Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan
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  • MANAGEMENT
  • UPDATED DAILY

The future of work isn't coming. It's already here — and it's moving fast. Future Ready is the podcast for leaders who want to stay ahead of AI, workplace transformation, and the forces reshaping how organizations operate and compete. Hosted by Jacob Morgan, futurist and bestselling author, this is where strategy meets reality. Every week, two formats in one feed: honest, unfiltered conversations with the CEOs, CHROs, and senior executives actually building the future of work — and sharp, no-fluff daily briefings that take the most important developments in artificial intelligence, AI agents, leadership, hybrid work, and organizational strategy and tell you exactly what they mean for your business. No hype. No filler. Just the insights, frameworks, and real-world playbooks that help you lead smarter, build resilient teams, and make better decisions in a world that won't slow down. If you're serious about leading what's next — this is your podcast. Subscribe to Future Ready wherever you listen.

  1. Two Hours That Changed AI, $1 Billion Enterprise Deployment Wave, and California's Worker Protection Order

    20H AGO

    Two Hours That Changed AI, $1 Billion Enterprise Deployment Wave, and California's Worker Protection Order

    May 21, 2026: Today might be the most consequential single day for the future of work in all of 2026. In a two-hour window yesterday afternoon, OpenAI's AI autonomously solved an 80-year-old math problem, Anthropic announced its first-ever profitable quarter at $10.9 billion in revenue, SpaceX filed a $1.75 trillion IPO, and every major tech CEO was summoned to Washington for an AI executive order signing. We break down what all of it means for leaders and workers. Then: Microsoft and EY just committed $1 billion to deploy AI inside every major enterprise on the planet — finance, tax, HR, supply chain, healthcare. This is the ERP moment for AI, and it's happening now. And finally: California's Governor signed the first executive order by any U.S. governor aimed at protecting workers from AI displacement. We look hard at what it actually does and what it doesn't.

    36 min
  2. Meta Cuts 8,000 Jobs, Top AI Researcher Leaves OpenAI for Anthropic, and 80% of Americans Are on Their Own With AI

    1D AGO

    Meta Cuts 8,000 Jobs, Top AI Researcher Leaves OpenAI for Anthropic, and 80% of Americans Are on Their Own With AI

    May 20, 2026: Meta began notifying 8,000 employees of their layoffs this morning — while simultaneously redirecting $145 billion into AI infrastructure. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI and the architect of Tesla's self-driving brain, just joined Anthropic with a specific mission: use AI to make AI better. And a major new Milken-Harris Poll finds that 80% of Americans want government workforce transition programs now, 68% say they're navigating the AI shift entirely alone, and 88% of business leaders privately admit companies cannot solve this without a coordinated national response.

    33 min
  3. The Companies Doubling Down on Junior Hiring, Why AI Is Eroding Gen Z's Brain, and Gartner's Shocking Jobs Forecast for 2028

    2D AGO

    The Companies Doubling Down on Junior Hiring, Why AI Is Eroding Gen Z's Brain, and Gartner's Shocking Jobs Forecast for 2028

    May 19, 2026: Everyone has an opinion about AI and jobs. Today we have actual data — three major studies published this week that, taken together, tell a story that's more nuanced, more surprising, and more actionable than anything you'll hear in the headlines. First: a Wall Street Journal report reveals that the companies going deepest on AI are actually increasing entry-level hiring — nearly three times more than are cutting — and why a 22-year-old with AI fluency may be the most valuable hire in the market right now. Then we get into why nearly half of Gen Z workers say AI is making them cognitively weaker, what London taxi drivers and GPS research tells us about what's actually happening to the human brain, and why the most dangerous AI user isn't the person who refuses to use it. And we close with Gartner's bombshell finding: 80% of companies cutting headcount for AI are seeing zero ROI — and by 2030, the ones that starved their talent pipeline this year will be paying a 15% premium just to catch up. Plus: why commencement speakers keep getting booed.

    20 min
  4. Out-learning the Competition by Building a Skills-Based Talent Ecosystem | Susan LaMonica, CHRO of Citizens Financial Group

    4D AGO

    Out-learning the Competition by Building a Skills-Based Talent Ecosystem | Susan LaMonica, CHRO of Citizens Financial Group

    If your organization isn't obsessed with how fast your people can learn, you're already falling behind in the race to "out-learn" the competition. In this episode, I'm joined by Susan LaMonica, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Citizens Financial Group—a super-regional bank with $226 billion in assets and 18,000 employees.  We explore how they are driving a massive workforce transformation to build a team that is ready for the future of work. We dive deep into their journey of becoming a skills-based organization and how they use a "skills taxonomy" and an internal talent marketplace to support mobility and career development. Susan also explains their "measured approach" to AI governance within a heavily regulated industry, including the role of their Generative AI Council. We unpack their "Reimagine the Bank" initiative, where they are rethinking 47 different business processes to drive value and effectiveness. From launching internal "gigs" to tracking productivity metrics like customer NPS and employee sentiment, this conversation is a strategic guide for any leader looking to blend high-tech tools with a human-centered culture. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

    54 min
  5. The Manager Purge, the Agent Sprawl Crisis, and America's 1,200 AI Laws With No Rulebook

    6D AGO

    The Manager Purge, the Agent Sprawl Crisis, and America's 1,200 AI Laws With No Rulebook

    May 15, 2026: The Guardian documents the tech industry's accelerating purge of middle managers — and history says companies have tried this exact bet before with Jack Welch and the Reengineering movement, with disastrous long-term results. The Wall Street Journal reports companies are drowning in ungoverned AI agents, raising a critical question: is agentic AI actually different from the RPA sprawl crisis of a decade ago, and is the difference showing up in real outcomes? And Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and NYU's Gary Marcus argue in Fortune that America's 1,200 AI bills have no shared test for what makes good policy — and the regulatory patchwork hardening in place rhymes uncomfortably with the conditions that produced the 2008 financial crisis.

    44 min
  6. Kevin O'Leary Got It Wrong, Meta's Trust Crisis, and the Talent Problem Nobody Wants to Fix

    MAY 14

    Kevin O'Leary Got It Wrong, Meta's Trust Crisis, and the Talent Problem Nobody Wants to Fix

    May 14, 2026: Tucker Carlson and Kevin O'Leary debated AI, energy, and jobs yesterday — and O'Leary had the right argument but made the wrong one. Today we break down what he should have said, including the real jobs data, what Jensen Huang is saying about hiring, and why the self-driving truck doesn't eliminate the driver — it transforms the job. Then we look inside Meta, where 8,000 layoffs are coming next week during the most profitable quarter in company history, employees are being surveilled to train their replacements, and some workers are openly hoping to get cut. And we close with a Fast Company piece that reframes the entire talent shortage conversation — the problem doesn't start in HR, it starts in kindergarten, and corporate America is pouring billions into the wrong end of the pipeline.

    36 min
  7. Goldman's Robot Workforce, Amazon's Fake AI Scores, and Princeton's 133-Year Trust Collapse

    MAY 13

    Goldman's Robot Workforce, Amazon's Fake AI Scores, and Princeton's 133-Year Trust Collapse

    May 13, 2026: Goldman Sachs President and COO John Waldron went on CNBC and publicly described his entire workforce as a "human assembly line," announcing that digital AI agents will be the firm's robots. Amazon employees are gaming internal AI usage leaderboards by burning meaningless tokens through a tool called MeshClaw — because the pressure to show AI adoption has become greater than the pressure to do actual work. And Princeton University voted to end 133 years of unproctored exams, because AI has made cheating behaviorally invisible and the peer accountability system that underpinned one of the most respected honor codes in American higher education has structurally collapsed.

    39 min

  8. MAY 12

    Rise of the Chief AI Officer, Five AI Bets Every Company Is Making, & Gartner Says AI Layoffs Have No ROI

    Most companies think they have an AI strategy. New data from Gartner says they're wrong — and it's costing them. In today's episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down three stories that cut through the hype and tell the real story of where AI and business stand right now. May 12, 2026: First, a landmark Gartner study of 350 global executives reveals that 80% of companies that cut headcount in the name of AI are seeing little to no return — and the ones getting real results are doing the opposite of what most CEOs are doing. Second: a provocative new framework from Fortune identifies the five AI postures most organizations have already drifted into without realizing it — and explains why the most dangerous one is the one that feels the most comfortable. Third: CNBC reports on how AI is creating a new C-suite power struggle, with the Chief AI Officer emerging just as every other executive function is being told it's their moment to lead.

    36 min
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About

The future of work isn't coming. It's already here — and it's moving fast. Future Ready is the podcast for leaders who want to stay ahead of AI, workplace transformation, and the forces reshaping how organizations operate and compete. Hosted by Jacob Morgan, futurist and bestselling author, this is where strategy meets reality. Every week, two formats in one feed: honest, unfiltered conversations with the CEOs, CHROs, and senior executives actually building the future of work — and sharp, no-fluff daily briefings that take the most important developments in artificial intelligence, AI agents, leadership, hybrid work, and organizational strategy and tell you exactly what they mean for your business. No hype. No filler. Just the insights, frameworks, and real-world playbooks that help you lead smarter, build resilient teams, and make better decisions in a world that won't slow down. If you're serious about leading what's next — this is your podcast. Subscribe to Future Ready wherever you listen.

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