Don’t Choose Claude Over Your Peer Group
Alan Pentz says AI is great at analysis but it can’t address the emotional side of running a business. Unlike humans, it has no scars.
Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Businesses have found a (possibly fraudulent) way to reduce the tariffs on Chinese imports.
With energy prices surging, Gene Marks suggests some ways to save.
The falling labor-participation rate does not bode well for economic growth.
Confronting the rise of AI, marketing platform Hubspot tries to rebrand from “inbound” to “unbound.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Alan Pentz says there’s something important that AI can’t do: “When business owners tell me they want to double or triple their companies, I tell them they’ll probably have to replace 50 to 75 percent of their leadership team. The people who got you here can’t get you there. It’s not a judgment on them. It’s a structural reality I’ve watched play out over and over. Nobody wants to hear it. It doesn’t show up in blog posts because it doesn’t get clicks. It doesn’t trend on LinkedIn because it makes people uncomfortable.”
“Conference speakers don’t lead with ‘you need to fire the people you built this with.’ AIs have a selection bias toward what’s pleasant, popular, and encouraging. The hardest truths about running a business are none of those.”
“Let’s say you’re using some dashboard and it flags that your COO is a growth bottleneck based on decision velocity, team turnover in her departments, and stalling revenue. The diagnosis is accurate. The data is clean. The recommendation is right there on screen. Do you act on it? You don’t. Because the question was never ‘is this true?’ You already knew. The question is ‘can I survive doing this?’ And a dashboard can’t answer that.”
“There’s a difference between a system telling you your COO is blocking growth and a person sitting across from you who says: ‘I know this is real because I did it. I fired people I loved. I went to their weddings. And it was the right call.’ That’s not advice. It’s testimony. It lands differently because the business owner’s real problem isn’t informational. It’s emotional. They need proof of survivability from someone who bears the scars.” READ MORE
