Workquake Weekly

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75% of AI Strategies Are for Show. Is Yours?
A former Lululemon CIO just said the quiet part out loud — and Steve thinks every executive needs to hear it.
This week, Steve digs into Julie Averill's New York Times opinion piece on what's actually happening with AI inside real companies. Averill spent eight years as CIO at Lululemon and thirty years in tech before that, so this isn't sideline commentary. It's someone who took the vendor meetings, ran the pilots, and felt the board pressure.
Steve unpacks her two big ideas: AI wishing — treating the technology like a magic wand that lets you skip the hard work of fixing messy data and broken systems — and AI washing, where companies under pressure describe what they hope will happen as if it already had. The numbers are sobering: 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots never delivered results, 75% of executives admit their AI strategy is more for show, and roughly a third of hiring managers who cut a role because of AI have already rehired for it.
Plus: why layoffs announced in the name of AI efficiency are often just moving work onto the people who stay, why 44% of Gen Z workers say they're actively sabotaging their company's AI rollout, and the autopilot analogy Steve keeps coming back to — AI holds the course, but people know where you're going and why.
Two questions to take into your week: What did that vendor actually ask about your business? And have you redesigned the work before cutting the role?
Links:
Julie Averill, "I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I." — The New York Times, Aug 3, 2026
MIT Project NANDA report (via Fortune): https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
Challenger, Gray & Christmas May job cuts report: https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-may-job-cuts-rise-16-from-april-highest-may-total-since-2020/
Robert Half May 2026 labor market update: https://www.roberthalf.com/us/en/insights/research/may-2026-labor-market-update-for-employers-and-job-seekers
Writer + Workplace Intelligence enterprise AI adoption survey: https://writer.com/blog/enterprise-ai-adoption-2026/

Amazon Just Proved Nobody Has AI Figured Out
Business Insider dropped a story this week that might be the most important workplace story of 2026 — and it's not about what Amazon is building with AI. It's about what they're being forced to tear down.
Amazon is winding down its flagship AI models, shutting its long-term AI research lab, and laying off some of the most sought-after technical talent in the company — the same team they created a special pay scale just to hire. All of this, less than three years after CEO Andy Jassy stood on stage and championed the very strategy they're now unwinding.
Steve breaks down why this matters far beyond Amazon: if one of the best-funded, most talent-rich companies on the planet is still rewriting its AI playbook in real time, then no one — not you, not your competitors, not the "experts" — actually has this figured out. This episode is about why feeling behind on AI is the wrong frame, why recalibrating your strategy is a sign of strength (not failure), and what leaders should actually do when the ground keeps shifting under their feet.
🎧 10 minutes. One hard truth: behind only means something when somebody else is ahead.

There's a question I ask before I take on any new client: does leadership already know what's broken, or are they hoping I'll discover it so they don't have to say it out loud themselves? If the answer is the second one, I walk.
This week I connect that standard to something quietly telling: OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies insisting AI is about to remake white-collar work, needed to walk into real organizations and make hard calls about how work actually gets done. They didn't hand that job to a model. They partnered with McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, and Accenture. Humans they trust.
I break down the three questions I use to decide when trust is actually in the room versus when I'm being paid to paper over the fact that it isn't. And I make the case that walking away from paid work is a privilege — which is exactly why it matters more, not less, for those of us who can actually afford to do it.
Is there a line you've actually walked away from money over, or just one you tell yourself you'd hold?

The AI Jobs Story Nobody Is Telling
Everyone is afraid AI is coming for the jobs. But what if we've been afraid of the wrong number?
New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Bank of England, and the Bundesbank surveyed nearly 6,000 senior executives across four economies — and found that more than 90% reported no impact on employment from AI over the past three years. These aren't skeptics. Nearly 70% of them are already using the technology.
So why does the narrative keep running ahead of the data?
In this episode, Steve Cadigan unpacks what the research actually says, why central banks are the right source to trust, and what the real jobs crisis looks like — a projected shortfall of 800 million jobs for young people entering the workforce over the next decade.
The question isn't whether to fear AI. It's whether leaders are going to play defense or offense with it — and whether anyone is going to raise their hand on the job creation challenge that's already here.

For two years, we've blamed AI for the disappearance of entry-level jobs. But what if that story was never true?
In this solo episode, Steve digs into new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — a source with nothing to sell — that ties roughly 64% of rising unemployment among young grads not to AI, but to remote work. The finding that stopped him cold: when teams spread out, the everyday coaching that turns a 23-year-old into a capable professional didn't move to another channel. It just disappeared.
Steve unpacks why nobody noticed, how a thousand small rational decisions quietly pulled up the on-ramp for early-career workers, and why "AI does that work now" became a more flattering story than "we couldn't figure out how to develop people from a distance." Then he goes one layer deeper — past remote work to the short-termism driving companies to mortgage the next decade for this quarter's numbers.
The good news? If we pulled mentorship out, we're also the ones who can put it back. Here's how.
🎧 ~10 minutes. Got thoughts? Find Steve on LinkedIn — he wants to hear from you.