AI-enhanced strategy, 10x professionals, agent economy foundations, and more

📖In this issue

• Framework: Building an AI Roadmap

• Foundations for an emerging agent economy

• LinkedIn data sheds light on the shifting work landscape

• CollabLLM is an active collaborator in achieving objectives

• Rita McGrath on inflection points, AI-enhanced strategy, memories of the future, and the future of professional services

• The rise of the 10x professional

💡Framework: Building an AI Roadmap

As I shared last week, my Building an AI Roadmap LinkedIn Learning course is out and getting attention.

If you’re not a LinkedIn subscriber or you want the super short version, here is a visual framework of what I cover in the course. There’s plenty of detail in the course, but the overview should be useful too. 😊

🧠🤖Humans + AI

Foundations for an emerging agent economy

AI agents will be autonomous economic participants. The economy will evolve dramatically as agents operate continuously, share perfect information, and rapidly adapt.

However our existing human-centric economy is not designed for agents. A very interesting paper explores in detail the barriers to the economic potential, and the enablers to move past those.

Beyond the Sum: Unlocking AI Agents Potential Through Market Forces
Summary of key insights

LinkedIn data sheds light on the shifting work landscape

LinkedIn has better data than anyone on how work is evolving. A few highlights:

📈 AI talent hiring has exceeded other hiring by 300% over the last 8 years and 30% over the last year.

🚀 The biggest rising jobs over the last year in the US have been AI Engineer, AI Consultant, and Physical Therapist, pointing to the fact that fully human jobs are far from done.

📚 70% of HR professionals say their organization is prioritizing upskilling initiatives across the board in 2025 - human skills matter.

🗣️ Communication was the number one most in-demand skill in 2024. Not AI. In fact, AI makes communication and relationship skills far more valuable.

LinkedIn Work Change Report and summary of key points

CollabLLM is an active collaborator in achieving objectives

LLMs are optimized for next turn response. This results in poor Human-AI collaboration, as it doesn't help users achieve their goals or clarify intent. A new model CollabLLM is optimized for long-term collaboration.

CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators
Summary of key insights

🎙️This week’s podcast episode

Why you should listen

Rita McGrath is one of the most insightful strategy thinkers globally, with her insights on topics like transient advantage and inflection points even more relevant today.

💡Reflections

The rise of the 10x professional

AI pioneer Andrew Ng recently share the idea of the “10x professional”

The concept of the "10x engineer" has long fascinated the technology sector - those rare individuals whose impact dramatically exceeds their peers. This phenomenon, while historically limited to software engineering, stands on the cusp of a remarkable expansion across professional domains, driven by the transformative potential of artificial intelligence.

The traditional barriers to extraordinary professional impact often stem from physical constraints. A retail worker's efficiency hits natural limits of human movement and customer interaction. Medical professionals, despite their expertise, cannot fundamentally accelerate human biology. These constraints have historically kept the performance gap between average and exceptional workers relatively narrow in many fields.

But we are witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm. Knowledge workers who deeply understand and strategically deploy AI tools are achieving unprecedented levels of impact. These professionals aren't merely using AI to accelerate existing workflows - they're fundamentally reimagining how work gets done. Consider marketing professionals who transcend routine content creation to orchestrate sophisticated, data-driven campaigns using AI for experimentation and personalization. Or recruiters who leverage AI systems to transform candidate discovery and evaluation, operating at scales previously unimaginable.

The key insight lies in understanding that exceptional impact rarely comes from doing traditional tasks faster. Just as 10x engineers create value through superior architectural decisions and problem identification rather than rapid coding, tomorrow's high-impact professionals will excel by fundamentally rethinking their approach to work. Early research, such as the Harvard/BCG study showing GPT-4's impact on consulting work, likely understates the potential advantage for those who master these tools most effectively.

The implications extend beyond individual productivity to the very nature of professional development. As AI continues to evolve, the path to exceptional impact is becoming accessible across a broader range of professions. This democratization of extraordinary achievement could reshape how we think about career development and professional excellence.

The future belongs not just to those who can use AI tools, but to those who can orchestrate them strategically to reimagine their entire professional domain. As these capabilities mature, we may find that the "10x professional" becomes not an outlier, but an achievable aspiration across many fields, fundamentally transforming our understanding of human potential in the workplace.