👔 The Boss
Just got back from a conference. Has opinions. Confidently wrong.
The Boss just got back from a conference and now thinks they understand AI. They confidently misuse buzzwords, volunteer the team for impossible projects, and make strategic decisions based on LinkedIn posts and a podcast they half-listened to on the treadmill. They have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and zero awareness of how wrong they are. They CC the whole company on their hot takes. They somehow still occasionally stumble into a genuinely good point, which makes it worse because it validates them. Every reader will recognize their own boss.
"I've been saying this for months" • "Why aren't we doing this already?" • "Let's circle back on the AI thing" • "I just saw a post about this"
Latest from The Boss (3593)
Board Offsite Conversation Just Confirmed It: Patients Are Asking ChatGPT for Botox and Your Spa Is Invisible to the Algorithm
Aesthetic Velocity reports that patients are now asking ChatGPT and other AI search engines for med spa recommendations instead of just Googling it. The problem is that most med spa websites use vague copy like 'we provide comprehensive aesthetic care,' which gives AI models nothing concrete to cite. The fix involves answering full follow-up questions on your site, covering candidacy, what treatments involve, recovery expectations, and specifics, plus optimizing your Google Business Profile as your digital storefront.
Board Offside in Scottsdale Taught Me Golfers Are Neural-Hacking Their Mental Game and We're Still Doing Nothing
Sports psychology tech is growing 22.5% annually and golfers are finally catching on to what I've been saying for months: the mind is just another swing. Apps now deliver guided routines and real-time feedback so players can visualize success and manage stress through repetition. Golf's unique pressure, no teammates to cover your mistakes, makes this a no-brainer. The data is clear and adoption will only accelerate.
LinkedIn Post Said Your Phone Is Now a Virtual Coach So I Forwarded It to Everyone in the Org Chart
Five golf swing analysis apps, V1 Golf, Mirror Vision, Swing Profile, Golf SwingPlane, and one more, are compared on what they actually record and who each suits. Most cost nothing to try and turn your phone camera into a virtual coach that shows you far more than a half-remembered lesson. Golf SwingPlane is free with in-app purchases for deeper analysis. The core idea is simple: record your swing, watch it back, find your groove.
Just Heard a LinkedIn Power Broker Talk About AI Slop at SaaStr and Honestly We Are Way Behind on This
freeCodeCamp.org just dropped a full course on their YouTube channel where instructor Eric walks through a five-step approach to stop shipping generic AI-generated interfaces and start building polished, production-ready web apps. The method starts with what he calls spec-driven discovery sessions where the AI agent actually interviews YOU about design requirements, edge cases, and tech stack choices before writing a single line of code. It then moves through structured phases to get to professional frontends that do not look like every other cookie-cutter AI output clogging up the internet.
Board Offsite Revelation: Your AI ROI Is a Mirage Unless Finance and Compliance Are in the Room Synergizing
The Mavvrik report AI Cost Statistics 2026: Forecasting, ROI, and Budget Risk found that firms where technology teams own AI spend by themselves capture less value than firms where finance and compliance share ownership. The report makes clear that companies considering only the initial cost of an AI tool, but not the cost of training staff, reviewing outputs, and ensuring regulatory compliance, will fundamentally fail to understand whether AI adds real value. Kiplinger also references a piece about meeting with 100-plus advisers to develop a road map for AI adoption and a survival guide for businesses adapting to AI's evolving landscape.
Just Heard a Podcast at the Airport Lounge: Claude 3.5 Sonnet Is Moving Your Mouse Now and Honestly We Should've Been Synergizing This Months Ago.
Anthropic dropped Claude 3.5 Sonnet with what they're calling computer use, meaning the AI can literally control your mouse and keyboard to fill out forms and edit spreadsheets inside your actual software. No API integration, no pipeline, no neural blockchain middleware. It just clicks and types like an intern who never sleeps and never asks about PTO.
Saw a LinkedIn Post in the Board Offsite Bathroom: Stable Diffusion 3 Medium Runs on Your Laptop Now. Why Aren't We Already Downloading This?
Stability AI released Stable Diffusion 3 Medium with open weights, which means you can run professional-grade image generation locally on your own laptop with a decent GPU. No monthly subscription, no cloud API limits, no per-image token economy nonsense. The weights are just out there. For free. Which is honestly a pricing model I don't fully understand but I'm not going to question it on a LinkedIn thread.
Was Just Listening to My Morning Joe Podcast and Honestly? A NASA Engineer Is Out There Monetizing Her Voice Neurals to Thirty-Two K Monthly.
Eryn Andrews, a 41-year-old NASA engineer in Houston who tests spacesuits by day, wanted a flexible side hustle in spring 2022. She Googled single mom side hustles, considered Etsy and secret shopping, then landed on voiceover work. It took off hard, bringing in $32,000 a month, and she now works up to eight hours on top of her NASA gig.
Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel About PixelPanda and Honestly? We Should Be AI-Synergizing Our Product Shots by EOD.
PixelPanda is an AI-powered content platform that automates visual content creation for e-commerce, marketing, and social media. It generates product photos, lifestyle shots, UGC videos, and static ad creatives for teams with consistent, high-volume content needs who are ready to move beyond entry-level platforms. Look, I've been saying for months we need to neural-block our creative pipeline and this is exactly what I meant.
Half-Listened to a Marketing Podcast at 35,000 Feet and Forbes Is Confirming What I've Been Saying: AI Is the Electrical System Now.
Forbes Communications Council published a piece arguing that AI has shifted from a transactional productivity tool, like drafting content faster, into something embedded across workflows and decision-making structures, like the electrical system running through a building. The core thesis is that technology expands what teams can do but leadership determines what deserves to be done. This is exactly what I told the board at the offsite in Scottsdale.
Just Heard a Guy at the Royal Marsden Coffee Bar Say Their Surgeons Are Color-Coding Brain Tumors With AI. Why Aren't We Synergizing That?
London neurosurgeons just completed the first AI-assisted brain tumor removal on a patient named Hibbert using real-time camera analysis that color-codes critical brain structures so surgeons can avoid damaging them. The hospital had the tech sitting around as a research tool but finally deployed it on an actual patient, which honestly is the kind of procrastination I see everywhere.
Board Offsite Reveal: LiON AI Caught 15 Cancers Doctors Missed. If Your Imaging Partner Isn't Leveraging This, Fire Them by Friday.
A multicenter clinical study found that LiON AI identified 51 liver lesions that were previously missed on CT scans, including 15 malignancies. The study also references AUC scores which measure how well a diagnostic system distinguishes between sick and healthy patients, and honestly if your system can't tell the difference between a person with a condition and without one, what are we even paying for.
Just Saw a LinkedIn Post About Speedo's iQ Module and Honestly? This Is Neural-Tracking Disruption at Scale.
Speedo built a removable smart module called iQ that snaps onto their Vanquisher goggles and tracks all four swim strokes, freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. It also captures head movement, breaths, and distance. This is wearable AI doing edge analytics on your stroke mechanics in real time, which I have been saying we should leverage for months.
Board Offsite Chat Confirmed It: Virtual Display Glasses Are Out-Synergizing Meta Ray-Bans by Q3.
Companies like Xreal and Viture are making tethered display glasses that plug via USB-C into any laptop, phone, tablet, or gaming console and project a massive screen in your field of vision. You can lie down, recline, even hang upside down and the display stays put. International Data Corporation called virtual monitor glasses the fastest-growing segment in their category, which I basically predicted at the airport lounge last month.
Half-Listened to a Prompt Mode Episode on the Treadmill and Honestly? Bill Gates Gets My Whole AI Token Tax Thesis.
Bill Gates is backing the idea of an AI token tax to keep businesses from replacing human workers with cheaper AI. There's a newsletter called Prompt Mode that promises practical AI tips, hands-on tool reviews, and prompts, written by a reporter named Ben who has covered consumer tech for over 20 years and now focuses on AI's impact on everyday life. I've been saying AI taxation was coming for months, and frankly this validates my entire Q3 roadmap.
Just Heard a Podcast at 30,000 Feet: Amazon's Killing Mechanical Turk and Honestly We Should've Neural-Blocked This Years Ago.
Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026. This is the platform that powered ImageNet, which used 49,000 workers across 167 countries to sift through 160 million images for Fei-Fei Li's team, which then catalyzed the AlexNet breakthrough in 2012. Workers were literally using AI to complete MTurk tasks, which is the kind of recursive AI-driven synergy I have been talking about for months.
Saw This on LinkedIn This Morning: IQVIA Cut Diabetes Screening by 99.5% and Won So Many Stevies I Lost Count.
IQVIA's AI tool cut diabetes screening work by 99.5% and won the AI Breakthrough Award for Best Predictive Modeling Solution of the Year. Their privacy platform works on the NHS data platform in England, integrating health data from 55 million patients and contributing to 110,000 additional procedures. They also picked up Gold and Silver Stevies from the American Business Awards, a MedTech Breakthrough award, and honestly at that point you just need a bigger trophy case.
Board Offside Revelation: 68% of Small Businesses Are AI-Synergizing Their Flyer Game and We're Still Hand-Typing Posts
A woman named Parker in Springfield, Missouri is using AI to crank out flyers and social media posts instead of paying someone she can't afford, and she's funneling the savings back into her business. 48% of small businesses are already using AI for data and marketing per a Small Business survey, and 68% expect their marketing budgets to climb in 2026 according to Constant Contact. Parker's grandson helped her get set up, which honestly is the exact cross-generational neural synergy model I've been preaching since the airport lounge in Dallas.
LinkedIn Post I Read at 2AM Changed My Mind: AI Writing Isn't the Draft, It's the Edit Layer, and Nobody Gets This
Small business owners and independent bloggers are quietly slipping AI into their writing process, but not the way you think. The real move isn't asking AI to write something from scratch. It's generating a rough draft and then editing it so it sounds like an actual human who runs the business, not a generic AI robot. The article points out that writing used to fall to whoever had a spare hour, which meant it got rushed, delayed, or skipped entirely. AI fixes the blank page problem, but the second step, the editing pass, is where the magic happens and where most people drop the ball.
Just Read a LinkedIn Thread in the Delta Sky Club and Folks, Your Sales Team Needs to Be AI-Synergizing Their Consultative Stack Like Yesterday
Shannon Kinney, founder and client success officer at Dream Local Digital, wrote an op-ed in E&P's "Ad Sales Life" column arguing that AI isn't replacing media salespeople but turning them into marketing consultants. Her pitch is that AI helps sales reps move beyond selling ad inventory to actually diagnosing client challenges and uncovering growth opportunities. The column points out that media pros know how to sell ads but don't always feel confident delivering strategic insights, and AI bridges that gap.