This is a special edition of the Citrix AI Hotsheet. Instead of the usual conversation between Brian & Dave, this week Brian shares the keynote he gave earlier this month EUC Tech Cruise in Norway: "The Last Chapter of EUC."

The talk lays out where the EUC industry stands in summer 2026 and where AI is taking it from here.

Brian opens by looking at why the AI narrative has flipped (six months ago it was "is AI even worth it?", today it's "AI is too expensive") and argues both miss the real story. AI capabilities keep climbing, but diffusion (how fast individuals, teams, and companies actually absorb those capabilities) is the bottleneck.

From there, he walks through his updated 7 Stages of Human-AI Collaboration roadmap (2026 edition): from using AI as a faster search engine, to a thinking partner, to a cognitive extension (your "second brain" / context vault), to a multi-tool agent, a fleet of AIs, a "pod" (worker + AIs), and finally the "published self".

Finally, it's on to the last chapter of EUC. Brian argues the assumptions underpinning 30 years of end-user computing are changing, but the discipline itself isn't going away—it's getting bigger. He maps VDI, image management, profile management, endpoint management, performance monitoring, and the control plane onto a future built around context vaults, skills, agent workers, cognitive observability, and token routing. His take: AI won't eat all software, (only the shallow layer), and the skills EUC and IT pros have built for decades translate directly into managing this new "cognitive" world.

Links mentioned in the episode:

7 Stages of Human-AI Collaboration roadmap, 2026 edition: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2026/06/10/the-7-stage-roadmap-for-human-ai-collaboration-2026-edition/

Skills Are All You Need: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2026/03/12/skills-are-all-you-need/

What's left for humans: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2026/04/09/whats-left-for-humans/

Brian's LinkedIn post announcing his second brain / context vault: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-built-second-brain-using-ai-its-changed-way-work-future-madden-0tote

OSWorld benchmark: https://os-world.github.io

Find us online:

Brian Madden

bmad.com: https://bmad.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmadden/

Citrix blog: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/?s=bmadden&type=author

Second brain: https://brianmadden.ai

Welcome to the first episode of the Citrix AI Hotsheet. Brian Madden (futurist, Citrix) and Dave Brear (account technology strategist, Citrix) introduce the show and dig into how AI is actually entering the enterprise — not the way the tech accelerationists or the vendor podcasts tell it, but the way it's really happening inside the banks, hospitals, and regulated environments where most knowledge workers actually work.

Two main topics this week.

AI will use the apps humans already use. Brian's thesis: AI in the enterprise won't come from top-down rewrites of every system — it'll come from AI workers logging in and using the same desktops, browsers, and applications human workers already use. We walk through why computer-using agents are slow today (screenshots, frame by frame), the OSWorld benchmark showing AI now exceeds the median human at operating a computer, and recent research on semantic primitives (W3C accessibility, Windows UI Automation) that cuts token consumption by ~80%.

The rise of context vaults. Dave introduces the second concept: knowledge workers are quietly building "context vaults" — what most people call second brains — that compound their thinking with AI. It started for both of us as a folder of notes; now it's the most significant shift in how we work day to day. We talk about why this is a corporate blind spot, what the scale problems look like, and the experiment of connecting two second brains together over MCP so we can ask each other's AI what the other one thinks.

Links mentioned in the episode

• OSWorld benchmark: https://os-world.github.io
• arXiv paper on UIA-based agent navigation (~80% fewer tokens vs. screenshots): https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00551
• Andrej Karpathy on personal context vaults — X post: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595 / companion gist: https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f

Find us online

Brian Madden

• bmad.com: https://bmad.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmadden/
• Citrix blog: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/?s=bmadden&type=author
• Second brain: https://brianmadden.ai

Dave Brear

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebrear/
• Second brain: https://davebrear.ai