David's Saturday AI Thoughts

David Boyle

Each Saturday, David Boyle reflects on what feels important in the world of AI. Not the breathless hype or the doom. The practical, analytical perspective: what happened this week, what it means for people who use language models in their work, and what to try next. David is Director of Audience Strategies and co-founder of Steadman. He advises organisations from L.E.K. Consulting to the BBC on AI adoption. This podcast is a spoken-word version of his Saturday AI Thoughts newsletter, with different voices for each section.

  1. 2D AGO

    Kids these days

    What happened this week: * AI displacement now shows up in the US government data at both ends of the career ladder: A Bloomberg analysis of new BLS figures finds every one of the eighteen occupations the BLS classifies as A... * The UK's data regulator has put AI hiring tools on formal notice. Sixteen organisations have already had a letter: The Information Commissioner's Office issued formal guidance this week saying that... * Salesforce will spend close to $300 million with Anthropic this year. Marc Benioff says the engineering productivity gains made it the easiest line in the budget: Marc Benioff disclosed that Salesf... What to try: * When the output goes wrong, shrink the task: Justin Skycak put it as a principle for skill acquisition this week: shrink the unit of practice until the mistake has nowhere to hide. The same rule ap... * Ask AI questions it can't possibly know the answer to: A marketing lead at a global firm told David this week she's running a five-minute stress-test on every AI tool she's thinking of trusting. Sh... * Run your day past AI before you start it: A senior leader described her commute habit to David this week. She opens Claude, asks it to review her calendar and her email, then asks it to surface wha... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-23

    12 min

  2. MAY 16

    What boards accept

    What happened this week: * The METR capability curve just went from one hour to one day. The unit of AI autonomy is now measured in human work-days, and the doubling holds on a log scale: METR, an AI evaluation lab, measures... * Half of organisations have already redesigned core workflows around AI, and a fifth have built new business models. The gap framing misses the story: BCG's AI at Work 2025 survey of 10,635 employee... * Anthropic just passed OpenAI in US business AI spend. The strategy lesson is older than AI: pick an audience and serve them: Ramp's AI Index, built from anonymised spend data across its US business... What to try: * Hand over the context, not just the question: Experienced leaders have context and are short on time. AI tools convert context into time saved, but only if you hand the context over. A leader David... * Build a personal skill, and add a rule to it every Sunday: A person David worked with this week reviews 100-page reports from their team on Sunday nights — typos, inconsistent language, logic gaps.... * Schedule a daily AI briefing. The use cases will follow: AI tools sit closed until you open them. That's a real reason senior leaders bounce off: not bad prompts, but a tool that requires you to th... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-16

    12 min

  3. MAY 9

    Choosing is the work

    What happened this week: * AI-adopting firms are growing headcount, not cutting it: A Goldman Sachs analysis circulating this week, charted by Callum Williams of The Economist, shows US firms that have adopted AI report net ... * Five percent, not fifty: the candid private-equity number: Pete Stavros, co-head of global private equity at KKR, told the Milken Institute conference last week that AI is improving portfolio compa... * Both AI labs went into private equity the same day: On Monday, Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion vehicle with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman. Engineers from Anthropic will embed ... What to try: * Push it harder, then skillify, then iterate: The simplest workflow upgrade David has coached this year, and it stacks. Push it harder: when the model gives you a perfectly reasonable answer, tell i... * Shadow your most AI-pilled employee for two days: Matt Stockton, an operator and investor, made the case this week. Find the rabbit-holed colleague (not the keenest, not the head of digital transfo... * Ask AI to build you an HTML slide deck instead of PowerPoint: Just ask. "Build me a slide deck on [topic] in a single HTML file." Most chat tools can do this now. Why bother? PowerPoint output from... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-09

    14 min

  4. MAY 2

    The bill and the harness

    David builds the case that flat-rate AI pricing is dying and that the buyer's question is no longer 'how much will this cost' but 'where does the spending compound'. He opens at a Las Vegas buffet that closed on 31st May, then moves to the supplier-side news: three of the four biggest AI vendors switched pricing in the last few weeks (Anthropic stripped bundled tokens out of Enterprise seats in mid-April, OpenAI took Codex pay-as-you-go a fortnight earlier, GitHub moves every Copilot plan to usage-based billing on 1st June, and an Anthropic manager admitted Pro and Max tiers have been outgrown). He brings in two friends' worried voice notes from the buyer side: a friend in Tokyo asking what happens when bills go up five or ten times, and a partner at a professional services firm naming the outsourcing trap. He explains the supplier maths (unit prices falling roughly tenfold a year, his $200-a-month Max plan delivering $500 a day of equivalent API use, unsustainable) and the buyer maths (Jevons Paradox: cheaper energy made coal use rise, not fall). The radiologist is the modern Jevons: Hinton's 2016 'stop training radiologists' was right about the models and wrong about the radiologists. Ten years on the US has six thousand more of them and pay is up roughly seventy per cent. Punchline: the bill rises either way, the question is whether the spending compounds in the model (a utility cost) or in the harness, the layer of instructions, context and workflows that wraps the model (an asset nobody else can buy). Intercom doubled engineering velocity in nine months on exactly that bet. What happened this week: * AI adoption stalls one layer below the executive sponsor, at the line manager: Gallup data (Q4 2025) finds AI use correlates more strongly with managerial endorsement than with tool access. In firm... * The frontier-model leaderboard is now refreshing in weeks, not quarters: The Epoch Capabilities Index now shows GPT-5.5 Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro above 155, up from GPT-4o's 128 in mid-2024. Seventeen... * Six VC firms, one investment thesis: Linas Beliunas read the published 2026 investment theses of six of the biggest venture firms side by side and found the same handful of AI bets in all of them: ... What to try: * Pick one tool, get fluent, then refine your harness: A leader David spoke to had spent weeks running the same task through ChatGPT and Claude side by side, then asking each to review the other. Gen... * Force yourself to change something on every AI output before you ship it: Came up at a senior training session this week, as the room debated when the 'check, edit, own' model breaks down. Increasi... * Skip the slides, build the page: In a senior strategy session this week, the most-praised artefact in the room was not a deck. It was a web page someone had built to walk teams through their thinki... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-02

    14 min

  5. APR 25

    Rise of the auditors

    AI-native teams need three roles: Director, Builder, Auditor. Execution is cheap, verification is expensive. Most organisations have zero Auditors and are shipping nothing because nobody is named to check. What happened this week: * 10% of organisations scale agents beyond pilots (McKinsey) * GitHub paused Copilot signups / Uber blew 2026 AI budget / Goldman inference costs approaching headcount parity * 29% of employees sabotaging AI initiatives (Writer survey) What to try: * Ask is this the simplest version (Cantrill laziness) * Audit cold: different model, fresh context * Save one reusable AI workflow (Chrome Skills) Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-04-25

    13 min

  6. APR 18

    The proxy break

    AI broke the old proxy (good writing = good thinking) but the new proxy ('sounds like AI' = no thinking) is equally unreliable. A friend's challenge prompted a deeper question: evaluate thinking, not wording. Two tests proposed: Quality (does the argument hold under pressure?) and Ownership (CEO principle). Fine-tuned models now preferred over human writing 62% of the time. What happened this week: * AI cover letters killed the signal: Freelancer.com study shows Goodhart's Law in action, better letters no longer predict better hires * Snap cut 1,000 jobs (16% workforce), AI writes 65% of new code, $500M annualised savings: substitution model has arrived * Passive AI delegation erodes confidence, pushing back strengthens it: 2,000-person study. Gartner: of 5.4hr saved, only 0.6hr reduces working time What to try: * Ask what keeps people awake at night, not how AI can help: surfaces real problems with AI solutions * Let the model research you before writing custom instructions: web search + self-portrait generates better instructions than manual writing * Find where your AI value sits: AI Value Map interactive tool, five questions on value allocation then five on capture Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-04-18

    11 min

  7. APR 11

    What a day can do

    Team-level AI infrastructure can precede and contain individual training. The cost of encoding how a team works into shared reusable tools just dropped from hours to minutes with Gen 2 tools (Claude Code + transcripts). A small jewellery company built thirteen shared skills in a day. Step two doesn't just follow step one, it can contain it. What happened this week: * Claude Code now writes 4% of all GitHub commits, doubled in six weeks; Anthropic run rate $30B (up from $9B at end of 2025), Claude Code alone $2.5B; projected 20% of commits by December * Goldman Sachs quantified AI's net labour market drag: -25k jobs substituted + 9k augmented = 16k net monthly loss; entry-level-to-experienced wage gap widened 3.3pp. But CFO surveys put genuine AI ... * Meta's internal tokenmaxxing leaderboard: 85k+ employees, 60T tokens in one month, Zuckerberg not in top 250. Rewards orchestration over outcomes. Incentivise use yes, incentivise maxxing no What to try: * Start with critique, not creation. Brand voice evaluator was diagnosis-only; teams fear proofreaders less than replacements. Nobody fights the spellchecker * Ask what keeps people up at night, not what they want AI to do. First question surveys existing habits; second surfaces unmet needs. Almost nothing appears on both lists * Show your team how others use AI. 515-startup field experiment: case studies alone led to 44% more AI usage, 1.9x revenue, 39% less capital needed ('the mapping problem') Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-04-11

    12 min

  8. APR 4

    What is your organisation actually for?

    Organisations say they're production systems but behave like human systems. The revealed preference is togetherness, not efficiency. AI adoption reverts because training optimises for individual productivity while the real binding force is human collaboration. What happened this week: * Dorsey wants to replace org charts with AI world models (Block restructuring) * Mollick says de-weirding AI is a mistake; hidden AI use is the harder problem * Zapier raised the AI fluency hiring bar: slope not snapshot, accountability added What to try: * Have AI interview you before building anything * Ask AI what looks weird before analysing data * Let AI be the app: build skills not standalone software Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-04-04

    11 min
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About

Each Saturday, David Boyle reflects on what feels important in the world of AI. Not the breathless hype or the doom. The practical, analytical perspective: what happened this week, what it means for people who use language models in their work, and what to try next. David is Director of Audience Strategies and co-founder of Steadman. He advises organisations from L.E.K. Consulting to the BBC on AI adoption. This podcast is a spoken-word version of his Saturday AI Thoughts newsletter, with different voices for each section.

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