Transforming to a Humans + AI workforce, crossing the GenAI divide, a collectivist e

August 25, 2025

“AI will empower us as creators, dreamers, and makers.” — Jensen Huang

Humans + AI in organizations and intentionality

This past week I did a keynote on Creating Humans + AI Organisations and a condensed masterclass on Building an AI Roadmap at LinkedIn’s Workforce Transformation Series events in Sydney and Melbourne.

The response to the Humans + AI message was very strong, in particular on the idea of trust being the fundamental enabler of AI adoption and organizational transformation, as laid out in the framework I shared in the newsletter two weeks ago.

This week’s podcast is with Michael I. Jordan, who Science has named as the most influential computer scientist in the world. His deeply insightful and fundamentally Humans + AI perspective is highly relevant and extremely valuable.

Be well!

Ross

 

📖In this issue

  • Action: Transforming to a Humans + AI workforce

  • Humans + AI: crossing the GenAI divide, trust development for AI adoption, and how CIOs are buying ai

  • Podcast: Michael I. Jordan on a collectivist perspective on AI, humble genius, design for social welfare, and the missing middle kingdom

💡Action: Transforming to a Humans + AI workforce

This is one of the final slides from my keynote at the LinkedIn Workforce Transformation series events this week. Hopefully these recommended action steps are fairly clear. The last one perhaps needs amplification.

Everything an organization does should be focused on learning - individual, team, and organizational. That learning needs to be applied to iterating - incrementally improving systems, which include the technology systems, but even more importantly the organizational structures and the nature of how work is done.

🧠🤖Humans + AI

How to cross the GenAI divide

Much discussion this week about a new report from MIT’s NANDA Agentic AI group, with the headline that 95% of GenAI initiatives produce zero value. There is a lot more subletly in the actual report, which shows that many organizations are getting value, how they’re getting it, and the key finding that success with AI requires organizational redesign.

AI leaders invest in trust-development initiatives

A McKinsey article on effective change management with AI points to a range of key drivers, which are all aligned with my work. In particular they look at the ways that organizations are deliberately focusing on trust, as came out in my LinkedIn keynotes this week.

How enterprise is buying and adopting AI

Andreessen Horowitz surveyed 100 enterprise CIOs to discover how they are using, buying and budgeting for GenAI, yielding 16 major findings.

🎙️This week’s podcast episode

Michael I. Jordan on a collectivist perspective on AI, humble genius, design for social welfare, and the missing middle kingdom  

Why you should listen

Michael I. Jordan is one of the seminal AI researchers, paving the way with RNN architectures, Bayesian algorithms, and more. Today he brings real perspective to where AI sits, and how we need to frame social, economic, and academic structures to benefit from it.

Thanks for reading!

Ross Dawson and team