Aaron Pearson

Storyteller and fractional CCO for growing industrial and enterprise tech companies, Chair of Majority in the Middle, runner, foodie, progressive Lutheran

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

I often see job postings from startups for communications managers asked to do executive level comms work. Why? Because that's what they think they can afford. Actually, you CAN afford a fractional communications leader to help you win. https://t.co/0JCM9sKwgy

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

@KRobbinsMN Well MNSCU in fact IS having this conversation as they seek to significantly reduce their buildings and eliminate redundant offerings. And I hope they get support for making those chalnges.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Only way to limit coming AI backlash is to start shifting taxes from labor to compute. The average voter needs to see salient benefits from AI. Today we tax labor > compute (income vs corp tax, depreciation for machines not education, payroll tax, etc). This will have to invert.

[LaTrisha Vetaw @LaTrishaVetaw]

Sobering reality: declining downtown property values are shifting the tax burden onto residents, making our city unaffordable.

Instead, my colleagues are focused on decriminalizing drug paraphernalia and a data center moratorium. It's time to get serious.

[David Daines @daviddorg]

Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks

Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains

That was 6 weeks. I'm going a full year.

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

@smburns @kneepads92 Scott, I think all the comments on your posts just prove your point.

[Paula Pant @AffordAnything]

The WSJ just ran the most depressing headline in human history.

The piece is a first-person column from two retirees.

They say that without bosses, deadlines, or meetings, there's nothing to interrupt zombie doomscrolling.

"We retirees have a particular vulnerability," writes one of the co-authors, Stephen Kreider Yoder, a retired WSJ editor.

"We have time on our hands and no external authority telling us to snap out of it."

"Let's have a show of hands:

"How many retirees have ended a day looking up from the phone, wondering where the time went and feeling the mental equivalent of having finished off a family-size bag of potato chips?"

"Yeah," he writes. "That's what I thought."

We spend decades trying to buy back our time ... and then spend it staring at our screens.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Another week on the road meeting with a couple dozen IT and AI leaders from large enterprises across banking, media, retail, healthcare, consulting, tech, and sports, to discuss agents in the enterprise.

Some quick takeaways:

* Clear that we’re moving from chat era of AI to agents that use tools, process data, and start to execute real work in the enterprise. Complementing this, enterprises are often evolving from “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to adoption to targeted automation efforts applied to specific areas of work and workflow.

* Change management still will remain one of the biggest topics for enterprises. Most workflows aren’t setup to just drop agents directly in, and enterprises will need a ton of help to drive these efforts (both internally and from partners). One company has a head of AI in every business unit that roles up to a central team, just to keep all the functions coordinated.

* Tokenmaxxing! Most companies operate with very strict OpEx budgets get locked in for the year ahead, so they’re going through very real trade-off discussions right now on how to budget for tokens. One company recently had an idea for a “shark tank” style way of pitching for compute budget. Others are trying to figure out how to ration compute to the best use-cases internally through some hierarchy of needs (my words not theirs).

* Fixing fragmented and legacy systems remain a huge priority right now. Most enterprises are dealing with decades of either on-prem systems or systems they moved to the cloud but that still haven’t been modernized in any meaningful way. This means agents can’t easily tap into these data sources in a unified way yet, so companies are focused on how they modernize these.

* Most companies are *not* talking about replacing jobs due to agents. The major use-cases for agents are things that the company wasn’t able to do before or couldn’t prioritize. Software upgrades, automating back office processes that were constraining other workflows, processing large amounts of documents to get new business or client insights, and so on. More emphasis on ways to make money vs. cut costs.

* Headless software dominated my conversations. Enterprises need to be able to ensure all of their software works across any set of agents they choose. They will kick out vendors that don’t make this technically or economically easy.

* Clear sense that it can be hard to standardize on anything right now given how fast things are moving. Blessing and a curse of the innovation curve right now - no one wants to get stuck in a paradigm that locks them into the wrong architecture. One other result of this is that companies realize they’re in a multi-agent world, which means that interoperability becomes paramount across systems.

* Unanimous sense that everyone is working more than ever before. AI is not causing anyone to do less work right now, and similar to Silicon Valley people feel their teams are the busiest they’ve ever been.

One final meta observation not called out explicitly. It seems that despite Silicon Valley’s sense that AI has made hard things easy, the most powerful ways to use agents is more “technical” than prior eras of software. Skills, MCP, CLIs, etc. may be simple concepts for tech, but in the real world these are all esoteric concepts that will require technical people to help bring to life in the enterprise.

This both means diffusion will take real work and time, but also everyone’s estimation of engineering jobs is totally off. Engineers may not be “writing” software, but they will certainly be the ones to setup and operate the systems that actually automate most work in the enterprise.

[Aaron Gleeman @AaronGleeman]

No one is allowed to call me pessimistic about the Twins any more. https://t.co/LPbiXT8hdZ

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

Umm, no. He and Pam seem to be confused about who’s really in charge in this country. #WeThePeople

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Bondi: "Being a citizen in our country is a privilege, not a right. And Donald Trump is going to have everyone in this country who deserves to be here who is a citizen."

[Matt Scherer @mattdscherer]

Minneapolis City Council tonight makes it abundantly clear that the DFL needs less organizers running for office and more real people. While election outcomes will never change by party in the urban core, watching it is a total turnoff to any normal person/voter.

[LaTrisha Vetaw @LaTrishaVetaw]

My colleagues shouldn't be focused on international affairs when we already have enough problems to solve locally. We need to increase police staffing, help our struggling small businesses, and build more affordable housing before we waste time pretending to be diplomats.

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

Literally the same day the Star Tribune runs a story about the challenges that continue to plague Uptown, the Minneapolis City Council spends the meeting focused on, let's see, not Minneapolis. https://t.co/qYqvIa3CdI

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

@sarasfreeman123 @plattMSP Ok in inflation-adjusted terms that’s a flat budget but still, it’s a problem

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

This is insane. Scott Bessent just defended Donald Trump’s comments on the death of Robert Mueller. Absolutely pathetic.

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

‘Once and for All’ Means Never https://t.co/7rXKKilG9y via @NYTOpinion

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

Austin is just a joy to me, and food and music are big reasons why: The 25 Best Restaurants in Austin Right Now https://t.co/xIYGxd5PNE via @NYTimes

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

@ScottJenningsKY @TimSheaARC Well that’s a false choice if I ever heard one.

[Rana Foroohar @RanaForoohar]

2/2:

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

@paulgazelka I think it’s easy enough to find 2016 on this chart.

[Aaron Pearson @apearson]

@DanMyers @bloisolson We did that all the time when I was a kid at Rosemount. Those bus rides with the pep band was part of the fun and made it a big deal.