I tried something new this week. No guest, no interview, just me thinking out loud about a talk I'm building on how companies actually get value from AI.

My complaint is simple. Most of us use AI to do the same work faster, and that shortcut has a ceiling. It's why the ROI never shows up the way it's promised.

So I went looking at how scientists use AI instead. Google DeepMind's weather model, GenCast, never got taught a single rule of physics. Researchers just fed it decades of real weather and let it find the pattern itself. It beat the gold standard forecast on 97 percent of tests.

Kaiser Permanente ran the same play on patients. Their Advance Alert Monitor catches the small signals someone's about to crash before the alarm goes off, not after, and gets a nurse there while there's still time.

Same move both times. Feed it everything, name the outcome, let it work backward. Here's the rule I'm building my talk around. Give AI the destination, not the directions.

I'm not done. More case studies coming, and I want you along for the ride.

About The Job Sh*t Show

The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

Eric Tabone, runs AI powered recruiting pipelines that process hundreds of applications a day for US companies. When we got into where the system still fails, he landed on a problem no amount of automation fixes.

Here's what we go over:

• Why he'd bet on someone who sold used cars for ten years over someone who coasted ten years at Salesforce, and what that says about how most companies screen for pedigree instead of grit
• Why he thinks the real problem usually isn't AI at all, it's a junior recruiter or a rigid checklist deciding who gets seen long before anyone judges fit
• Why he still won't recommend AI video interviews, even as a major tech firm builds a product that gives candidates a "choice" almost nobody actually takes

About Eric Tabone

Eric Tabone moved from Dallas Fort Worth to Bogota, Colombia almost two decades ago and built his third company, Nearshore Business Solutions, around recruiting talent across Latin America for US companies. He's convinced AI has made hiring faster. He's not convinced it's made it smarter.

About Great Mondays Radio

→ Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.

→ I've spent two decades helping leaders fix their culture. Learn how I can support your work Great Mondays.

→ Want sharp takes on AI and the future of work? Read The Job Sh*t Show on Substack.

→ Watch Great Mondays Radio episodes on YouTube.

Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and still can't tie the spend to results. Starbucks pulled its AI inventory agent. Ford hired back 350 engineers to clean up after automated inspection. So what's actually going on?

I think most of us are stuck in mode one and mode two thinking — using AI to automate tasks or do things faster ourselves — when the real payoff is in mode three: changing what work is worth doing at all. I walk through the steam-engine-to-electric-motor shift, the productivity J-curve, and two examples that show what mode three looks like in practice: IKEA turning 8,500 call center workers into a $1.25B design consulting business, and DeepMind's AlphaFold going from 200,000 human-predicted protein structures to 200 million.

Also — quick heads up. This is the last Job Shit Show episode you'll catch here on Spotify/Apple. We're folding it into Great Mondays going forward, so you can still catch it there, plus we'll keep posting video on Substack.

And if mode three thinking is something you want to work through with me directly, I'm hosting a workshop called AI Together on September 9th. Sign up at aitogether.greatmondays.com.

About The Job Sh*t Show

The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

What if the algorithm screening your applicants is designed to reject your best ones?

Aden Nepom, president of Art of Change, has spent almost two decades teaching executives to communicate under pressure using tools built from improv. When we got into what AI does to creativity, she landed on a problem she doesn't have a fix for yet.

Here's what we go over:

• Why she thinks LLMs are structurally built to average, and what that's doing to a friend of hers who keeps getting rejected for being an outlier
• How telling an AI to "act as" someone is technically an improv game, and why it gets sharper answers than a plain command ever will
• Why she refuses to let AI answer her own writing prompts, even though it would be faster, because she doesn't want to outsource her own thinking

About Aden Nepom

Aden Nepom has spent nearly two decades teaching executives and teams to communicate under pressure using tools built from improv. She's convinced the real risk of AI isn't job loss. It's letting it think for you before you've noticed you stopped.

About Great Mondays Radio

→ Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.

→ I've spent two decades helping leaders fix their culture. Learn how I can support your work Great Mondays.

→ Want sharp takes on AI and the future of work? Read The Job Sh*t Show on Substack.

→ Watch Great Mondays Radio episodes on YouTube.

My friend Lindsey Caplan buys professional services. She also sells them. Recently she opened a deliverable from someone she's paying real money, and found AI output staring back at her.

What she landed on is something I keep coming back to. We've confused what we actually pay professional services people for. It was never really the output, even if it looked that way for years. It's the judgment, the pattern matching, the thing someone builds by doing this work long enough to see what you can't. I said something similar in a recent interview. Domain expertise is the new oil. Information is everywhere now. Knowledge is a utility. What's rare is someone who has seen enough of the pattern to tell you what it means.

The disclosure question is where it got messy for us, and I've been here before. Five years ago it was whether your web guy only builds on WordPress. Now it's whether the person you hired is quietly routing your project through AI without telling you. Lindsey's take isn't that AI is the problem. It's that nobody's saying up front where they're using it and where they're not, and that silence is what kills the trust.

Here's where I landed by the end of the conversation. AI was never built to help you do less work. It's not a shortcut, and treating it like one is exactly what's breaking down in the industries where time was always the product being sold.

About The Job Sh*t Show

The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

What if the healthiest company in your industry has nothing to do with its stock price?

Chase Sterling has spent almost 25 years inside workplace well-being, running Wellbeing Think Tank and pulling sentiment straight from Reddit and TikTok threads that never make it into a press release. When I asked her where things are headed, she didn't sugarcoat it. We haven't hit bottom yet.

Here's what we go over:

• Why attrition tells you more about a company's health than its stock price ever will
• How CEO pay climbed from 10 times the average worker in the 80s to over 300 times today, and why Dr. Bronner's caps its own leadership at 20 times on purpose
• Why a leader saying "let's just ask AI" before anyone else speaks is the fastest way to kill a room

About Chase Sterling

Chase Sterling founded and runs Wellbeing Think Tank, a nonprofit focused on helping employers balance organizational performance with worker health. She's worked nearly every corner of the wellness industry, from vendor to broker to internal HR, and her core belief is simple. The worst behavior a company tolerates is its actual culture, no matter what's painted on the wall.

About Great Mondays Radio

→ Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.

→ I've spent two decades helping leaders fix their culture. Learn how I can support your work Great Mondays.

→ Want sharp takes on AI and the future of work? Read The Job Sh*t Show on Substack.

→ Watch Great Mondays Radio episodes on YouTube.

LinkedIn is noisy, frustrating, and often feels like a job search dead end—so why are we still using it? In this episode, Josh unpacks the tension we all feel about the platform, exploring what still works (profiles, networks, discovery) and what definitely doesn’t (spam, false leads, and the chaos of too much noise). Plus, a glimpse into how job seekers are starting to reclaim control—one Slack or Discord community at a time.

About The Job Sh*t Show

The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

Why do recruiters only need two minutes to decide if you're worth a call?

I talked to Josh Silverman, founder of PeopleWork Partners, who has as spent 30 years connecting designers with opportunities, and recently placing candidates at companies like Target, Netflix, and OpenAI, and he told me the whole hiring system runs on guesswork dressed up as process.

Here's what we go over:

• Why most recruiters spend one to two minutes on a portfolio before sorting a candidate into a yes or no pile
• How the entire burden of proving a good hire falls on the candidate, while nobody ever checks if the company or manager was actually the right fit
• Why your best work gets stuck in Jira tickets and Slack threads that disappear the moment you leave a job

About Josh Silverman

Josh Silverman is the founder and CEO of PeopleWork Partners (peoplework.partners). He spent a decade chairing the Master of Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts before the school's closure, and he now places designers and product people in roles at companies including Target, Cisco, Netflix, and OpenAI. He thinks the resume is a dead format and that soft skills, not technical ones, are actually the harder skills to master.

About Great Mondays Radio

→ Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.

→ I've spent two decades helping leaders fix their culture. Learn how I can support your work Great Mondays.

→ Want sharp takes on AI and the future of work? Read The Job Sh*t Show on Substack.

→ Watch Great Mondays Radio episodes on YouTube.

Managing an AI agent is like speed running my worst management habits. I get frustrated, I start micromanaging, and I catch myself acting like the boss I used to complain about.

Boris Berenberg, founder of Zero AI, told me we're turning everyone into a manager now. There's no such thing as a non managerial role anymore.

Jack Dorsey disagrees. He called middle managers "an information routing protocol," cut 4,000 jobs at Block, and said he wants all 6,000 employees reporting straight to him. If a manager is just a router, sure, a computer can replace that. But that's the part of the job that sucks anyway.

Here's the part that doesn't. Gallup says managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Google's own research found coaching was the top trait of their best managers, and technical skill was dead last. We just never train for it.

There's also a hard cap. One person can really know maybe eight people well. That's why good teams stay small. It's slow. It's also the whole job.

So middle management might be the last job that still requires you to give a shit. Now that we're all about to manage a team of bots, the question is whether we show up as a coach or a router.

About The Job Sh*t Show

The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

Casey Schaffer, a leadership coach who specializes in how professional identities shift, joined me this week, and she's watched companies make the same mistake twice, first with remote work, now with AI, and she's not convinced this round goes any better.

Here's what we cover:

• Why I think the exact same trust collapse from "prove you're productive then get called back anyway" is about to repeat with AI cuts
• How one company Casey worked with onboards a new AI agent alongside every new hire, with the manager training both together
• Why the doorman problem shows you don't actually know what a job is until AI fails at replacing it

About Casey Schaffer

Casey Schaefer runs Definitions Coaching and Consulting, where she works with people leaders navigating identity shifts tied to career change. Her sharpest opinion in this one is that performance management systems haven't moved an inch even as the skills companies actually need have changed completely, and I think she's right that this gap sits squarely on HR's desk to fix.

About Great Mondays Radio

→ Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.

→ I've spent two decades helping leaders fix their culture. Learn how I can support your work Great Mondays.

→ Want sharp takes on AI and the future of work? Read The Job Sh*t Show on Substack.

→ Watch Great Mondays Radio episodes on YouTube.