Episode #1044 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Steve Brown gets into one of the biggest mistakes organizations are making with AI right now: treating it like another technology rollout. Buy the tools… train the team… add a policy… run a few experiments… show some productivity gains… and… move on. Steve makes the case that this is much bigger than that (no argument from me). AI is not just another layer of software inside the business. It is a fundamental transformation in how organizations think, decide, create, operate and compete. That shift is easy to underestimate because the tools feel so accessible and amorphis at the same time. Anyone can open a chatbot. Anyone can generate a document, summarize a meeting or build a rough prototype. But that surface-level ease can hide the deeper work required to become truly AI-first. Steve has spent more than twenty-five years helping organizations prepare for the future of technology. He is a former Senior Director and in-house futurist at Google DeepMind, where he was there during the launch of AlphaFold, a former Chief Evangelist and Futurist at Intel, and now an advisor who has worked with many global brands including Nike, JPMorgan Chase, Samsung, Disney and many others.

His latest book, The AI Ultimatum – Preparing For A World Of Intelligent Machines And Radical Transformation, is aimed at leaders trying to understand what this next decade may demand from them.

What makes Steve’s perspective land is that he does not frame AI as a simple efficiency story. Yes, AI will automate work. Yes, it will create new productivity gains. But the more interesting question is what happens when organizations begin to work with AI agents, digital employees and intelligent systems that are no longer just tools waiting for instructions, but active participants in how work gets done. In this conversation, we talk about the three stages of AI adoption, the rise of digital employees, why leaders need to rethink workflows instead of simply automating broken ones, and how employees can be involved in designing the systems that may reshape their roles. We also get into surveillance, governance, workforce anxiety, creativity, burnout and the emergence of super teams where humans and intelligent machines work side by side. Mostly, this is a conversation about what happens when intelligence becomes programmable. The organizations that win may not be the ones that license the most AI tools. They may be the ones willing to rethink what work, management and value creation actually mean.

The episode is now live… please listen to our conversation here: A World Of Intelligent Machines With Steve Brown – TWMJ #1044.

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