David Rice @BossBrainBuffer

Full piece in this week's newsletter. Two conferences, one problem, and the accountability gap nobody has solved yet. peoplemanagingpeople.com/hr-strategy/ch…

A room full of HR leaders at Transform voted on who owns AI literacy in their org. Most common answers: everyone. Second most common: no one. That's the whole story.

I covered two major AI conferences this spring and kept noticing the same thing: the people shipping AI tools and the people absorbing them are not having the same conversation.

Summary of where early-stage AI money is going: →SF → Founders w/ good origin stories and no lumbar support → Companies that can double in value before a coffee gets cold → Autonomous boats (yes, really) We live in the future. And it's unevenly distributed and overfunded.

One panelist declared the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative is overdone. Companies are reinventing themselves. Going AI-native. Scrapping everything and rebuilding. So basically: your enterprise software vendor didn't fail. They needed to start over. Totally normal. Very reassuring.

At #HumanX in San Francisco this week. Watched a VC panel where they asked a roomful of SF tech people if SF is the best place to build a startup. The crowd said yes. 🧵

This dynamic isn't unique to HR. It's what happens to any function defined by the work it's given rather than the work it could contribute. Assign the labor. Withhold the authority. Question the value.

40% report high or extreme stress. 47% rate company leadership moderately effective or worse. 35% say HR is barely valued. These are the people responsible for navigating every workforce challenge your organization faces.

New HRCI data from 4,583 HR professionals. When HR operates strategically → 90% feel valued by leadership. When it's administrative → 43%. Only 10% see themselves as essential strategic leaders. 🧵

Turns out when your competitive advantage is "we're cheaper than humans," you're extremely vulnerable to things that are cheaper than you. They automated the lawyers. AI automated them. Full circle.

LegalZoom pioneered the "you don't need to pay a professional, just use our software" business model. This week the stock is down 20% after Anthropic released legal plugins. How about that?

Advice? Document everything. Export everything. Keep your prompts, your workflows, your processes vendor-agnostic where possible. Please keep your arms and institutional knowledge inside the vehicle at all times.

What executives need to understand: Every hour your team spends optimizing for a specific AI platform is a potential sunk cost the moment M&A lawyers get involved. Build your AI strategy with the same assumption you'd use for any critical vendor: What's the exit plan?

We're all out here building our entire workflow around specific AI models, right? Claude for writing, ChatGPT for brainstorming, Perplexity for research. You've got your perfectly tuned prompts. Your custom instructions. Your muscle memory for which AI handles what.