Tackling the AI Challenge Head-On
I was looking forward to this trip because I always look forward to spending time at Villa Santana, our home in Nicaragua. I was also charged up because it was the first time since the COVID debacle that we were able to gather all of Agora’s executive publishers from all over the world for nearly two weeks in one place.
EN did a good job arranging the schedule so that there was time for attendees to have some free time to enjoy the resort’s amenities and, no doubt, try to keep in touch with their businesses via email and Zoom.
After a busy day, Agora publishers enjoy our always amazing sunsets.
The purpose of the get-together was to talk about the biggest and most meaningful changes we’ve all experienced in the past four or five years, with a particular emphasis on how AI is affecting our industry and what we’re doing about it.
In case you haven’t heard, the AI revolution that I predicted several times over the past 12 to 18 months has broken out, and it is radically transforming many industries on what seems like a weekly basis. One example of the way it’s affecting us: BC, our CFO, estimates that by May of 2027 we will be producing 50% more revenue than we are producing now, but with less than half our current payroll. You don’t need to have an MBA to understand how transformative that is going to be.
I was impressed by what we were able to accomplish in this short period of time. I audited six or eight super-informative presentations from some of our most knowledgeable and creative leaders, and I participated in maybe two dozen animated conversations that resulted in a to-do list that is 46 items long.
I’m going to summarize everything I learned here in the next issue. But because I didn’t want to leave you with anything more than this preview of the next issue, I thought I’d include the following anecdote that I must have written a dozen years ago. It somehow opened up on my laptop. (Maybe because Claude took over and decided I should do something with it?)
