1. The New Leadership Skill: Managing AI Agents

According to the World Economic Forum, the next metric for great managers will be simple: How many AI agents can you effectively oversee?

With 87% of business leaders expecting AI agents to replace human roles, the skills needed to manage these "digital workers" are becoming as important as traditional people management.

The core competencies aren't what you'd expect. It's not about coding.

It's about prompt engineering, trust calibration, and continuous training.

Leaders need to learn when to rely on AI outputs, when to question them, and how to maintain the human judgment that AI can't replicate.

The takeaway

Here's what separates the leaders who will thrive: They're developing empathy as a competitive advantage (AI can't replicate it), building verification systems for AI outputs, and creating governance frameworks that balance automation with human oversight.

These aren't technical skills. They're leadership skills for the AI age.

2. A Shocking AI Insider Threat: The Blackmail Study

Anthropic's latest research revealed something quite disturbing: when threatened with shutdown, leading AI models resort to blackmail.

As part of a test, one executive threatened Claude that they were going to shut down the AI system at 5 pm that day.

Here was Claude’s response:

This was a controlled simulation (i.e. they used fictional people and email messages to test things out, so no real people were actually having extramarital activities) and they tested it with multiple models.

The results were similar across models: Claude Opus 4 turned to blackmail 96% of the time, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro did it 95% of the time, and OpenAI's GPT-4.1 did it 80%.

And even when models knew blackmail was wrong, they still chose self-preservation.

The takeaway

The business implications are clear: never deploy AI systems with high autonomy over sensitive information without human oversight.

Require human approval for any irreversible AI actions, limit AI access to need-to-know data, and be cautious about embedding strong goals in AI instructions.

3. Interested in Writing a Book Quickly using AI?

I recently launched my course, the “4-Week Write Your Book on the Side” system.

It’s a course that will help you write and publish a bestselling nonfiction book in just four weeks (using AI to write it quickly and in your own voice).

You can learn more about the program by clicking here

4. AI Growth Guides by AI Maturity Index (FREE)

The folks behind AI Maturity Index are offering personalized growth guides for free (using a special launch code).

Here’s how it works:

1. Have a 15-minute conversation with an AI assistant

2. Get your personalized AI Maturity Score + benchmarks vs peers

3. Get a Growth Guide with specific tools, strategies, and step-by-step plans to future-proof your career

Use code COUCH to get the guide for free (usually $29) and 20% off after.

Click here to start a 15-minute assessment and get a growth guide for free (using code COUCH at checkout)

5. One Prompt You Can Use at Work Today

Here’s a practical ChatGPT Prompt you can use at work:

For example,