico was growing. Every creator wanted to make video without a camera. One year later, they killed it. Disney found out thirty minutes before the announcement and pulled a billion-dollar partnership the same day. OpenAI saw the signal. They just never asked whether it was theirs. While they spent a year building a video tool, Anthropic quietly captured 73% of first-time enterprise AI buyers. OpenAI's share dropped from 50% to 27%. That's the number that should have kept someone up at night. The signal wasn't wrong. The interpretation was. I built my interpretation framework around five questions that separate the signals worth chasing from the ones worth letting go. OpenAI would have hit "no" on at least three of them. Would we be gutted if Anthropic launched their own video tool? No. Does a video generator fit a company hiring the CFO who took Square public and preparing for what could be the biggest IPO in tech history? No. The realistic downside of skipping Sora was zero. The cost of losing enterprise buyers while they were distracted? Existential. Every leader has been in this room. A real signal shows up. It's exciting. Everyone around the table wants to move. And the hardest thing to say is: "This is real, but it's not ours." The companies that build momentum aren't the ones who chase every signal. They're the ones who know which signals to let go. Have you ever been that person in the room saying "this isn't our fight" while everyone else chased the shiny thing? This one is for you.

A founder I know got the call every executive dreads: ransomware, client data locked, seven-figure demand. Six months earlier, their CFO had called cybersecurity "a nice-to-have." Security isn't a line item. It's a leadership decision. The HP EliteBook X Flip is powered by an Intel® Core™ Ultra Processor with AI-driven threat detection that works the moment you power on. The breach you prevent is the one you never have to explain to the board. #ad #IntelCoreUltra

How does AI actually find its answers? Most people assume it works like Google. You ask a question, it searches, it gives you results. But that is not what is happening most of the time. And if you don’t understand the difference, you are making decisions based on a wrong mental model. Some AI pulls from memory and some from search. These are fundamentally different processes. The first type is foundational. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. These models were trained on a massive snapshot of the internet. What they know about you was baked in during training. You can’t post your way into their memory next week. But you can build the kind of authority that gets absorbed the next time they update. Publishing in major outlets. Getting cited by other credible voices. Having your ideas referenced consistently across the web. It’s a longer game, but it’s not a passive one. The second type retrieves. Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT with browsing turned on. These go hunting before they answer. They pull live sources in real time, synthesize them, and cite them. What you publish this week can show up in an answer next week. Now here is the part nobody wants to hear. There is no hack for either one. No tool is going to shortcut your way into AI answers. Tools can help you track what is happening, and some good ones are emerging. But what actually determines whether AI pulls your brand into a response is the same thing that has always mattered: clarity, specificity, and consistency. AI should be the wake-up call to finally do the things you were supposed to do a long time ago. Get specific about what you actually do. Publish consistently in places that matter. Make your expertise citable, not just claimable. When someone asks Perplexity for a keynote speaker who teaches AI strategy in a practical way for business leaders, it goes hunting for fresh, specific, citable answers. Right now. In real time. The question is whether your content gives it something worth pulling. The brands that win in AI are not the ones gaming a new system. They are the ones who finally got serious about the fundamentals.

Jack Dorsey just cut Block’s workforce nearly in half. From 10,000 to under 6,000. This is a watershed moment. Is the business is struggling? Nope. He did it because he read a signal and acted on it before he was forced to. I was on a panel with Jack years ago when Twitter had fewer than 2,000 users. We were the only ones on stage advocating for social media as the future. Most of the room was skeptical. We were right, and early. That’s his pattern. He was one of the first CEOs to send employees home during the pandemic when everyone else was still debating. And now he’s making one of the biggest AI-driven workforce restructurings we’ve seen from a major tech company. When Jack moves, others follow. His words: “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.” The market agreed. Block’s stock surged 24%. Here’s what most people are missing in the “AI is taking jobs” conversation. Dorsey said smaller, flatter teams using intelligence tools can do more and do it better. And that capability is compounding every week. The gap between companies who see this shift coming and those who don’t is growing by the day. Strategic Urgency is the ability to spot that signal, interpret what it means for you, and act on it. That’s exactly what Dorsey is doing here. This isn’t a call for every leader to start doing layoffs. It’s a call to read the signal and build your plan now, while you’re operating from strength, before the market forces your hand. If you’re an individual at any level of any organization, there are three things you need to be doing right now. Uno, build your personal brand. If you are quietly building in a corner where no one knows what you do, that is a risk you can no longer afford. Visibility is career insurance. The people who get tapped for the next opportunity are the ones others already know and trust. Dos, get with AI. I don’t care what your company’s official stance is. Do not let their timeline become yours. Learn it. Use it. Make it a personal priority. Imagine working at a company in the ‘90s that told you computers weren’t necessary. Maybe for them, in that moment, they weren’t. But for your career? You couldn’t afford to wait for permission. The same is true right now. Tres, think about your next move before you have to. The best time to build optionality is when you still have a paycheck and stability. Update the skills. Expand the network. Position yourself so that if your company makes this same decision six months from now, you’re not scrambling. You’re ready. Windows of opportunity are opening and closing faster than they ever have. Your ability to spot the signal, interpret what it means for you, and act on it is what separates the people who get ahead from the people who get caught off guard.

I tried to look for this and couldn't believe it didn't exist. We know every industry is getting hit hard with change but how are the companies within each industry actually responding? We have disruption indices that tell you how fast things are moving. We have readiness surveys where executives grade their own homework. But, nobody is measuring the gap between the two. So I built it. 🤓 The Hyder Index tracks 15 US industries across six change signals (customers, talent, policy tailwinds, money, culture, and disruptions) and five response indicators (earnings call language, strategic hiring, capital reallocation, product activity, and response timing). Every score is based on publicly verifiable data. No surveys. No self-assessments. What companies are doing, not what they say they are doing. A score of 50 means equilibrium. Higher means the gap is widening. Some of what I found: - No industry scored in the Green Zone. Not one. - Technology & AI leads at 81. Not because tech companies are unaware, but because the pace of change is so extreme that even active responses are falling behind. - Media & Entertainment scored 79. Google search traffic to publishers is down 33%. 17,000+ jobs cut. And two-thirds of publishers report zero efficiency gains from their AI efforts. - Education has the lowest response score (15) of any industry. 89% of students are using AI for coursework, yet the average institution takes 12 to 18 months to set an AI policy. By the time the policy is live, the technology has already evolved. - The closest to equilibrium? Hospitality at 49. The pandemic forced the industry to build organizational muscle for rapid change. That survival muscle is still paying dividends today. This is Version 1.0. The methodology is completely transparent. I expect people to push back on scores, and I welcome it. That is how the data gets better. Please feel free to geek out with me on this so I don't feel so alone! But here is what I know after 17 years of advising companies across six continents: most companies do not fail because they miss the change coming. They fail because they respond to it without the right aim or the right timing. The Hyder Index measures that gap. Check it out here: hyderindex.com I will be publishing monthly updates and industry deep dives. If your industry is in here, I would love to hear whether the score matches what you are seeing on the ground. (And if you want me to bring this data to your executive team or your next main stage, lemme know. It’s been really fun so far.) What industry are you most curious about? #HyderIndex #StrategicUrgency #FutureOfWork #BusinessStrategy

Soon, ‘recommended for you’ will feel as old-fashioned as telling someone to ‘hang up the phone.’ Once personalization is the default, the idea of generic content will seem like a relic of the analog age.

This weekend my son created two video games from scratch using AI. The kid is 6. Meanwhile most leaders I talk to are still drowning in email, sitting through meetings that should be async, and spending their sharpest hours on work that doesn't move anything forward. By 9 PM they're back on their laptop wondering where the day went. That's why I built Rewired. This Thursday I'm hosting eight people at my home in Miami. One day. Laptops open. We tear apart how you currently work and rebuild it with AI woven into every layer. Nobody leaves until their workflow is actually running differently. This isn't a lecture about AI. It's an intervention for how you operate. My own daily stack includes Discord, Telegram, Claude, OpenClaw, voice-activated bots, and automated pipelines that run while I sleep. I built and sold a multimillion-dollar agency, I keynote across 26 countries, I have two young kids and three giant schnauzers. I'm doing more right now with less effort than at any point in my career. With tools that are available to all of us right now. The inaugural group for the workshop is full. I'm already planning the next date. If you're a leader who keeps telling yourself you'll figure this out when things slow down (they won't), send me a DM. I'll put you at the front of the list.

Look at this one job for which demand has surged 800% in the last nine months. Forward Deployed Engineers. Their job is to go inside a company and wire AI into everything it already does. Salesforce staffed a thousand of them. Because the software doesn't rewire your organization. Someone has to. And this isn't just a tech story. Hospitals just made the same move. For decades, they relied on staffing agencies because the internal tools for credentialing, shift matching, and compliance weren't good enough. The agencies weren't a partner. They were a patch. Then the tools caught up. Credentialing dropped from 60 days to 15. One health system built an internal platform and nurses doubled their shifts in three months. Two industries. Same discovery at the same time. The middleman existed because the internal capability wasn't there yet. Once it was, the margin became indefensible. If you run a team or a P&L, this is the audit: look at your vendor spend and ask whether you're paying for capability or for wiring you could now own. If you run a consulting practice or a services firm, the question is harder: is what you sell a capability your clients can't build? Or a bridge they haven't gotten around to replacing? The firms that will thrive through this are the ones who move from bridging gaps to building roads with the client. Not the ones hoping the client never learns to build.

Your reputation now has a seven-day shelf life. New research from Muck Rack shows that AI systems cite content most heavily within the first week of publication. After that window closes, the odds of that source shaping AI answers plummet. This changes everything about how companies think about timing. The old model: Publish when ready. Perfection over speed. The new reality: Publish consistently or be invisible in the conversations that matter. Most companies are still operating on quarterly content calendars while AI is building buyer perceptions in real time. The question isn't whether you have a content strategy. It's whether your timing matches the pace of how decisions are actually being made.

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. But should they? According to LinkedIn's latest Workforce Confidence survey, 40% of U.S. professionals say they're interested in launching a business soon. The numbers are even higher in certain industries—53% in arts & recreation and 52% in hospitality are ready to go solo. I get it. The appeal is real. According to the same survey, 65% of self-employed professionals report having control over their careers vs. just 45% of traditional employees. But here's what the stats don't tell you: entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. Before you quit your job and dive into the startup world, watch this. This isn't about crushing dreams—it's about making informed decisions. Because the last thing you want is to realize 18 months in (when you're burned out and broke) that you should have asked these questions first. The entrepreneurial path isn't for everyone and that's totally ok.

#ad You don't need to be Fortune 500 to access Fortune 500 buying power! 💪 This mindset shift changed everything for my business operations. Ready to unlock bulk discounts and business pricing? Create a free account today at amazon.com/shama @Amazon Business #SmartBusinessBuying #EntrepreneurLife #BusinessEquality #SmallBizPower #LevelThePlayingField

A prediction without interpretation is just entertainment. And, you don’t have time to be entertained. (Put down the reels!) Every December, you get flooded with trend reports. By February, you’ve forgotten them. The problem isn’t the predictions. It’s that no one teaches you what to do with them. After 17 years advising Fortune 500s and PE portfolios, I’ve learned that the companies that win aren’t the ones with the best data. They are the ones that apply Strategic Urgency. We are three weeks into 2026, and the market is splitting. --> The Middle has collapsed (The Great Fracture). --> Imperfection is the new luxury (The Human Premium). --> The Public Square is dead (The Post-Social Shift). Your organization is either building for these realities, or you are hedging. If you’re hedging...you’re dying. I wrote this piece to give leadership teams the vocabulary to finally move. It covers the "Clay Layer," the death of the average consumer, and why being an Operator requires violence.

This is the purest form of intent marketing that’s ever existed. Hint: https://lnkd.in/eAJnhQZu For decades, marketers have tried to reverse-engineer buyer intent from keywords, clicks, and behaviors. We’ve been guessing at what people want based on proxy signals. Not anymore. When someone types “Best B2B PR agency for lead generation” into ChatGPT, that’s not a signal of intent. That IS the intent. In their own words. At the exact moment they need it. Today, Zen Media released the Prompt Discovery Index™, which captures the actual language of buyer intent: unfiltered, uninterpreted, and actionable. It maps the 1,000 to 10,000+ prompts buyers actually use in your category. Then it shows you: • Which buying moments you own • Which ones your competitors own • Which ones are open territory Here’s the reality: Your visibility report might show 250 buy-intent prompts with 0.2% visibility. That’s not “you’re losing search traffic.” That’s “buyers are having 250 different purchase conversations and you’re in 0.5 of them.” These aren’t vanity metrics. These are missed sales conversations. Why now matters: AI-generated answers will reduce traditional search traffic by 30%+ in the next 12 months. The companies that show up in those answers capture demand at the precise moment of maximum purchase intent. The ones that don’t become invisible. Early results prove it: • 30% increase in AI citations in 90 days • 3x more visibility in first answer sets in 30 days • Direct correlation to pipeline growth

NVIDIA just announced a $100 billion deal with OpenAI. Everyone’s asking: is it real money or just financial engineering? Wrong question. The real question is: what signal does this send about where AI is headed? ↳ It signals where top engineering talent should bet their careers ↳ It signals that today’s models are just the beginning of an infrastructure race ↳ It signals that every other tech giant—Google, Microsoft, Amazon—now has to show their hand This isn’t about whether the money is “real.” It’s about the urgency it creates. When market leaders make moves this big—real or theatrical—they compress decision timelines for everyone else. Your competitors. Your clients. Your team. The future doesn’t sneak up on you. It announces itself. And today’s announcement just compressed AI timelines by 12 months. #AI #Leadership #Strategy #Innovation

I counted the women in this room on one hand. An AI meetup. Sold out. …And almost no women. Happy International Women's Day. Let's talk about what nobody wants to say out loud. This is not just one event. This is a pattern playing out at AI events across the world. Here are two data points that should stop you mid-scroll: LinkedIn's own data shows women's share of senior leadership hires peaked in 2022 at nearly 35%. It has dropped every year since. Down to 33% in 2025. To be clear, the drop is not because women stopped applying. It is happening on the employer side. Meanwhile, Harvard studied 143,000 people across 25 countries and found women are 22% less likely to use generative AI than men. These two trends are running at the same time. They are connected. Part of this is an ethics gap. Women are more likely to pause and ask whether they should be using AI. Men just use it. But the bigger driver is identity. A lot of women do not see themselves as "techy." So they skip the meetup. They hang back. They do not grab the seat. Here is what I need you to hear: AI is not a tech skill. It is a thinking tool. And you are already a builder, a strategist, a problem solver. This was made for you. Nobody is coming to close this gap for us. The builders who move now will be the ones running the table in five years. Get in the room. You deserve to be here.

In the age of AI, mediocrity is free. Mark D’Arcy, Global Creative Director at Microsoft AI, dropped this line that stopped the room cold at today’s MSN Partner Summit in Monaco. Monaco is the 26th country I’ve spoken in, and it reminded me how universal this challenge has become. It’s not just about content anymore. It’s about how leaders and organizations operate when “good enough” becomes automatic. The differentiator now is excellence in strategy, in creativity, in execution. What will excellence look like in your industry when AI makes mediocrity effortless?

Target’s new CEO, Michael Fiddelke, spoke about the need to “move with urgency and focus.” But here’s the challenge every modern leader faces: Too little urgency, and opportunities slip away. Too much urgency, and teams burn out chasing noise instead of signal. What Target and every organization today needs isn’t just speed. It is Strategic Urgency. The discipline of knowing: ↳ what truly matters ↳ when to accelerate ↳ when to conserve energy Because urgency without clarity = chaos. Urgency with clarity = competitive advantage. In my latest piece, I share how Target can embed Strategic Urgency into its DNA and why this capability will define its turnaround.

This one is for the parents on LinkedIn… I am not teaching my kids to code. People keep asking me, “How do I prepare my kids for AI?” They expect me to say robotics. Prompt engineering. Some kind of junior developer boot camp. But the tools are going to change a hundred times before my kids are grown. What won’t change is how they see themselves. So everything I do is about reinforcing identity. Here are the five things I tell my kids: 1. You are a builder. 2. You are an awesome problem solver. 3. You are so resourceful. 4. Your worth is not defined by someone else’s capacity, human or otherwise. 5. You love to learn. We can’t control the tools they’ll have in ten years. But we can arm them with an identity that isn’t rooted in fear.

The Early Mover Advantage is Dead. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced it’s building an AI-powered jobs platform to compete with LinkedIn. The shock wasn’t the technology. It was the timing. Where LinkedIn has been iterating for years, OpenAI spotted a window and moved in months. This is Strategic Urgency in action. And it’s the same pattern we saw in 2020 when OneDine took their tableside ordering tech and retooled it overnight for contactless dining. They had a six-month head start while everyone else was still “evaluating options.” That advantage still pays dividends today. The lesson? We’re no longer in an age of early mover advantage. Moving early is just table stakes. The real differentiator is executing at market speed. Windows don’t open for years anymore. They open for weeks. Sometimes days. That means the central question for leaders has shifted: Not “what’s our long-term strategy?” but “do we have the urgency muscle to move fast enough to matter?” Because in compressed markets, waiting isn’t cautious. It’s corporate suicide.

Matt Shumer's piece "Something Big is Happening" is going viral. He's sounding the alarm that what happened to tech workers in 2025 is about to happen to everyone else. I agree with him. But his advice stops at the individual level: spend an hour a day experimenting with AI tools. Great start! But if you're leading a team, a department, or a company? Individual skill-building isn't enough. While people are figuring out how to use ChatGPT, entire organizational structures are being rewritten underneath them. PwC just consolidated new hires into 13 hubs instead of 72 offices. Google offered voluntary buyouts to employees not "all in" on AI. Both moves were framed around culture. The real reason is much simpler. They need fewer people and they know it. I wrote a full breakdown of what I'm calling the Three Collapses and what leaders should actually do about them. Your planning cycles are too slow. Your role definitions are outdated. And the half-life of an opportunity has shrunk from years to weeks. The companies winning right now aren't the ones with the fanciest AI tools. They're the ones that built the muscle to spot which shifts matter for THEIR business and move before the window closes.

Monday morning reality check: My team was drowning in department reports, vendor proposals, market research, and board materials from 5 different strategic initiatives. Sound familiar? Instead of spending hours manually organizing and synthesizing information across departments, we transformed our workflow with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Here's what changed everything: ✅ Created an organized PDF Space for all strategic documents ✅ Used AI Assistant to identify key risks and opportunities across ALL initiatives ✅ Extracted critical action items and resource requirements instantly ✅ Generated executive summaries and presentations with Adobe Express integration The result? What used to take our leadership team hours now happens in minutes – with better insights and faster decision-making. This isn't just about organizing PDFs. It's about empowering businesses to make faster, more impactful decisions while keeping teams aligned and informed. Fellow executives and business leaders – how much time could you save if document synthesis was this streamlined? Try Adobe Acrobat Studio and see the difference for yourself. Link to my PDF Space below 👇 #AdobeAcrobatPartner #digitaltransformation #leadership #businessstrategy https://lnkd.in/errfUEja

Parenting is basically improv with better props now. This holiday season, get weird with AI. It’s not just for spreadsheets. Happy Holidays!

The news that Slack’s CEO is departing for OpenAI isn't just a personnel change....it’s a massive signal about the future of attention. We are seeing a migration from "Public Feeds" to "Private Channels" and now, to "Intelligent Interfaces." I challenged the audience at LevelUp earlier this year to look at this discrepancy. Human behavior has already shifted. We consume publicly, but we share, validate, and decide privately...in DMs, in Group Chats, and yes, in Slack channels. The gap between "how humans actually behave" and "how businesses think humans behave" is getting wider. This is a lesson in Strategic Urgency. The market doesn't send you a memo when it pivots. It just moves. The leaders who win in 2026 won't be the ones optimizing for public applause; they will be the ones who understand AND ACT on the invisible currents driving behavior in the private channels we can't see.

What happens when a billion people gain superpowers? For two years, we’ve talked about AI as if it’s an external force, something separate from us. But what if we’ve been framing it wrong all along? Instead of artificial intelligence, what if we started thinking in terms of intelligence amplified? That single shift changes everything. It centers the human, not the machine. It reframes the future from one of replacement to one of empowerment. We’re not watching AI evolve. We’re evolving with it. And when a billion people suddenly have access to amplified intelligence, it reshapes what’s possible in every classroom, courtroom, and boardroom on earth. This edition of The Hyder Ground explores how that shift—from AI to IA—might be the most important mindset change of our time. #AI #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Innovation #IntelligenceAmplified

I just wrapped up a keynote in Aspen to a room of high-net-worth wealth advisors. The topic was Strategic Urgency. I taught them my framework of "Six Signals" to track before the market moves. And almost immediately, the market handed me the perfect case study for Signal #1: The Customer Signal. 60%. That is the percentage of Dollar Tree’s new customers who make over $100,000 a year. That represents three million new households in the last quarter alone. But if you look at the receipts, the story gets interesting. They aren’t buying milk. They aren’t buying eggs. They are buying party favors and holiday decor. The CEO calls it “the thrill of the hunt.” This isn’t an economic story about inflation pinching the upper middle class. This is a psychological story about a massive shift in consumer behavior. When people making six figures are getting their dopamine hits from a $1.25 holiday decoration, the old models of consumer segmentation are officially broken. The Lesson: AI can process transaction data and browsing patterns in real time. The companies using AI to spot these shifts saw them months before the headlines did. Stop listening to what the market says it values. Look at where it’s actually spending its time. Where else is value perception shifting right now that your competitors are missing? #StrategicUrgency #ConsumerBehavior #MarketTrends #Leadership #RetailStrategy

Nearly 2 billion people use AI. Only 3% pay for it. I've been analyzing why AI products fail to convert, and it comes down to three gaps most companies don't even know they have:  👉 The Comprehension Gap: You're explaining features when customers need outcomes.  👉 The Confidence Gap: Early AI hype burned many. Now they don't believe your claims.  👉 The Connection Gap: Users understand what you do, believe it works, and still don't buy because they can't picture it in their Tuesday morning. Here's the uncomfortable truth: 88% of non-users are unclear how AI will impact their life. And 26% of consumers feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of AI tools. The products that win won't have the most advanced models. They'll have the clearest value propositions. That's a strategy problem, not a technology problem. I break down exactly how to bridge each gap in my latest piece.

Amazon just laid off 14,000 people, and it could hit 30,000. Their CEO said it out loud: “AI will reduce our workforce.” This isn’t just about Amazon. It’s a Talent Movement signal, one of the six signals I teach leaders to watch. They are cutting layers while investing billions in AI infrastructure. Translation: companies do not need more project coordinators. They need people who can drive outcomes faster with AI tools. They do not need more managers managing managers. They need operators who own end-to-end results. If you are an individual, ask yourself: Am I in a role that adds layers or one that drives measurable outcomes? If you are a leader, ask: Are we structured to compete with companies that just got 30 percent leaner and twice as fast? Strategic Urgency means you do not wait for this to happen to you. You interpret the signal and act while there is still an advantage to capture. #strategicurgency #ai #leadership #futureofwork

AI won’t cost you your job. It’ll cost you relevance. In marketing, PR, and communications the danger isn’t being replaced by a bot. It’s being drowned out in a flood of AI-generated noise. LinkedIn data shows that 85% of U.S. professionals will see at least 25% of their skills reshaped by AI. For media and marketing pros, that shift is already here. The real question isn’t “will you use AI?” It’s “will your outcomes still matter in an AI-saturated market?” Lead with strategic urgency now — or risk being invisible later.

Trevor Noah’s insight about AI and creativity has stayed with me since Day 2 of emceeing the MSN Partner Summit in Monaco. When tech companies demo AI-generated comedy, Trevor explained, it always falls flat. His reasoning was powerful: AI is “Trevor from 20 years ago” — static, trained on old data. Humans, by contrast, update constantly. A broken hand today changes the material tomorrow. Every conversation and experience reshapes how we create. This comedy insight reveals a deeper truth about all creative work. Across my own conversations with global leaders, I have observed the same pattern: AI will continue to improve at execution, but it cannot match our uniquely human adaptability. The real mistake leaders and creators are making is trying to compete with AI on AI’s terms. The future belongs to those who practice reinvention continuously. AI executes. Humans adapt. That is the competitive advantage no algorithm can touch. #AI #Leadership #Creativity #BusinessTransformation #Innovation

$250 billion dollars were spent on AI last year. 90% of CEOs report zero productivity gains. That stat is everywhere right now. And most people are reading it as "AI doesn't work." But dig a little deeper into the NBER study and you'll find what they actually measured: sales per employee. I can’t…sales per employee, really guys? Of course that number didn't move. Employees are still doing the same job they've always done. Just a little faster. Maybe a little more efficiently. But efficient and effective are not the same thing. Nobody asked: should this role look different now? Should this workflow still exist? What would we stop doing if this tool actually works? When PCs first hit the workplace in the 80s, productivity dropped for years. Not because computers didn't work. Because nobody redesigned the work around them. Companies that eventually did saw massive gains. Companies that just plugged in a computer and measured the same old output? They saw nothing. Sound familiar? The $250 billion AI mistake isn't buying the technology. It's changing nothing else around it.

The press release just became an AI visibility engine. 6 hours after we published one: ↳ChatGPT cited it 40 times ↳Meta’s AI mentioned it 17 times ↳Perplexity and Apple added more Not journalists. Not clicks. AI engines. This is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). You’re either in the answer...or invisible. Full breakdown + tactical blueprint in my latest. #AnswerEngineOptimization #GenerativeAI #FutureofSearch

Apple’s satellite iPhone upgrades aren’t about better phones. They’re about moving while the window is still open. Most companies are still debating whether satellite connectivity matters. Apple stopped asking that question two years ago and started building infrastructure. This is what Strategic Urgency looks like in practice. When you’re evaluating your next move, ask yourself: • Does this help us reach our stated goal? • What unique advantage makes this more valuable for us? • Is there a time window, and are we within it? • What’s the downside versus cost of being slow? I was Twitter user 2000 something. Eighteen consulting firms told me social media was a fad. They weren’t wrong about what it looked like in that moment. They were wrong about the signal it was sending. Right now, satellite connectivity seems excessive to most people. So did social media. So did smartphones. What signals are you seeing in your business that seem excessive today but won’t be in three years? The cost of waiting isn’t just missing the opportunity. It’s letting someone else shape the category while you’re still deciding whether it matters. #StrategicUrgency #Leadership #BusinessStrategy

Omnicom just retired FCB, DDB, and MullenLowe. FCB was founded in 1873. DDB won Cannes Network of the Year this year. 152 years of history. Top creative awards. None of it mattered. This is a Market Disruption signal. And if you’re not in advertising, you still need to pay attention. Here’s how to interpret it: The barbell effect is accelerating across industries. The big get bigger. Omnicom is now the largest advertising company in the world with $73B in billings. The specialized survive. Martin Agency, Goodby Silverstein, Lucky Generals all kept intact. The middle gets crushed. Over 20,000 positions eliminated. Three legendary networks erased. We watched this exact pattern in retail. Walmart and Amazon on one end. Specialty boutiques on the other. The middle hollowed out. Now it’s hitting professional services. Agencies first. Consulting, law, and accounting are next. And AI is accelerating the timeline. When AI can handle the middle-of-the-road work, the only defensible positions are massive scale or irreplaceable expertise. I’m writing this on my way to Aspen to deliver a keynote on this very shift. The question I’m asking audiences: are you positioned at the edges or stuck in the middle? The middle is no longer a strategy. It’s a waiting room. #StrategicUrgency #Strategy #Leadership #AI #Advertising #Omnicom

The latest LinkedIn report just dropped: nearly 80% of professionals feel unprepared for the 2026 job market. But here’s what’s really happening…there’s an engagement gap, and it’s hitting Gen Z the hardest. Everyone thinks Gen Z is just “behind” on AI. I think it’s more complicated than that. For older generations, AI is an upgrade layered onto a stable career. For Gen Z, they’re being asked to build a career inside the disruption itself. They aren’t seeing upskilling. They’re seeing hiring freezes and entry-level roles replaced by “efficiency” narratives. And now we’re entering what I call the Multiplier Gap. The distance between mediocre performance and excellence amplified by AI has never been wider. In 2026, mediocrity is the new floor, and AI owns the floor. Leaders: Does your AI strategy give your people an edge, or does it just cut costs? Early career: Don’t wait for your company to hand you a strategy. Be a first responder. Learn how these tools expand what you can do before someone else decides how they work on you.