Apples AI boss, John Giannandrea, is stepping down after seven years on the job. Apples stock price got a slight boost on the news, as some investors saw Apple signaling a new urgency to bring AI to its devices.
Following a transition period, Giannandrea will retire next spring, Apple said in a press release Monday. Most of Giannandreas AI group will now be tucked into Craig Fedherigis software development group, which owns development of the various operating systems in Apple devices.
While the reasons for Giannandreas departure are no doubt complicated, its a wonder he lasted so long. For years, hes been linked to Apples failure to seize on generative AI to improve its Siri voice assistant and make the iPhone and other iDevices smarter and more personalized.He may have made errors in judgement. Reports said he waffled several times on the preferred architecture for Siri — on how much of the assistants AI processing should run on the device versus a server in the cloud. But its also possible that his plans for integrating AI into Apple products encountered friction from other Apple leaders, or were hampered by fears among the leadership team that generative AI would compromise user privacy or create new legal exposure. At any rate, by 2024 Apples leadership — including Tim Cook — had lost confidence that Giannandreas group could turn AI research into useful (and safe) AI features and products.
Before coming to Apple, Giannandrea had been prolific as the head of search and AI at Google. Under his leadership, the search giant began relying on AI to refine its understanding of certain user-preferred search terms, in hopes of returning more relevant and useful results. He was at the helm of Googles AI efforts when its researchers invented the transformer language model architecture that sparked the generative AI boom and new apps like ChatGPT.
Apple poached Giannandrea in 2018 to inject new life into its floundering AI efforts. This gave Apple the time and leadership it needed to develop its own models and inject its devices and services with new intelligence. Apple combined the Siri and AI/machine learning groups and put them under Giannandreas control, creating a single point of accountability for infusing the companys operating systems, services, and developer tools with AI.
Giannandreas work during his first years at Apple was kept largely under wraps by the company. Fast Company, which had been granted meetings with the companys AI group, was repeatedly denied access to Giannandrea. As the starting gun of the generative AI revolution sounded with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Apple stayed largely silent and remained so even as its peers raced to develop their own large AI models and apps. Then in June 2024, Apple announced at its developer conference that it would bring Apple Intelligence” features to its devices, enabling them to offer intuitive and proactive help based on the users personal data. It also announced plans to use generative AI to create a smarter next-gen Siri. For a time, hope was restored that Apple would catch up with the AI revolution.
But neither Apple Intelligence nor next-gen Siri have shown up. (Apple now says theyll arrive in 2026.) In lieu of its own AI, Apple tried to integrate OpenAIs ChatGPT into Siri, but the user experience is clunky. In March, Apple announced it would be taking Siri out of Giannandreas control and placing it inside Fedherighis software group. Just six weeks later, Apple removed its robotics research group (which it hoped would lay the groundwork for future Apple home devices) from Giannandreas AI group.
Apple believes Amar Subramanya, the Microsoft executive theyve tapped to replace Giannandrea, can and will get things back on track. A 16-year veteran of Google, Subramanya led engineering for the companys Gemini Assistant. He has an impressive resume, and very likely a price tag to match. His hire, along with Giannandreas departure, should be read as Apples acknowledgment of falling behind its peers in AI — and a signal that it intends to catch up. Interestingly, it was Giannandreas departure that got top billing in the press release Apple put out Monday, not the arrival of a new AI chief in Subramanya.
Apple stock got a slight bump on the announcement, closing up $4.25 (1.52%) at $283.10.
Giannandreas departure is very much about what kind of tech company Apple wants to be in the long term. Does it want to develop and control its own AI models, or pay to rely on big AI models like Googles Gemini? Apple has distinct advantages with its sticky and trusting relationship with users, and control over both its software and hardware, including the chips inside the devices. Its in a unique position to leverage smaller, more specialized AI models running on those chips to deeply understand and effectively assist users.
Whatever the move, you can expect to see a lot more focus and pressure within Apple to realize new AI features and a smarter Siri in iDevices.
The U.S. stock market is holding relatively steady on Tuesday as both bond yields and Bitcoin stabilize.
The S&P 500 rose 0.1%, coming off its first loss in six days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 115 points, or 0.2%, as of 1:02 p.m. ET, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.5% higher.
MongoDB helped lead the market and jumped 23.4% after the database company delivered stronger results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. United Natural Foods also climbed after reporting a stronger profit than expected, and it rose 7.3%.
They helped offset a 4% drop for Signet Jewelers, which gave a forecast for revenue in the holiday shopping season that fell short of analysts expectations. The jeweler said its expecting a measured consumer environment.
Another potential warning about U.S. shoppers’ strength came from the chief financial officer of Procter & Gamble, the giant behind Tide detergent, Ivory soap, and Oral-B toothbrushes. Andre Schulten said the landscape for U.S. consumers is volatile” at the moment, though still within the company’s expectations. Procter & Gamble fell 2.3%.
The U.S. economy has been holding up overall, but thats masking sharp divisions beneath the surface. Lower-income households are struggling with inflation thats still higher than anyone would like. Richer households, meanwhile, are benefiting from a stock market thats within 1% of its all-time high set in late October.
In the bond market, Treasury yields were calming following their jumps the day before. The 10-year yield was holding at 4.09%, where it was late Monday, while the two-year yield eased to 3.52%, from 3.54%.
Higher yields can drag prices lower for all kinds of investments, and those seen as the most expensive can take the biggest hit.
Bitcoin, which tumbled below $85,000 on Monday as bond yields worldwide marched higher, pulled back above $91,000. That helped stocks of several crypto-related companies bounce back from sharp slides on Monday.
Strategy Inc. climbed 6.9% and more than made up for Monday’s loss. Coinbase Global gained 3.3%, and Robinhood Markets rose 3.6% to recover much of their drops from the day before.
Mondays climb in yields came after the Bank of Japan hinted that it may raise interest rates there soon. But hopes are still high that the U.S. Federal Reserve will cut its main interest rate when it meets in Washington next week.
What comes after that for the Fed, though, is uncertain. The Fed has already cut its overnight interest rate twice this year in hopes of shoring up a slowing job market. But lower rates can fan inflation higher, and inflation has stubbornly remained above the Feds 2% target.
Complicating things is the U.S. governments earlier shutdown, which delayed reports on the job market and other areas of the economy.
Investment giant Vanguard said its data suggests the U.S. labor market remains stable but is still soft compared with last year.
Overall, hiring numbers are slower on a month-to-month basis. But fewer workers are going after job openings because of weaker immigration and an uptick in retirements, according to Adam Schickling, a senior U.S. economist at Vanguard. That, in turn, means hiring doesn’t need to be as strong in the past to keep the unemployment rate steady.
In stock markets abroad, indexes moved modestly across much of Europe and Asia.
South Koreas Kospi was an outlier and jumped 1.9% for one of the worlds bigger moves. Tech stocks helped lead the way, including rises of 2.6% for Samsung Electronics and 3.7% for chip company SK Hynix.
By Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
A Pennsylvania police officer responding to a tip from the manager of a McDonald’s testified Tuesday about confronting Luigi Mangione during the intense manhunt last year for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killer.
As soon as Mangione doffed his medical mask at the restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Officer Joseph Detwiler said, I knew” he was the suspect whose face had been all over the news since the shooting five days earlier on a Manhattan sidewalk.
It’s him I’m not kidding. Hes real nervous, and he didnt talk too much, Detwiler told a supervisor by phone from the restaurant parking lot moments after meeting Mangione, according to the officer’s body-camera video. It was played in court Tuesday, the second day of a hearing about evidence in the case.
Mangione indeed said little initially to Detwiler and another officer, giving only what turned out to be a false name, home state and driver’s license. But Detwiler testified that hed noticed the man’s fingers shaking as they interacted and officers patted him down.
Over the ensuing minutes, Mangione placidly ate a hash brown as the officers waited for colleagues and claimed they were simply responding to loitering concerns at the eatery.
I was trying to keep him calm, Detwiler told the court, adding that he at one point started whistling over the restaurant’s holiday-season music to make him think that nothing was different about this call than any other call.
Lawyers for Mangione, 27, want to block prosecutors from showing or telling jurors at his eventual Manhattan trial about statements he allegedly made and items authorities said they seized from his backpack during his arrest. The objects include a 9 mm handgun that prosecutors say matches the one used in the killing and a notebook in which they say Mangione described his intent to wack a health insurance executive.
The defense contends the items should be excluded because police didn’t get a warrant before searching Mangione’s backpack. They also want to suppress some statements Mangione made to law enforcement personnel, such as allegedly giving a false name, because officers started asking questions before telling him he had a right to remain silent.
The laws concerning how police interact with potential suspects before reading their rights or obtaining search warrants are complex and often disputed in criminal cases.
In Mangione’s case, crucial questions will include whether he believed he was free to leave at the point when he spoke to the arresting officers, and whether there were exigent circumstances that merited searching his backpack before getting a warrant.
Detwiler testified that he never told Mangione he couldn’t leave, nor mentioned the New York shooting. Defense lawyers, however, have argued in court filings that officers strategically stood in a way that prevented him from leaving.
Mangione, the Ivy League-educated scion of a wealthy Maryland family, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges. The state charges carry the possibility of life in prison, while federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Neither trial has been scheduled.
Mangiones lawyers want to bar evidence from both cases, but this weeks hearing pertains only to the state case.
Manhattan prosecutors haven’t yet laid out their arguments for allowing the disputed evidence. Their federal counterparts have said in court filings that police were justified in searching the backpack to ensure there were no dangerous items and that Mangione’s statements to officers were voluntary and made before he was under arrest.
Five witnesses testified on Monday, including a Pennsylvania prison officer who said Mangione told him that, when arrested, he had a backpack with foreign currency and a 3D-printed pistol.
Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind as the executive walked to a midtown Manhattan hotel for his companys annual investor conference on Dec. 4, 2024. Prosecutors say delay, deny and depose were written on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase insurance industry critics use to describe how companies avoid paying claims.
Thompson, 50, worked at the giant UnitedHealth Group for 20 years and became CEO of its insurance arm in 2021. He was married and had children who were in high school.
Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press
Students applying to college know they cantor at least shouldntuse AI chatbots to write their essays and personal statements. So it might come as a surprise that some schools are now using artificial intelligence to read them.
AI tools are now being incorporated into how student applications are screened and analyzed, admissions directors say. It can be a delicate topic, and not all colleges are eager to talk about it, but higher education is among the many industries where artificial intelligence is rapidly taking on tasks once reserved for humans.
In some cases, schools are quietly slipping AI into their evaluation process, experts say. Others are touting the technologys potential to speed up their review of applications, cut processing times, and even perform some tasks better than humans.
Humans get tired; some days are better than others. The AI does not get tired. It doesnt get grumpy. It doesnt have a bad day. The AI is consistent, says Juan Espinoza, vice provost for enrollment management at Virginia Tech.
This fall, Virginia Tech is debuting an AI-powered essay reader. The college expects it will be able to inform students of admissions decisions a month sooner than usual, in late January, because of the tool’s help sorting tens of thousands of applications.
Colleges stress they are not relying on AI to make admissions decisions, using it primarily to review transcripts and eliminate data-entry tasks. But artificial intelligence also is playing a role in evaluating students. Some highly selective schools are adopting AI tools to vet the increasingly curated application packages that some students develop with the help of high-priced admissions consultants.
The California Institute of Technology is launching an AI tool this fall to look for authenticity in students who submit research projects with their applications, admissions director Ashley Pallie said. Students upload their research to an AI chatbot that interviews them about it on video, which is then reviewed by Caltech faculty.
Its a gauge of authenticity. Can you claim this research intellectually? Is there a level of joy around your project? That passion is important to us, Pallie said.
The prevalence of AI usage is difficult to gauge because it is such a new trend, said Ruby Bhattacharya, chair of the admission practices committee at the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). NACAC updated its ethics guide this fall to add a section on artificial intelligence. It urges colleges to ensure the way they use it aligns with our shared values of transparency, integrity, fairness and respect for student dignity.
Some schools have faced blowback over using AI
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) faced a barrage of negative feedback from applicants, parents, and students after its student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, reported in January the school was using AI to evaluate the grammar and writing style of applicants’ essays.
The university declined to comment for this article and referred to its admissions website, which it updated after the criticism. UNC uses AI programs to provide data points about students common application essay and their school transcripts, the website says. Every application is evaluated comprehensively by extensively trained human application evaluators.
At Virginia Tech, Espinoza said he has been contacted by several colleges that are interested in the new technology but wary of backlash. The feedback from a lot of colleagues is, You roll this out, were watching you, and well see how everyones reacting, he said.
He stressed the AI reader his school spent three years developing is being used only to confirm human readers’ essay scores.
Until this fall, each of the four short-answer essays Virginia Tech applicants submit was read and scored by two people. Under the new system, one of those readers is the AI model, which has been trained on past applicant essays and the rubric for scoring, Espinoza said.
A second person will step in if the AI and human reader disagree by more than 2 points on a 12-point scoring scale.
Like many colleges, Virginia Tech has seen a huge increase in applications since making SATs optional. Last year, it received a record 57,622 applications for its 7,000-seat freshman class. Even with 200 essay readers, the school has struggled to keep up and found itself notifying students later and later.
The AI tool can scan about 250,000 essays in under an hour, compared with a human reader who averages two minutes per essay. Based on last years application pool, Were saving at least 8,000 hours, Espinoza said.
Colleges see benefits of AI tools for applicants
The messaging is sensitive for colleges, many of which now have students certify that they have not used AI unethically for essays and other parts of the application. But schools say AI tools can help admissions offices eliminate errors in tasks like uploading transcripts and can simplify the process for students.
Georgia Tech this fall is rolling out an AI tool to review the college transcripts of transfer students, replacing the need for staff to enter each course manually into a database. It will allow the school to inform applicants more quickly how many transfer credits they’ll receive, cutting down on uncertainty and wait times, said Richard Clark, the school’s executive director of enrollment management.
Its one more layer of delay and stress and inevitable errors. AI is going to kill that, which Im so excited about, Clark said. The school hopes to expand the service soon to all high school transcripts. Georgia Tech also is testing out AI tools for other uses, including one that would identify low-income students who are eligible for federal Pell Grants but may not have realized it.
Stony Brook University in New York is also using artificial intelligence to review applicants’ transcripts and testing AI tools for a variety of tasks, like summarizing student essays and letters of recommendation to highlight things an admissions officer should consider, said Richard Beatty, the schools senior associate provost for enrollment management.
Maybe a student was fighting a disease sophomore year. Or maybe a parent passed away, or theyre taking care of siblings at home. All these things matter, and it allows the counselors to look at the transcript differently, Beatty said.
Colleges are interested in AI summaries of transcripts, extracurricular activities nd letters of recommendation that tell human readers the students story in a more digestible way, said Emily Pacheco, founder of NACACs special interest group for AI and admission.
Humans and AI working togetherthat is the key right now. Every step along the way can be greatly improved: transcript reading, essay reviews, telling us things we might be missing about the students, said Pacheco, a former assistant director of admission at Loyola University Chicago. Ten years from now, all bets are off. Im guessing AI will be admitting students.
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The Associated Press education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Jocelyn Gecker, AP education writer
Fatherhood used to be invisible in the conversation about entrepreneurship. The story was always the same: A founder celebrated for sacrifice, for grinding through the night, taming fortune one day at a time. The world championed the grind. But that archetype is now deeply outdated.
The successful founder is no longer the one sleeping under their desk. Thats not simply dedication; its a symptom of poorly designed systems. If your company requires your constant, heroic presence, you haven’t built a businessyouve built a cage.
Today, elite performance is not measured by the hours you log, but by the resilience of the organization you leave behind. The best entrepreneurs build things that thrive when they are gonesay, to simply make breakfast or see a Little League game. The new true flex is to be out of office and unreachable.
THE STRESS TEST
Fatherhood is the ultimate stress test for an entrepreneur’s systems.
This isn’t about the impossible concept of balance. That word implies separation. This is about deep integration. Its about simply sitting on the floor with your childthe ability to be fully present for simple things. Being a father is not a distraction from ambition; it is a profound competitive advantage. The quiet moments demand tools like empathy and grace. These are the exact skills required to lead a high-trust, modern team. It forces you to operate from a position of systemic strength, not perpetual effort.
The perspective is that days are long, but the years pass like a train in the night. This accelerated sense of time, which spans decades not quarters, is the masterclass both fatherhood and entrepreneurship teach.
3 PARALLELS FOR RAISING HUMANS AND A VISION
The following three core disciplines run parallel between raising humans and scaling a vision.
1. Patience and long-term vision
You must learn to ignore the immediate market tantrums, the noise of instant feedback, and the urge to sprint. You invest, guide, and trust the process. You build, break, and grow.
2. Nurture autonomy
True leadership is not about commanding; its about creating an environment where othersyour children, your employeeslearn to lead themselves. Curiosity is the path to growth. We must empower self-sufficiency, giving room for the inevitable failure and iteration required for competence.
3. Active presence
I recall a day fishing on the Harpeth River. The August downpour had left the water swollen, filled with snags and debris. Laughing turned to silence as each child found their hole. In that stillness, I learned more about patience and waiting for the right moment to guide than I did in any boardroom. The stakes were suddenly real. The humility to wait for the fish, and the willingness to let others find their footing, perfectly mirrored the trust I had to place in my leadership team during a turbulent launch.
ACCEPTANCE
The elite leader of the next decade is the one who accepts that lifes non-negotiable anchorslike familyforce an excellence that the constant grind never could. Fatherhood demands you delegate ruthlessly and focus only on the high-leverage work. This forces a vision for the future and its unknowns that is built for endurance, not a flash.
The most successful companieslike the most resilient familiesare those built to last, not to sprint. They are sustained by presence, not absence.
So I look to the horizon. We are ready for what comes next.
Logan Mulvey is CEO of Cinq Music.
The world economy has proven surprisingly durable in the face of President Donald Trumps trade wars, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Tuesday, upgrading its outlook for global and U.S. economic growth this year.
The 38-country OECD now forecasts that the world economy will grow 3.2% this year, down a tick from 3.3% in 2024 but an improvement on the 2.9% it had predicted for 2025 back in June. The organization, which does economic research and promotes international trade and prosperity, expects global growth to slow to 2.9% next year.
The OECD also raised its forecast for U.S. growth this yearto 2%, up from the 1.6% it had forecast in June. Still, even with the upgrade, the American economythe worlds largestwould have grown considerably more slowly than it did in 2024 (2.8%).
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has overhauled U.S. trade policy, imposing taxes on imports to build a protectionist wall around the previously open American economy.
The trade barriers were widely expected to slow growth and push up costs. But his tariffs have come in lower than the ones he threatened to impose in the spring. Many companies beat the levies by importing foreign goods into the United States before they took effect. And the U.S. and world economies are getting a boost from massive investments in artificial intelligence.
The global economy has been resilient this year, despite concerns about a sharper slowdown in the wake of higher trade barriers and significant policy uncertainty, OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann wrote in a commentary accompanying the forecasts. Still, he added: We expect higher tariffs to gradually feed through to higher prices, reducing growth in household consumption and business investment.
The OECD expects China, the worlds No. 2 economy, to grow 5% this year, the same as in 2024. It sees the 20 economies that share the euro currency collectively expanding 1.3% in 2025, lackluster but up from 0.8% in 2024.
India, which has supplanted China as the worlds fastest-growing major economy, is expected to generate 6.7% growth this year, up from 6.5% in 2024.
Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer
More than 1 million workers in America have been laid off so far in 2025, according to the latest tally of announced job cuts from the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The jobs span nearly every major industry, but layoffs have hit tech and government jobs the hardest. Heres what you need to know, and which tech companies have had the largest round of layoffs in 2025.
2025 layoff announcements surpass 1 million
Nearly every week this year, there have been headlines about layoffs hitting Americas workers.
The latest report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas adds up layoff announcements from U.S. employers through the end of October. According to the report, 1,099,500 workers have lost their jobs due to layoffs.
Given that those numbers dont include November layoffs, and we are only at the beginning of December, it’s a certainty that the figure will rise before the end of the year.
Worse, the 1,099,500 job cuts are 65% higher than the 664,839 job cuts announced through October 2024.
This year’s figure also exceeds the 761,358 full-year 2024 job cuts by 44%. And to put the 2025 figures into greater perspective, Challenger, Gray & Christmas says this years job cuts are at their highest levels since 2020, when there were 2,304,755 through that Octobermany spurred by the pandemic.
Government and tech account for most layoffs
While layoffs have hit nearly every industry in 2025, two sectors were impacted more than others: government and tech.
Government worker layoffs account for the most job losses, many stemming from cuts made by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), then led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas calls this the DOGE Impact and states that it remains the leading reason for job cut announcements in 2025.
In total, those cuts amount to 307,638 for the year through October. That figure includes 293,753 direct layoffs of federal workers and contractors, along with an additional 20,976 layoffs due to a DOGE Downstream Impact.”
Challenger, Gray & Christmas says these additional layoffs are a reflection of the loss of federal funding to private and non-profit entities.
After government-related layoffs, the sector next most affected by job cuts was the tech industry. Challenger, Gray & Christmas says that through October 2025, 141,159 tech workers lost their jobs due to layoffs.
Overall, the top five sectors with the most job cuts in 2025 through October are:
Government: 307,638
Technology: 141,159
Warehousing: 90,418
Retail: 88,664
Services: 63,580
Tech companies lead private-sector layoffs in 2025
After removing sweeping federal government job cuts from the figures, the tech industry accounted for the most layoffs so far in 2025.
Thats little surprise considering that hardly a week went by this year without additional rounds of tech layoffs making the news.
Meanwhile, some Big Tech companies made an outsized contribution to 2025s tech layoffs. According to data from layoff tracking website Layoffs.fyi, the largest rounds of job cuts from U.S. tech companies so far in 2025 have come from the following:
Intel
Amazon
Microsoft
HP
Salesforce
Meta
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Its worth noting that while any layoffs this year are devastating to the workers involved and their families, Layoffs.fyis data shows that 2025 has so far seen fewer tech layoffs than in years past.
Layoffs.fyis data currently shows that 120,444 tech employees were laid off globally by 239 tech companies in 2025 so far. That compares to 152,922 tech employees laid off from 551 tech companies in 2024, and 264,220 tech employees laid off from 1,193 tech companies in 2023.
Since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, almost everyone has used Artificial Intelligence in some fashion to help with their work and the world collectively believes AI holds potential. I have written on AI subjects three times before in this series on strategy & AI, on AI investment, and on AIs impact on entry level hiring. The third was co-authored with friends Ahmad Zaidi, co-founder and CEO of AI start-up TransforML, and Gui Loureiro, Regional CEO Walmart Canada, Central America, Chile and Mexico and co-author of Reinventing the Leader. That team returns for this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insight piece on leadership and AI. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
Substitution vs. augmentation
Every new technology that has or will come along has the potential to both substitute for humans and augment humans whether wheel, printing press, electricity, internal combustion engine, telephone or digital computer. For example, the printing press put lots of scribes out of jobs, but it also massively augmented the ability of humans to communicate their ideas, starting with the worlds first publishing mogul, Martin Luther! It is irrefutable that the printing press augmented humans to a vastly greater extent than it substituted for them. And that has been the case with every truly important technology the world has seen, including the list above.
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The overwhelming public concern about AI is that it will become the first major technology to have its biggest impact by way of substitution. We dont know how the balance between substitution and augmentation will play out. But it is clear that the easiest path is substitution and lots of people will provide advice on that front. We sincerely hope that those with the power to influence the direction of AI wont focus their energy on spurring its substitution for humans. One way to guard against that negative outcome is to demonstrate the power of augmentation and that is our greatest interest because augmentation of humans with AI is what will really advance society and within it, business.
We believe that it will take strong leadership to tilt the balance toward augmentation. To realize the potential value and make AI an augmentation superpower, modern leaders need to master each of the following five layers, each a deeper and more sophisticated augmentation that builds on the layer before.
First level: How AI augments knowledge & research
AI is now a common first-pass research assistant. It can map a space, surface sources, and draft a structured brief in minutes. Sophisticated deep research tools like iterative question decomposition, source triage, and synthesis passes that are incorporated into AI products help analysts quickly collect information that would have earlier taken days. That even includes the time it takes to verify sources and detect and correct the Achilles heel of AI, hallucinations.
For example, a mid-level manager might prompt AI to: Size the Mexican hard-discount grocery market and identify three expansion risks. On a task like this, AI can (1) outline demand drivers and competitor set, (2) pull public data points (market sizes, growth rates, store counts), (3) generate a comparison table, (4) list interview questions for two customer segments, and (5) draft a 1-page brief with assumptions and confidence levels. The human then validates numbers, adds confidential insights, and finalizes the narrative augmented by AI.
Second level: How AI augments through task automation
Beyond research, AI can quietly take work off the plate of busy leaders, leveraging their time for other higher-value activities. AI can capture and crystallize notes, summarize meetings, tag decisions, extract owners and due dates, and push them to your tracker. It can cascade strategy, translating top-level objectives into team-level initiatives, propose KPIs, and keep a living single source of truth to ensure value delivery. This is the focus of the TransforML platform, which connects strategy choices to projects. It provides risks and weekly updates so leaders see progress, and accumulates blockers and deltas in one place. AI can automate routine operations such as converting emails to tickets, standardizing brief templates, generating weekly roll-ups, and pre-drafting stakeholder communications.
In this layer, leaders get leverage from AI by eliminating the necessity for countless monitoring meetings thanks to more and better machine-assisted follow-through.
Third level: How AI augments through skill leveling-up
AI is a force multiplier for uneven skill profiles. Very few of us have completely consistent skill levels across the spectrum required in our jobs. Each of us has our stronger and weaker skill areas. AI can be used to level-up those weaker skill areas to give us a more consistent skill set through AI augmentation.
For example, we have seen a front-end engineer, who is brilliant in user experience design but less confident with logic structuring, use AI o propose architecture options and trade-offs, generate scaffolded components and tests, and help with complex logical flows. As a result, the front-end engineer has been able to add a disproportionate amount of impact through her unique strengths in developing user experiences that truly delight customers, without being held back by her skill deficits.
Fourth level: How AI augments through blind spot detection
AI is relentless at checklisting the things we forget. Thanks to Atul Gawande and The Checklist Manifesto, we know that even highly skilled professionals need checklists to avoid blindspots. But AI can go far beyond a simple standard checklist. Point AI at a plan and ask: Whats missing? What could fail? It will probe dependencies, non-obvious stakeholders, compliance constraints, and capacity cliffs. It will test for coverage gaps. Used well, it becomes a second pair of eyes that flags risks early and attaches mitigation options with owner, time requirements, and resulting cost estimates. AIs ability to sift through innumerable documents in minutes allows it to do this at a scale and speed that augments beyond human capacity.
Fifth level: How AI augments through counterbalancing groupthink
Groupthink is a well-documented problem (popularized by Yale professor Irving Janis in a 1971 article and 1972 book) by which teams converge too quickly on suboptimal decisions. To counterbalance groupthink, leaders can assign AI the role of devils advocate. Prompt it to argue the strongest opposing case, quantify downside scenarios, and stress-test assumptions. Which single assumption, if wrong, breaks this plan? This keeps debate vigorous and constructive without putting the interpersonal burden on a single brave colleague.
What leaders can do to move teams through the five layers of augmentation
Set the strategy for AI
The leader must set the overall role of AI in fulfilling the companys strategy. For example, Guis boss (Walmart corporate CEO) declared that Walmart will be people led, powered by technology. That helped Walmart employees understand that it wasnt going to be technology first and people second which would have indicated a substitution rather than augmentation agenda. As strategy evolves, it is important that people know what the company is ultimately trying to accomplish, and how.
Set the bar & the ritualsBe specific on what good looks like for AI augmentation. For example, mandate AI-first drafts for research memos, require AI-generated action lists after meetings, and add a devils advocate AI check before big decisions. Make these part of the operating rituals, not optional extras. Once it becomes part of the ritual, people will quickly overcome any initial fear or hesitation.
Pair tools with training & metricsThe challenge is less with intelligent use that will come quickly with practice and more with adoption. Provide training on the approved tools to ease and sped adoption. Set guardrails to help users avoids unpleasant and unproductive downsides. Set and track usage with simple metrics such as percentage of meetings with AI action summaries or percentage of projects with AI risk reviews. Celebrate wins and coach the laggards.
Role-model and de-risk.As with most things in company life, this wont take root unless leaders set a positive example. That lowers the implied risk for everybody else in the company. For example, leaders should show their own AI-assisted work (redlines, drafts, risk logs) and make it safe to iterate. Create a sandbox for sensitive work, define guardrails (privacy, IP, accuracy checks), and reward teams for using AI to improve outcomes, not just for using AI.
Practitioner insights
Strategy is choice and as a leader (whether at the top or somewhere in the middle of your organization) in the modern era, you have the choice to focus on substitution or augmentation in your utilization of AI. It is a true strategic choice because the opposite is not stupid on its face. Some will focus more on substitution while others on augmentation. And we predict both will succeed in creating value though in very different ways with differing societal implications.
That having been said, we believe the greatest upside will come setting goals focused on augmentation. That will require cleverness in defining how AI can most powerfully augment your business and then demonstrating the leadership to take advantage of all five levels of augmentation.
AI can give teams superpowers, but only leaders can help unlock them.
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A few blocks from my home sits a small Japanese grocery store that has been in the neighborhood for years. Its the kind of place that once felt irreplaceablecarefully sourced ingredients, shelves stocked with items I couldnt find in mainstream supermarkets, and an owner who knows her regulars.
But much as I love this store, it has been in steady decline for a few years now. Whole Foods opened up nearby and it now stocks all the basicsmiso paste, kombu, dashi packets, norithat I, or anyone else, could want for weeknight Japanese cooking. Suddenly, the extra trip to the specialty shop felt unnecessary most of the time. The big chain became good enough, and in a world where convenience dictates behavior, good enough tends to win.
What happened to that shop isnt really about Japanese groceries. The same story is playing out across sectors as the mass market parts of many businesses are being swallowed up by bigger players. If a small business competes on anything that a large company can copy and make money from, you can bet your bottom dollar that a large company will eventually start providing those goods or services. And thanks to globalized supply, online storefronts, and the ever-increasing speed of information flows about trends and consumer needs, that copying can happen almost instantly.
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Thats why many small businesses need to rethink their business models. Market segments that once seemed niche are quickly becoming part of the mass market. And small businesses have never been able to compete in broad market sectors on the provision of products or services alone. In todays environment, the only defensible strategy is to go narrowmuch narrower than often feels comfortable.
Taking this path can be particularly difficult because when times are tough. The instinct of a small business owner is normally to try harder at everything: better service, longer hours, more products, lower prices. But thats a trap. When you compete broadly against players with structural advantages, youre fighting a war of attrition you cannot win. So, instead of trying to beat big companies at their game, SMEs should play a different game altogether, a game they have advantages that the big beasts cant replicate.
The three shifts that define survival
Small businesses that want to thrive in the future need to make three fundamental shifts in how they operate.
1. From Generalist to Specialist: The Power of Expertise
When business gets tough, owners often broaden the offeringthey add more products and try to serve more customer types to become all things to all people. This is understandable but counterproductive. Instead, the path to survival runs through radical specialization: owning a territory so narrow and deep that competition becomes nearly irrelevant.
The point is that while generalist businesses compete with everyone, specialists compete with almost no one. An accounting firm serving all small businesses faces constant price pressures from the commoditization of services in their sector. The same firm focusing exclusively on assisting craft breweries as they navigate excise tax regulations, inter-state distribution challenges, equipment depreciation schedules, and seasonal cash flow patterns can add value in ways that a large firm selling generalized services never could. They are not competing on price anymorethey are competing on irreplaceable expertise.This matters now more than ever because AI and automation are rapidly commoditizing general knowledge. ChatGPT can generate useful general marketing advice. But it cannot replicate 15 years of navigating the specific regulatory environment of biotech fundraising or identifying which Japanese suppliers source sustainably today. Only the deepest moats can be defended when breadth can be automated.
2. From Customers to Community: Building Tribal Loyalty
In an age in which more and more interactions are becoming digital and transactional, the hunger for genuine connection intensifies. People will pay premiums and make extra trips for businesses that make them feel they belong to somethingbusiness that dont just sell products but that create communities.
Radical specialization creates the conditions for community, because the people who walk through the door arent just customers anymore. They are people who share something in common: a deep focus on and interest in a specific activity, product, or type of knowledge. This is the foundation on which small businesses can build their tribes.
For example, instead of simply selling products, the Japanese grocery store in my neighborhood could cultivate a community of serious home cooks who care about authentic Japanese cuisine. It could organize monthly sake tastings, knife skills workshops, cooking demonstrationsanything that helps create a community of people who come to the store because its their store, a place where people like them hang out and shop. In this way, the business becomes not just a vendor but the center of a shared identity.
3. From Corporate Speak to Real Humanity: The Power of Authenticity
Small businesses often try to sound like big companies. The irony is that this erases the one advantage small businesses will always have over their larger competitorsthe ability to be distinctively, recognizably human.
Big companies have no choice but to be bland, because when a business serves millions of customers with diverse values and preferences, it cannot afford to be polarizing. Every piece of marketing content, branding, and presentation is smoothed into a form that is maximally inoffensive, and which almost inevitably tends to fade into forgettable corporate messaging. But small businesses that specialize do not face this constraint. They can afford to have opinions, quirks, and personality. And in a world where AI can generate perfectly polished content and every brand sounds the same, being recognizably yourself becomes a competitive advantage that cannot be replicated.
This isnt just about being quirky for its own sake. An authentic voice does three thins that corporate polish cannot. First, it makes expertise tangiblestrong opinions come from deep knowledge, and customers can sense the difference between an earned perspective and generic advice. Second, it attracts the right people while repelling everyone else, which is exactly what a specialized business needs. Third, it creates connection before transaction. When someone has been following the grocery store owners social media posts for months, seeing her passion for real ingredients and deep knowledge of the products she sells, the first visit feels less like shopping and more like finally meeting someone they already know.
Three things to do right now
Here are three concrete steps you can take immediately as a small business owner to help your business survive into 2026 and beyond.
1. Map your territory
Pick your top 10 customers and write down what they have in common. What do they care about that others dont? What expertise do they value that general competitors cant provide?
This exercise reveals where the business already has traction with a specific groupthe foundation for radical specialization. Most small businesses discover theyre already serving a niche without realizing it. The work is recognizing it and leaning into it fully rather than hedging with broader offerings.
2. Choose one thing to stop doing
Radical specialization requires subtraction. This week, identify one product line, service offering, or customer segment that pulls the business away from its core expertise.
Then stop serving it.
This can feel terrifying. The instinct is to worry about lost revenue. But the store that stops trying to compete as a general grocer and embraces a new identity as a specialty shop for serious home cooks isnt limiting itselfits claiming territory it can actually defend.
3. Show up as a human being
Pick one platformInstagram, LinkedIn, a blog, whatever feels naturaland commit to posting three times this week as an actual person with actual opinions.
The goal isnt to go viral or be provocative for its own sake. It is to demonstrate that there is a real human with real expertise and real opinions behind the businesssomeone worth paying attention to and someone eventually worth paying to do business with.
This may feel uncomfortable at first. That discomfort is a good sign. If it feels too polished and safe, its not quite working yet.
The path forward
That Japanese grocery store near my house is still therefor now. But if it wants to survive in the long term, it will need to make choices that feel counterintuitive: going narrower instead of broader, becoming smaller instead of bigger.
In a world in which large companies are serving broader and broader markets, small businesses need to lean into becoming specialists. This gives them not just something feasible to defend but the tools they will need to fight for their territory.
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A shooting last weekend at a children’s birthday party in California that left four dead was the 17th mass killing this year the lowest number recorded since 2006, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.Experts warn that the drop doesn’t necessarily mean safer days are here to stay and that it could simply represent a return to average levels.“Sir Isaac Newton never studied crime, but he says ‘What goes up must come down,'” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. The current drop in numbers is more likely what statisticians call a “regression to the mean,” he said, representing a return to more average crime levels after an unusual spike in mass killings in 2018 and 2019.“Will 2026 see a decline?” Fox said. “I wouldn’t bet on it. What goes down must also go back up.”The mass killings defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed in a 24-hour period, not including the killer are tracked in the database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. Fox, who manages the database, says mass killings were down about 24% this year compared to 2024, which was also about a 20% drop compared to 2023.Mass killings are rare, and that means the numbers are volatile, said James Densley, a professor of at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota.“Because there’s only a few dozen mass killings in a year, a small change could look like a wave or a collapse,” when really it’s just a return to more typical levels, Densley said. “2025 looks really good in historical context, but we can’t pretend like that means the problem is gone for good.”
Decline in rates of homicide and violent crime might be a factor
But there are some things that might be contributing to the drop, Densley said, including an overall decline in homicide and violent crime rates, which peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Improvements in the immediate response to mass shootings and other mass casualty incidents could also be playing a part, he said.“We had the horrible Annunciation School shooting here in Minnesota back in August, and that case wouldn’t even fit the mass killing definition because there were only two people killed but over 20 injured,” Densley said. “But I happen to know from the response on the ground here, that the reason only two people were killed is because of the bleeding control and trauma response by the first responders. And it happened on the doorsteps of some of the best children’s hospitals in the country.”Crime is complex, and academics are not great at assessing the reasons behind crime rate changes, said Eric Madfis, a professor of criminal justice at University of Washington-Tacoma.“It’s multicausal. It’s never going to be just one thing. People are still debating why homicide rates went down in the 1990s,” Madfis said. “It is true that gun violence and gun violence deaths are down, but we still have exceedingly high rates and numbers of mass shootings compared to anywhere else in the world.”More states are dedicating funding to school threat assessments, with 22 states mandating the practice in recent years, Madfis said, and that could be preventing some school shootings, though it wouldn’t have an impact on mass killings elsewhere. None of the mass killings recorded in the database so far in 2025 took place in schools, and only one mass killing at a school was recorded in 2024.
Most of those who die in mass killings are shot
About 82% of this year’s mass killings involved a firearm. Since 2006, 3,234 people have died in mass killings and 81% of them were shooting victims.Christopher Carita, a former detective with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and a senior training specialist with gun safety organization 97Percent, said the Safer Communities Act passed in 2022 included millions of dollars of funding for gun violence protection programs. Some states used the money to create social supports for people at risk of committing violence, and others used it for things like law enforcement and threat assessment programs. That flexibility has been key to reducing gun violence rates, he said.“It’s always been framed as either a ‘gun problem’ or a ‘people problem’ and that’s been very contentious,” Carita said. “I feel like for the first time, we’re looking at gun violence as a ‘both, and’ problem nationally.”Focusing on extreme events like mass killings runs the risk of “missing the forest for the trees,” said Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University. “If you look at the deaths from firearms, both in homicides and suicides, the numbers are staggering. We lose the same number of people every year to gun violence as the number of casualties we experienced in the Korean War. The number one cause of death for children is guns.“Mass killings should be viewed as one part of the issue, rather than the outcome of interest,” she said.
Rebecca Boone, Associated Press
