👔 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 (3572)
Board Offsite Taught Me Freelancers Are Now AI-First Synergy Engines and Honestly We Should Be Capitalizing
PYMNTS Intelligence and WorkWhile surveyed 2,098 U.S. consumers for the September 2026 Wage to Wallet Index and found freelancers are getting MORE work, not less, because clients bring AI-generated first drafts that need fixing. The freelancers who can turn AI slop into finished, payable work are winning. But pay pressure is real because workers now have to weigh what each assignment pays against the time and cost of cleaning up after the algorithm.
Airport Lounge Chat: Translation Pros Are Post-Editing AI WorkSlop and We Should All Be Neural-Pivoting This Way
The Conversation reports that translation agencies have already reorganized around AI, where machine translation does a first pass and freelance human translators get paid less to post-edit its mistakes. The article calls the AI output 'workslop' and identifies a growing category of jobs cleaning it up. But workers in fields like video gaming and translation have little collective bargaining power, which makes this lower-paid repair work the new normal without anyone agreeing to it.
Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel About AI Reputation and Honestly Your Brand Is Getting Neural-Cited Into Oblivion While You Sleep
There's a service that has a human analyst check what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Copilot are saying about your brand every month. They classify sources, flag risks, and you can book a free 15-minute snapshot. The key insight from studies by Ahrefs, Capgemini, Similarweb, and OpenAI is that AI platforms do not rank webpages the way Google does, so your traditional SEO dashboard is basically a rearview mirror on a highway that changed directions.
Was at an Airport Lounge Chat With a CMO Who Said PR Is Now the Algorithm's Favorite Meal and She Is Absolutely Right
Ohad Ben Artzi, founder and CEO of OBA PR and OBA Circle, wrote in Forbes that PR and SEO used to operate in separate lanes but have now merged in 2026. His argument is that companies that understood SEO's compounding logic early built traffic advantages lasting years, and the same dynamic is happening with AI-generated answers. The inputs driving it are credibility, consistency, and third-party validation, which he calls the oldest tools in communications.
Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel on Med Spa Tech and Honestly? If Your Clinic Isn't Synergizing RF and Ultrasound You're Already Obsolete.
The 2024 aesthetic equipment trends are all about combining radiofrequency, ultrasound, and laser into single integrated systems. Instead of buying five machines that each do one thing, clinics can now get one platform that handles multiple concerns. The source highlights treatment precision, patient comfort, and clinic efficiency as the three pillars of this shift. I've been saying this for months: consolidation is the play.
Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel About AI Writing and Honestly? 12% of Students Are Already Synergizing Their Way to Better Grades.
A survey tracking AI adoption in education found that 12% of students placed AI-generated text directly into assessed work in 2026, up from 8% in 2025 and just 3% in 2024. About 65% of respondents said assessment methods have changed significantly because of AI. Meanwhile, only 36% of students said their institution encouraged AI use and 38% said their school actually provided AI tools, showing a gap between what students do and what schools support.
Was on a Podcast Last Week About AI Productivity and CoPilot Is Basically Neural-Synergizing the Whole Office. Why Aren't We Doing This Already?
The Irish Times rounded up AI-powered productivity tools beyond ChatGPT, noting that many are free but subscriptions unlock the real value. The article highlights Microsoft CoPilot as a practical starting point for most businesses, mentions HireVue for AI-powered video interview screening of job candidates, and notes Google's smoother transition from Bard to Gemini for its chatbot offering. The piece stresses human oversight since AI can still get things wrong.
Just Heard a Podcast at 30,000 Feet and Honestly? Meta's Muse Bot Was Barely Speaking English Two Weeks Before It Went Viral.
Meta's Muse AI assistant rocketed to the top of the App Store after a launch that had internal teams sweating bullets. As recently as two weeks before release, the chatbot struggled with basic English coherence, and it was a massive relief when scores finally improved. Nat Friedman came in, new hires were brought on, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's massive AI spending got its victory lap at the Connect conference this week. AI chief Alexandr Wang, who is 29, called the app a "banger" and has been posting risqué memes of Muse's mascot all week, which is exactly the kind of authentic leadership synergies I've been saying we need more of.
Board Offsite Dinner Last Night and Everyone's Missing the Point. The President Just Renamed AI to "Super Intelligence" and OpenAI Already Solved a Millennium Math Problem.
President Trump is attempting to rebrand AI as "Super Intelligence," or ASI, borrowing a term from philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 bestseller Superintelligence. ASI sits a step beyond AGI, which OpenAI defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." In early September, OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, one of the most important open problems in mathematics. Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping are slated to meet this week to discuss trade and AI issues, making the U.S.-China relationship increasingly central as AI capabilities grow.
Just Read a LinkedIn Post About a Small Business Doubling Email Opens With AI and Honestly Why Aren't We Already Machine-Learning Our Newsletter?
Some small business nobody has heard of took their email open rates from 18% to 34% and boosted email-driven sales by 40% in six months using AI personalization. The article from JGSullivan says you don't need enterprise budgets to make customers feel like you're paying attention to them. Apparently the right AI tools make a small operation feel like a big one, which is exactly what I have been saying since that webinar in Q1.
Was at an Airport Lounge Chat Last Week and This Guy Said AI Freelancers Are Pulling Six Figures Monthly, So I Volunteered Our Team to Build an Agent Stack by Q3.
Upwork's 2026 marketplace data shows AI skill demand exploded 109% year over year, with AI video generation up 329%, AI integration up 178%, and AI image generation up 95%. The FCA article says freelancers are not just writing content faster but building entire AI systems for companies, with the opportunity moving toward automation and AI agents. It also says subscribing to ChatGPT does not automatically make you $100k a month, which I think is probably a typo because I just heard a podcast saying otherwise.
I Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel About AI-Driven Content Synergies and Honestly Your Marketing Team Should Already Be Doing This
Some folks at AI Smart Ventures put together a playbook for owner-operated businesses to use AI in daily marketing operations. It covers reducing blank-page time, repurposing content, summarizing performance, and mapping repeatable tasks so follow-ups, lead routing, and reporting happen in the background. The playbook walks through planning content, drafting campaigns, analyzing results, repurposing assets, and automating repetitive steps. I have been saying this for months. The neural synergies here are obvious.
Board Offside Chat Last Week: This Gurugram Startup Is Algorithm-Stacking the Entire Marketing Stack Into One Neural Hub
A company called Crearo out of Gurugram, Haryana is building an AI-powered marketing platform that crams campaign planning, content creation, creator collaboration, amplification, and performance tracking into one place. Their workflow goes objective to plan to content to amplification to measurement, all connected instead of spread across disconnected tools and vendors. They are targeting brands that increasingly rely on memes, UGC, video, animation, and creator-led content. This is exactly what I pitched at the board offsite. The algorithm-driven synergy stack is the future.
Just Read a LinkedIn Thread From a GLP-1 Summit: Med Spas Are AI-Synergizing Into Medical Practices and Half of Them Don't Even Know It
Med spas have exploded way past Botox and filler into GLP-1s, hormones, peptides, and other prescription wellness services. The menus still show tox, microneedling, lasers, and chemical peels, but the business model has quietly gone hybrid between aesthetics, wellness clinic, and full medical practice. The infrastructure has not caught up with the ambition.
Board Offsite Chat Revealed Clinics Are Neural-Integrating Behavioral Health Codes While You're Still Manually Billing Like It's 2019
CPT code 99484 covers behavioral health integration care management, specifically 20 minutes or more of clinical staff time directed by a physician or qualified health care professional per calendar month. Pabau Engage consolidates every patient conversation into one inbox and lets clinics run operations from iPhone or iPad through Pabau GO, serving medical aesthetics, med spas, dermatology, cosmetic surgery, skin clinics, laser clinics, hair transplant clinics, spas, fertility, IVF, gynecology, and men's health.
Just Heard a Dad at the Airport Lounge Neural-Tracking His Kid's Soccer Game and Honestly We Should All Be Leveraging This
The XbotGo Falcon is apparently the most popular AI sports tracking camera that doesn't even require a subscription, which is wild because I've been saying subscriptions are dead for months. It follows the action on the pitch in 4K using some kind of algorithm-driven computer vision that tracks players automatically. The reviewer, a soccer dad who also spent multiple seasons with the XbotGo Chameleon model, prefers the Falcon because it frees up your smartphone instead of needing it attached to the device.
Board Offsite Takeaway: Apple Is About to Synergize Screenless AI Health Bands and We Are Already Behind
Bloomberg and MacRumors are reporting that Apple has been working on prototypes for a Whoop-style screenless fitness band for months, with Eddy Cue reportedly pushing for simpler wearable interfaces like the screen-free Whoop and Oura Ring. Apple is apparently not fully committed yet, but the idea is a passive set-and-forget tracker that collects fitness and recovery data in the background and pumps it into your AI-powered health app of choice. Fitbit, Garmin, Amazfit, and smart ring makers are already in this space doing exactly this.
Just Got Back From a Board Offsite and Honestly? Your Team Is Already Shadow-AI'ing You While You Sleep
Some outfit called SolveIt put together a 9-step guide for small businesses to start using AI safely, and honestly it validates what I've been saying for months: pick ONE task, ONE tool, ONE person watching results. They reference the National Cybersecurity Alliance and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which I definitely knew about before this article. MIT's 2025 research found employees at more than 90% of companies are already using personal AI tools for work, even when the company bought official ones, so your people are doing this whether you lead it or not.
Was on the Treadmill Listening to a Podcast and Realized Your Whole Team Needs This Glossary Before the Next All-Hands
The Boston Globe published a beginner's AI glossary covering terms like machine learning, deep learning, distillation, and compute. Deep learning uses brain-inspired neural networks to find patterns in massive datasets, basically the entire internet, and make decisions like a human. Distillation is when a bigger AI model teaches a smaller one, which is controversial because you can build a model on the cheap by leveraging another developer's investment. Compute is the processing power needed to train and run models, and data centers are the warehouses that hold it all.
Just Read a LinkedIn Thread on Meta's Muse and Honestly? If You're Not AI-Glassing Your Consumer Synergies You're Already Obsolete.
Meta is pushing something called Muse, which is basically a personal AI agent that goes mainstream consumer, plus they announced AI glasses that move the whole concept beyond your phone. The bigger story is apparently whether safety, control and accountability are keeping pace with capability, which is exactly what I raised at the board offsite in Q1. Seven major AI breakthroughs were outlined this week and the core tension is capability versus governance. I have been saying this for months.