#023 - I Owe You an Update. The Timeline Changed.
I have my routines that make me strong. Or stronger.
Exercising every day. Taking a walk in my forest. Reading. Meditating. Learning.
They are not impressive. They are not optimized. They are not hacks. They are the small, repeatable things that hold a person together when the world keeps changing the rules.
I started thinking about why I cling to them so hard. And I realized something uncomfortable.
The routines are not just discipline. They are anchors. Because everything outside of them is moving faster than I can process.
Last week, I had to update something I told you.
The Number That Stopped Me
A group of researchers built a test. The hardest one ever designed for AI. Over 2,500 questions across more than 100 fields. Mathematics. Ancient languages. Philosophy. Molecular biology. Questions that top academics argue about. Questions written specifically so that no machine could answer them. It's called Humanity's Last Exam.
When the test launched, AI scored 9%.
Fifteen months later — 46%.
And that is the public number. What is running inside the world's leading labs right now is already past 60%.
I read that on a Tuesday. I did not stop thinking about it for the rest of the week.
Because I had been telling you something different.
In The Three AI Waves, I argued we had years between automation and augmentation. Years to prepare. Years to build the muscle of strategic thinking before AI started reasoning at an expert level.
We don't.
The wave I said was coming around 2030 is already here, in preview. The capability curve is bending faster than I expected. Faster than most strategy decks account for. Faster than your 2025 plan was built for.
I owe you an update. The timeline changed.
Why I Walk in the Forest
There is a reason I started with my routines.
When I walk in the forest, I notice things I miss everywhere else. Not because the forest is quiet. Because I am. The trees do not grow faster when I am stressed. The path does not change because my calendar is full. But my ability to see it changes completely depending on what I carry into it.
That is what the morning movement, the reading, and the silence give me. Not productivity. The ability to actually see what is happening around me, instead of just reacting to it.
And right now, there is a lot to see.
Because the executives I meet are starting to feel it. Not as panic. As a low-grade unease. They sit in vendor demos that look further along than last quarter's. They watch their teams produce work in an afternoon that used to take a week. They read numbers like 60%, and their stomachs tighten, even if they cannot quite say why.
What they are feeling is the gap between the world their strategy was written for and the world that is actually arriving.
I am not immune to it. I felt it on Tuesday.
A World I Did Not Plan For
Let me show you what 2028 might look like. Not a forecast. An imagination exercise. The thing I tell every C-suite they need to do, and the thing almost none of them actually do.
It is a Monday in late 2028.
A senior executive — let's call her Anna — opens her laptop. She does not check her email first. She checks her decision queue. Her AI agent has spent the weekend processing market signals, customer feedback, supplier risk, and three internal initiatives. It has prepared seven decisions for her, ranked by stake, with the reasoning behind each.
She does not approve of them. She judges them.
She rejects two, not because the analysis is wrong, but because the agent does not yet understand a relationship dynamic with one of the partners involved. She accepts three. She asks the agent to rerun two with different assumptions about regulatory risk.
This takes her twenty-five minutes.
In terms of raw analytical output, she is operating at roughly 200 times the throughput of an executive doing the same work the traditional way. Not because she is smarter or faster. Because she stopped doing the work that machines can do, and focused entirely on the judgment that machines cannot replicate. Every minute she spends is a decision minute. Nothing else.
Her competitors? They are still scheduling alignment meetings. Still asking analysts to prepare slides. Still treating AI as a tool for tasks. They are working hard. They are working in the old shape.
Anna is not better than them. She just imagined this world four years earlier. In 2024. When most leaders were still asking whether AI could replace customer service.
That four-year head start is not technical. It is strategic. It is the willingness to sit in a room and ask: What does our business look like if AI reasons at an expert level?
Most leadership teams have never had that conversation. Not once.
Why This Is Personal
I am writing this newsletter on a Saturday morning. After a walk in the forest. After meditation. With coffee.
I am not panicked. I am not catastrophizing. I am not selling fear.
But I am updating my thinking in public. Because that is what I owe you.
Last year, I said we had time. We had less than I thought. The leaders I meet who are doing best right now are not the ones with the biggest AI budgets. They are the ones who started imagining 2028 in 2025. Who took an afternoon — just one — to ask the strategic question seriously. Who treated AI not as a procurement decision, but as an identity question for their business.
That is the gap I see widening every month.
The leaders who are anchored — who have their own version of the forest, the movement, the quiet — are processing this faster. Not because they are smarter. Because their nervous system is steady enough to actually think about what is happening, instead of just reacting.
Calm scales. Panic doesn't.
One Piece of Practical Advice
If you take only one thing from this newsletter, take this.
Block 90 minutes on your calendar this month. Alone. No deck. No vendor. No agenda. One question.
"What does my business look like in 2028 if AI reasons at an expert level across our core functions?"
Not what tools you'll buy. Not what your CTO will build. Not what your competitors are doing.
What does your business look like? What is it for? What do you sell? Who do you sell to? What is the value of the human in the room?
If you cannot answer that in 90 minutes, that is not a failure. That is the diagnosis. It means you have been running a procurement plan, not an AI strategy. And you have time to fix it.
But not as much time as I told you last year.
I wrote a longer piece this week unpacking all of this — the benchmark, the trajectory, the strategic blind spots most C-suites still have. If you want the full argument, it is on the blog.
But the heart of it is what I just told you.
The timeline changed.
The anchors matter more, not less.
And the leaders who will win in 2028 are sitting down with the hard question now.
Your move.
