What I'm working on.
Not all the way done, but can't wait for that, too important.
Also, this problem's way too big for our company to solve. Will need a lot of players, and hopefully you too.
Sharp breakdown. More than half of the 4,500 executives are still using agents as disconnected assistants. Full orchestration where agents hand off and close processes is not the same as a set of task bots.
Same pattern here. Everyone is building AI to solve future of work but the platforms that win help 1 person discover and act on the right opportunities with agents that execute.
Exactly. When both sides automate, the resume drops to zero signal. The edge is not a better bullet point, it is proof a script cannot fake, and 1 demonstrated build beats 50 polished lines.
Exactly. The case for fractional HR is not cheaper hours, it is faster judgment on the 3 or 4 decisions that actually carry risk. You buy the expertise on the days you need it, not a full-time seat.
Exactly. ATS systems filter instead of reading so the resume channel is dead. Agents make 10x the direct outreach possible but the human conversation still closes the deal.
Same pattern here. The research says experience compounds but the ATS and salary bands still screen it out for most. The 1 in 2 who go fractional sell the outcome and skip the broken filter.
Sharp breakdown. Blind screening removes names and backgrounds but the real decision still requires watching the person think through a live problem. Scripts fail on 1 in 2 of the edge cases.
Exactly. Senior marketing leadership was always a judgment problem not a 5 day a week presence problem. Two days of direction with the network running the rest is the real model.
Same pattern here. Everyone looks great on paper, but 1 real problem walked through live exposes who can actually think. The paper is noise now, the real-time judgment is the only signal that holds.
Exactly. When resumes are 100 percent AI-generated, the document carries zero signal, not insight. The only real test is a live problem the candidate has to steer in front of you, not a take-home.
Sharp breakdown. 10 years ago that level was reachable solo but most operators hit the cap without a team. The automation now lets one person reach the same scale while staying lean.
Exactly. Solo caps you at what 1 person can hold. Collaborating with a small bench lets you take the bigger engagements because income is a network problem not a time problem.
Tokens will get 90% cheaper every year as models improve and $10k desktop workstations from @dell and @apple, running open source models, drive tokens to “essentially free”
Token costs will be looked at like storage and bandwidth costs in a couple of years — which is to say you won’t think about them much.
Same pattern here. A 6 person team now handles the volume of 15 but only if the judgment layer stays human and tight. Otherwise the multiplier just ships the wrong work faster.
If you think a $300K corporate salary is payment for 40 hours of weekly labor, I've got news for you...
There is a persistent cynical narrative that large enterprises are bloated engines of inefficiency, filled with overpaid professionals who spend their days looking at slides and doing "nothing."
I mean, it's a comforting myth for critics, but I think it fundamentally misunderstands modern knowledge work.
That $300K salary (or $400K, or $500K) isn't a reward for linear effort but an option premium on high-leverage thinking.
We are still haunted by the ghost of the assembly line, ie, the outdated idea that compensation must directly correlate with time spent + physical output.
In the factory world, if you leave your station, production stops, but in the knowledge economy, value is almost totally decoupled from time.
Folks... An enterprise paying a senior leader or specialist $25K a month is not buying 160 hours of typing, they are buying *insurance* against catastrophic errors and positioning themselves for asymmetric upside.
I'll try to make it tangible with an example...
Consider a complex matrix organization busy with a $40M product migration. In this environment, the value distribution of a worker's is heavily spiked.
Most days look like nothing... alignment meetings, reading documentation, maintaining steady state. Yes, to an outsider, it looks like "doing nothing."
But then a critical day arrives. A vendor fails, a timeline slips, a crossroads appears, whatever... If that $300K professional has the institutional memory and capability to make just 4 or 5 correct decisions during those critical moments, the ROI is staggering! A single right call can avert a $5M problem.
Suddenly, that $300K salary doesn't look like bloat but, to me, seems like the cheapest asset on the p&l.
These days we are bombarded by tech CEOs promising fully autonomous, AI-driven organizations and I keep saying these pitches miss the entire point of how complex enterprises actually move.
Data computation can be outsourced to an LLM but going through the decision fabric of an enterprise cannot. You need people for:
> Knowing *how* to build consensus across disconnected departments with competing incentives;
> Understanding the unspoken history of why past projects failed, and how to position a new initiative so it doesn't trigger corporate antibodies;
> When a multi-million-dollar decision goes sideways, an algorithm cannot stand before a board of directors or regulators and take ownership of the corrective action.
An AI can give you a pristine strategic framework with nice and difficult sounding words, but it cannot navigate the human matrix required to execute it.
The ability to be effective inside a complex enterprise is a rare AND expensive skillset precisely because it cannot be automated or easily replicated.
My point is you aren't paying for the 9-to-5 "grind", but more for the readiness.
Like an elite surgeon or an expert technician, you pay for the decades of accumulated knowledge that allow them to fix a crisis in 5 minutes, not the 5 minutes itself....
Leverage, not labor.