This is issue 700. Every Wednesday since the first week of January 2013, for more than thirteen years, I have shown up in your inbox without missing a week. That is the milestone, and I am proud of it. But the number is not what I want you to take from today. What matters is what stayed fixed while everything around it changed. For 700 weeks, through five different versions of who my company was, the mission never moved. I...

Something happened recently that stopped me mid-sentence and has had me thinking ever since. While demonstrating one of our new apps developed with the help of AI during one of our AI Insider Lab sessions, I shared with our group of senior consultants and advisors that AI has compressed our development time by a factor of 8 to 10x. That number came directly from reflecting on two recent builds, a new app and a member portal, and comparing what they...

Two years ago, these two professionals were indistinguishable. Same caliber of expertise. Same decades of client work. Same reputation in their respective markets. Both heard the same message about AI changing everything. Both believed it intellectually. Both had access to the same tools. Today, one of them operates with a confidence and clarity that clients notice immediately. The other is working harder than ever and falling behind in ways that are difficult to name but impossible to ignore. The difference...

There is a pattern I keep seeing, and it is too consistent to ignore. A senior professional reads an article about AI transforming their industry. They nod. They agree. They may even forward it to a colleague with a note that says, “we should talk about this.” And then they go back to working exactly the way they worked last month. And the month before that. And the month before that. This is not a discipline problem. It is not...

Everyone is asking the wrong question about AI and jobs. The fear is that AI will replace senior professionals. It will not. Not yet, and probably not in the way most people imagine. The real disruption is quieter, more structural, and far more dangerous: AI is eliminating the entry level and junior roles that train the next generation of senior professionals. The pipeline that creates your future replacement, your future partner, your future successor, is breaking. And almost nobody is...

There is an uncomfortable truth hiding inside the AI productivity revolution, and almost nobody is talking about it. The same tool that is supposed to make you sharper may be quietly making you weaker. Not because AI is flawed. Because of how you are using it. Think about what happened with calculators. Once they became standard, we stopped doing mental math. Not gradually. Almost immediately. The skill did not fade because it became irrelevant. It faded because something else handled...

There is something nobody in the professional services world wants to say out loud, so I will say it. The expertise you have spent your entire career building is now a depreciating asset. Not because you are wrong. Not because your knowledge is flawed. But because AI is commoditizing knowledge itself at a speed that makes your years of accumulated insight less rare with every model release. This is not about being replaced by a chatbot. It is about the...

Most professionals I work with are not struggling because they lack expertise. They are struggling because they cannot clearly express what they know in a way that makes the right people stop and say: “I never thought about it this way. I need more of this.” After nearly four decades working across software development, internet strategy, and now also artificial intelligence, I have watched this pattern repeat across every technology wave. The consultants, coaches, and advisors who fall behind are...

Every week, I watch smart professionals use AI the same way. They open a new conversation, explain who they are, describe what they need, provide the context, ask their question, get an answer, close the window, and start the entire process over again next time. It is the equivalent of hiring a brilliant strategist and firing them at the end of every meeting. This is how most people use AI. And it is exactly why most people get mediocre results...

From Stagnant to Thriving: The 7 Reasons Your Business Stopped Growing Most business owners don’t fail dramatically. They stagnate quietly. Revenue plateaus, energy drains, and the business that once felt like momentum starts to feel like maintenance. The problem is rarely competence. It’s architecture. What makes stagnation more dangerous in 2026 than ever before is that AI is accelerating the advantages of businesses that are already well-positioned and strategically clear. The gap between thriving and stuck is no longer closing...