Dan Schawbel

Dan SchawbelSep 17, 2026

On Wednesday, I sat in the audience at HubSpot's UNBOUND 2026 in Boston and heard CEO Yamini Rangan say that human Intelligence has never mattered more, and that transformational companies aren't picking sides between AI and people. Instead, they are combining the strengths of both and creating leverage that neither could create alone. In nearly every conversation I have with executives, they feel pressure to adopt AI fast, but many are still figuring out where the technology ends and where their people's judgment begins. Rangan explained that it’s not a competition, but a combination, which is a very powerful framing.  She pushed the audience to stop measuring AI progress by tools adopted, tokens spent, or number of trials run, and to start measuring outcomes instead. Once you know the outcome you want to achieve, build the foundation, and then invest deliberately in both AI and people to get there. Too many companies buy the tools first and figure out the outcome later. The other point that stuck with me was about context. Rangan explained that AI becomes counterproductive the moment it operates without deep knowledge of your company's processes, values, and ways of working. If you have a model trained on generic data, you get generic output, which isn’t useful for your business. That’s why you need to train AI on the specific context that makes your company yours. This is exactly the shift I’ve seen in my own research and in conversations with senior leaders. The leading organizations I’ve spoken to are the ones building genuine leverage between their people's judgment and their technology's speed, grounded in real context and aimed at a clear outcome. I was happy to have attended with Creators HubSpot Media for the Fall Spotlight launch, one of the biggest product moments HubSpot has had in years. If you want to learn more about UNBOUND and HubSpot's Fall Spotlight, check it out here: https://lnkd.in/eBa_2duW @HubSpot #HubSpotMediaPartner #Ad

Dan SchawbelSep 16, 2026

Coleman Barney, writing in Inc. Magazine, argues that the AI layoff wave is starting to reverse because companies confused automating tasks with replacing judgment, and those are fundamentally different things. Coleman, a people leader at Descript, points to Gartner's prediction that half of AI-driven job cuts will be reversed by 2027, and makes the case that the real mistake wasn't adopting AI but removing the humans who knew when to follow a policy, when to escalate, and when a customer's tone meant something a transcript couldn't capture. That kind of applied, accumulated judgment can't be automated. It can only be lost. HR leaders need to ask four questions before any AI-driven headcount decision: Has the tool actually been tested or are you taking the vendor's word for it? Is the role mostly about judgment calls or mostly about looking things up? What does it cost if the AI gets it wrong? And are you removing the person or giving them a better tool? The companies that ask these questions before cutting will avoid the expensive cycle of quietly rehiring for the same seat under a different title six months later. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/g-EDUjSw #EntryLevelJobs #AIAndWork #HRLeaders #WorkforceTransformation #GenZ #FutureOfWork

Dan SchawbelSep 16, 2026

My latest for Inc. Magazine looks at what Dario Amodei and Sam Altman's exchange over AI safety reveals about real leadership. Amodei proposed "pacing the frontier," deliberately slowing AI advancement, and backed it up by having Anthropic commit to embedding independent evaluators immediately. Altman called it "a great idea, and we will do the same" but published no comparable terms, and that gap between endorsing a principle and actually committing to it is the same one that separates good leadership from good PR in any industry. Read the full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gw83sSRv #Leadership #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #CEO #Management