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The 5-Week Leap: What It Really Takes to Move a Business into the Age of AI
The 5-Week Leap: What It Really Takes to Move a Business into the Age of AI
A Thought Piece / Case Study Rewrite Most companies do not need more AI hype. They need a clearer view of what is now…
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The Great Bifurcation: Is the College Degree Dying, or Just Evolving?
The Great Bifurcation: Is the College Degree Dying, or Just Evolving?
The conversation around the value of higher education has reached a fever pitch. We are no longer just debating rising…
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How to Get Hired in the Age of AI - A Panel Discussion
How to Get Hired in the Age of AI - A Panel Discussion
More than 200 students and business leaders filled Skaggs Hall at Boise State University for a timely conversation: how…
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Forging Our Future: Reflections on the SIoC Workshop at Boise State University
Forging Our Future: Reflections on the SIoC Workshop at Boise State University
It’s not every day you walk into a room where philosophers, technologists, educators, policy folks, and entrepreneurs…
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🔨 The Echo of the Hammer. The Whisper of the Code.
🔨 The Echo of the Hammer. The Whisper of the Code.
There’s a certain ache when we talk about craftsmanship. It’s not just nostalgia—it’s a longing for a kind of work…
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Why Entrepreneurs Who Master AI Will Win the Future
Why Entrepreneurs Who Master AI Will Win the Future
The AI Augmentation Era: Why Now is the Best Time to Be an Entrepreneur The future everyone was talking about? It’s…
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Post Labor Economics
Post Labor Economics
In an episode of "Mindblowers," AI expert David Shapiro discusses the coming era of post-labor economics, where AI and…
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The Mood You’re In Might Be Running the Show
The Mood You’re In Might Be Running the Show
Ever watch a game where your favorite team is losing at halftime? One fan turns to optimism: “They’ve got this. We’ve…
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The AI Reckoning: Are You Prepared for the Post-Labor Economy?
The AI Reckoning: Are You Prepared for the Post-Labor Economy?
The advent of artificial intelligence is poised to fundamentally reshape the labor market, a shift so profound that…
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Dwight Pond shared thisAs I work with clients, they all want the promise of AI. But there are no short cuts - it is data first. The advantage startups have is that they can endure data is right at the start.Dwight Pond shared this🏗️ AI First vs. Data First AI built on weak data looks impressive… until it collapses. Clean, trusted data creates a foundation that lasts. At infoVia, we help organizations take a Data First approach — strengthening data quality, integration, and trust so AI can actually deliver value. Because strong outcomes aren’t built on hype. They’re built on solid data. #DataFirst #AIStrategy #DataQuality #DigitalTransformation #infoVia
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Dwight Pond shared thisCareful on the downshift. https://lnkd.in/g5eyW8ECEconomists have found an answer to slowing cognitive decline: avoid retiring early, study finds | FortuneEconomists have found an answer to slowing cognitive decline: avoid retiring early, study finds | Fortune
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Dwight Pond shared thisDigital automation? Oh no, its not coming for my business.Dwight Pond shared thisQuestion - Data, Defensibility, and Moat - Does my business have a physical or community-based anchor that is immune to digital automation? In the age of AI, businesses that exist only as digital code are the most vulnerable. They are essentially "floating" without an anchor, making them easy to automate or replace by a single software update. If your enterprise is built purely on moving data around, you aren't building a resilient business; you are managing a digital commodity business. AI can process facts and follow logic, but it cannot stand in a physical room, sense the subtle tension in a local community, or take responsibility for a complex human outcome that has real-world consequences. True competitive power comes from identifying a "disharmony"—a specific problem in how people actually live and work—that requires more than just a smart answer. To build an unshakeable business, you must anchor your "offer" in the one thing automation cannot touch: trusted coordination within a community. This is the move into true professional adulthood—accepting that while AI handles the routine cognitive labor, you must handle the commitments, the trust-building, and the social obligations. Your "anchor" isn't necessarily a building; it is your place in a specific network where people rely on your character and judgment to solve their fundamental concerns. When your business helps people navigate high-stakes issues like their health, their family’s future, or their professional dignity, you create a "virtuous circle" of loyalty that a machine can never replicate. Pause and look at your business plan: if a global competitor offered your AI-driven software for free tomorrow, would anyone still need you? If the answer is "no," then you have a tool, not a business. To act effectively, you must find a niche where human presence and mutual obligation are the primary sources of value. Focus on building "networks of help" where you are the leader who coordinates action and guarantees results. The moment you move your business from the "cloud" into the messy, high-stakes reality of human coordination, you stop being a replaceable data-processor and start becoming the architect of your own lasting security.
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Dwight Pond shared thisNate Jones is spot on. Read the summary.Dwight Pond shared thisThis is great advice - not easy advice. But wisdom. AI isn’t going to eliminate your job in one dramatic sweep. It happens “slowly, then suddenly. Think back to travel agents in the 1990s. The routine layer of their work was hollowed out first. While their calendars remained full, they were standing on thin ice. If your role relies on tasks AI can absorb, you are in the same position today. To survive the incoming wave of corporate reorganization, you need to find your Human Margin—the space where intuition, emotional courage, and "meta-judgment" live. The first step? A ruthless calendar audit. Categorize your last two weeks into these four buckets: 1. Theater (T) Work performed to maintain a polite organizational fiction. Think status meetings where nothing is decided or slide decks no one reads. AI handles "adequate" better than humans; this layer will be the first to vanish. 2. Commodity (C) Necessary work that produces value but doesn't require you specifically (e.g., meeting summaries, routing requests). It’s essential to the company, but dangerous to your identity. AI is compressing this work rapidly. 3. On the Line (L) Borderline work involving routine synthesis or pattern recognition. A junior employee could do 70% of it, but it still needs a hint of your judgment. This is actively sliding toward commoditization. 4. Durable (D) This is the Human Margin. It relies on context, taste, and the courage to engage in "question holding"—the ability to realize a team is solving the wrong problem and bravely keeping the ambiguity open rather than executing the wrong framework. The 6-Move Playbook for AI Survival Once you’ve audited your time, you must aggressively shift your focus from Theater/Commodity to Durable work: Stop Performing Theater: Cancel or skip the useless recurring check-ins. If the work is just for show, stop showing up. Avoid the Efficiency Trap: When AI saves you five hours on commodity tasks, do NOT fill that time with more commodity work. Reinvest those hours into messy, ambiguous projects that require human judgment. Track Your Judgment: Every week, privately document one complex call you made where your intuition directly improved the outcome. Trade Value for Focus: Use that track record of success to negotiate your way out of routine, commoditized assignments. Be "Partially Legible": Share your successful outcomes, but don’t turn your intuitive process into a step-by-step manual. If you turn your judgment into a recipe, you’ve made it delegable and automatable. Keep the "secret sauce" in your head. Change Roles if Necessary: If your audit reveals your job is 100% Theater and Commodity with no room for Durable work, move now. Find a role where judgment is required before the industry forces the choice upon you. The future of work isn't about being more efficient than a machine; it's about being more human than the process. https://lnkd.in/gHHnBusPAI's 'Thin Ice' Moment: Is Your Job Already Gone?"AI's 'Thin Ice' Moment: Is Your Job Already Gone?"
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Dwight Pond shared this“OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman discussed spinning out the company’s robotics and consumer-hardware divisions late last year, a move intended to give them more room to grow without weighing down the core business. As part of the plan, the two companies would have been able to raise external funding and operate more independently. But it was rejected, in part because OpenAI concluded the new entities might have to remain consolidated on its balance sheet, according to people familiar with the matter.” https://lnkd.in/gjVMEmViAhead of Race to IPO, OpenAI Discussed Spinning Out Robotics, Hardware DivisionsAhead of Race to IPO, OpenAI Discussed Spinning Out Robotics, Hardware Divisions
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Dwight Pond shared thisI have experienced this. I recently spoke with a potential healthcare client. They wanted to implement AI. As we dug in - the client was unsure of their primary data sources, their workflows, the integrity of their data. Those must be addressed.Dwight Pond shared this✨ AI isn’t magic without good data. ✨ Too many organizations rush to AI and overlook the fundamentals that make it work. At infoVia, we do it differently. We help teams build trusted data foundations and apply AI where it delivers real results — not hype. Strong data ➜ smarter AI ➜ better decisions. Let’s stop overpromising and start building what actually works. #AI #DataStrategy #DataQuality #DigitalTransformation #infoVia
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Dwight Pond shared this“A string of cities across America’s Sunbelt are emerging as graduate-hiring hot spots in an otherwise challenging job market for young professionals, an exclusive analysis shows. Birmingham, Ala., tops the list of the places where newly minted graduates are landing jobs with a college-level career track, followed by Tampa, Fla., according to the new study by payroll processor ADP. In fact, six of the list’s top 10—including Raleigh, N.C.; Tulsa, Okla.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte, N.C.—are in the South. Other pockets of the country also punch above their weight as early-career launchpads for their mix of 20-something hiring, pay and affordability. Columbus, Ohio, and California’s San Jose area unexpectedly got top scores this year—evidence that even places with so-so earning potential or high costs of living can be prime locations for landing that first job postgraduation.” https://lnkd.in/g2WFHnX9These Are the Hiring Hot Spots Where College Grads Are Landing Good JobsThese Are the Hiring Hot Spots Where College Grads Are Landing Good Jobs
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Dwight Pond shared thisI cannot emphasize this enough - building trust is a skill.Dwight Pond shared thisQuestion - Data, Defensibility, and Moat - How am I building trust in an environment where content and code are increasingly generated by machines? In a world where machines can generate flawless text and perfect code for free, looking professional is no longer a source of trust—it is simply a baseline for being average. If your business relies on the "polish" of your output to prove your worth, you are in a vulnerable position. Trusting a well-written email or a functional app was a habit from an older, slower era. Today, the abundance of machine-generated noise has made people naturally suspicious of anything that feels automated. Real trust has shifted away from the information you provide and toward the responsibility you are willing to take. You cannot build a business on data alone because a machine cannot make a promise, and trust is ultimately an assessment of how you will behave when things get messy. To build trust in the age of AI, you must move from being a "distributor of content" to a designer of human outcomes. AI can generate a thousand strategies, but it cannot stand behind a single one of them when a situation breaks down. Your competitive power lies in your character and your commitments. You win when you offer something that is "fresh, new, and scarce"—a personal guarantee to solve a specific problem that the generalized machine doesn't even perceive. People don't want more "smart" content; they want the relief of knowing that a reliable human being is coordinating a "network of help" to ensure their fundamental concerns, like their financial safety or their family's well-being, are actually cared for. The most practical move you can make today is to stop using AI to hide and start using it to be more present. Use the machine to handle the routine chores of drafting and coding, but make sure every commitment you make is anchored in human judgment and a clear, spoken promise. Ask yourself: "If all my automated systems failed tomorrow, would my customers still trust my judgment enough to keep working with me?" The moment you stop selling "outputs" and start selling integrity and coordination, you stop being a replaceable participant in the digital noise and start becoming an essential leader that no machine can ever replicate.
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Dwight Pond shared thisI was 'vibe coding' over the weekend. I was creating my own CRM tool. A few observations: - For a non-technical programmer (me), the tools really get you over the finish line. I used Claude and it walked me through all of the steps including downloading needed tools and extensions. - It actually is fun to see your idea come to life. - There is great value in iteration rather then upfront detailed specs. I didn't know what I didn't know. And so here is to rugged individualism, learning by doing, and enjoying the journey. P.S. - usage limits are frustrating.
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Dwight Pond liked thisDwight Pond liked thisAnthropic launched 10 finance agents yesterday. FactSet dropped 8%. Thomson Reuters dropped 5%. Claude Opus 4.7 now ships with pre-built agents for pitchbook building, KYC screening, GL reconciliation, and month-end closing. The kind of operational stuff that still gets done in spreadsheets. Plus native Microsoft 365 integration carries context across Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook. They also added Moody's data piped in via MCP covering 600M+ companies. (lending much?) --- But what captured my attention is the broader blitz of announcements in financial services from Anthropic This landed one day after the $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman, and Hellman & Friedman And the FIS partnership embedding Claude into AML investigations at BMO. Three announcements in 48 hours. All pointed in the same direction. ---- Three things worth sitting with: 1. Anthropic shipped M365 add-ins before Microsoft shipped anything competitive in finance. That was supposed to be Copilot's job. 2. This is the second time this year FactSet tanked on an Anthropic announcement. Down ~55% over 52 weeks. Morningstar, S&P Global, and Moody's all sold off — even though Moody's was featured as a data partner. 3. The JV uses the Palantir forward-deployed-engineer playbook. Except Anthropic's version comes pre-loaded with a customer list — every portfolio company Blackstone and H&F already own. --- Anthropic projected 10x enterprise growth. They saw 80x. Model + vertical agents + data connectors + embedded engineers + PE distribution. That's a completely different company than the AI safety lab from 3 years ago.
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Dwight Pond liked thisDwight Pond liked thisLenny Rachitsky just had Nikhyl Singhal on the podcast, and one line hit hard: the vast majority of PMs will be in a different job within five years. Companies will shed 30,000 and rehire 8,000 — all AI-first. I've been sitting with a version of this problem for a while now, and here's the part nobody's solving: even the people who survive the shift can't prove what they're worth anymore. AI broke the proof chain. Production used to signal competence because production used to be hard. Now output is free. A hiring manager looking at ten portfolios has no reliable way to tell which ones were understood and which ones were assembled. The signal that's scarce isn't what you built. It's whether you understood what you built. That's why I built Nate's TalentBoard. The idea: a public profile where your AI projects live alongside proof that you actually comprehend them. You link what you've built — whatever tools you used — and answer four questions about each one. What is this. Why this approach. What would break. What did I learn. Those four questions are a comprehension test you can't fake. Over time, your profile becomes a transaction history — not "I claim I can do these things" but "here are the things I did, and here's proof I understood them." GitHub gave developers this. Nobody built it for PMs, designers, operators, strategists, analysts — the broader builder class that's doing real AI work with nowhere to show it. Today's article lays out the full framework. The TalentBoard link is inside. Read it and build your profile today: https://bit.ly/4tQFgN3
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Dwight Pond reacted on thisThis chart is sobering and likely worth 5 minutes of uncomfortable reflection
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Dwight Pond reacted on thisDwight Pond reacted on thisSo Claude Mythos was, indeed, not marketing hype. Remember this is a general purpose model that just happens to be good at finding exploits because good models are good at lots of things. Expect similar from OpenAI & Google. And from open models in 8 months. https://lnkd.in/eprqE_vR
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Dwight Pond liked thisDwight Pond liked this🏗️ AI First vs. Data First AI built on weak data looks impressive… until it collapses. Clean, trusted data creates a foundation that lasts. At infoVia, we help organizations take a Data First approach — strengthening data quality, integration, and trust so AI can actually deliver value. Because strong outcomes aren’t built on hype. They’re built on solid data. #DataFirst #AIStrategy #DataQuality #DigitalTransformation #infoVia
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Dwight Pond liked thisDwight Pond liked thisBOEBERT: "Implant aborted baby parts into lab animals? Have you heard of that sort of research?" GOODMAN: "We did an analysis showing that over 90% of experiments using human fetal tissue & putting them in animals were funded by Fauci's NIAID." Bet you won't see THIS one in the mainstream media. REPOST and get it out there! #thinblueline #lawenforcement
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Pond and Associates, LLC
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ITIL Foundation
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Rotary - Boise Downtown
Boise, Idaho
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Amazing opportunity to be involved with terrific people and work on projects that impact the world, the nation and my town.
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Business Professionals Leadership
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IT Leadership Roundtable - Treasure Valley
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Want to be eligible for more contracts and funding? Show proof of accessibility. More RFPs and funding requirements now demand it. That’s where accessibility audits and VPATs come in. Each serves a different role, but together they help document your accessibility efforts and open the door to more opportunities. An audit evaluates your site for accessibility issues, and a VPAT is the official report procurement teams require. 👉 If your organization is bidding for contracts, do you know which one you need?
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Squared Compass
💸 GovCon cash running tight? If you’re a small government contractor navigating this shutdown, don’t wait for relief, build your own survival plan. Our latest blog post breaks down a 14-day, step-by-step cash-flow strategy to help you: ✅ Prioritize payroll and critical costs ✅ Accelerate invoicing and receivables ✅ Secure short-term financing (even with SBA loans frozen) ✅ Avoid CPARS risks during downtime ✅ Prep for restart and REA recovery Whether you hold 8a contracts, SDVOSB set-asides, or are working on your government contracting certification, this plan is your go-to guide. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eP5Z4D4T #GovCon #GovernmentContracting #8aCertification #SBIR #CashFlow #ShutdownPlan #WomenOwnedBusiness #SDVOSB #ProposalWriting #GrantWriting #NAICSCodes
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