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The most consequential shift in business right now isn't AI - it's the gap between…
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Jeremy Korst shared thisMy FAVORITE post of last week: AI may save us from marketing SEO slop and paid "optimization" -- marketers may need to get back to basics and leverage actual strategy. Say it with me: Segmentation. Targeting. Positioning... "Stop treating AI like a channel to optimize. It's a new, intelligent audience that has to be understood and convinced. That means getting product, marketing, CS, and leadership in a room to answer two questions: -- Where and why is our product genuinely better? -- How do we prove it in a way even a model can understand? The winners here won't be the companies that game prompts and flood the zone with keyword content. They'll be the ones that build something genuinely worth recommending — and then make the evidence impossible for the model to ignore."Jeremy Korst shared thisWe analyzed 37,000 real AI conversations to figure out what actually drives recommendations, and found out that AEO/GEO sells metrics that don't work. I'm constantly hearing nightmare stories from customers who got sold on AEO/GEO tools, ground away on improving their prompt rank, and saw no impact on their bottom line. Dishonesty bothers me, so we dove deep to figure out what actually drives recommendations, and what's noise. Three things stood out: 1. Visibility is basically solved for any serious player. ChatGPT routinely pulls 80+ sources in a single commercial conversation. If you're a real company, you're almost certainly in the model's weights and definitely in its search results. AI already knows you exist and what you do. Pumping out more undifferentiated content won't change that. 2. AI doesn't recommend you because it doesn't think your product is good enough. That's the uncomfortable part nobody wants to say out loud — partly because it isn't something an SEO team (the main buyer of most AEO/GEO tools) can fix. The real work is improving the product, sharpening positioning, and proving value. That's not an SEO/AEO job. 3. Prompt-rank tracking is mostly theater. Moving your rank on a test prompt doesn't correlate with pipeline. You're just overfitting to your test set. Real user behavior and model reasoning are far messier — and far more brutal. So what should you actually do? Stop treating AI like a channel to optimize. It's a new, intelligent audience that has to be understood and convinced. That means getting product, marketing, CS, and leadership in a room to answer two questions: -- Where and why is our product genuinely better? -- How do we prove it in a way even a model can understand? The winners here won't be the companies that game prompts and flood the zone with keyword content. They'll be the ones that build something genuinely worth recommending — and then make the evidence impossible for the model to ignore. Full research in the comments. 👇
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Jeremy Korst shared thisHalf of CEOs told IBM the pace of their own AI spend left them with disconnected, piecemeal tech. I read that as a confession, not a complaint. The hard skill right now isn't finding more AI to adopt, it's deciding what to ignore. Your company strategy is the lens through which to make that determination. The teams I see moving fastest aren't consuming the most. They built a filter and protect it.Jeremy Korst shared thisHalf of CEOs told IBM the quiet part out loud: the pace of their own AI investment has left them with disconnected, piecemeal technology.
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Jeremy Korst shared thisRelated to yesterday's WSJ article below: OpenAI just released new data on agentic AI use, both for OpenAI employees and other orgs using Codex. Codex capabilities have increased substantially in recent months, and have become more accessible to non engineers, so I'm not surprised to see the resultant steep usage curve. But here are some other interesting insights: - Codex became the primary AI tool for every department at OpenAI. Engineering moved first, but Legal, Finance, and Recruiting crossed into Codex being their primary AI tool around April 2026. For the average OpenAI worker, Codex usage now accounts for more than 85% of output tokens. Since Codex users tend to user more tokens than non-users, its share of overall tokens is even higher: Codex accounts for 99.8% of weekly output tokens generated within OpenAI. - Non-developer adoption grew especially rapidly, outpacing developer adoption. Since August 2025, non-developer users rose 137x for individual users, 189x for organizational users, and 12x within OpenAI. - Codex enabled OpenAI workers to do tasks outside their job description. While technical usage is still most prevalent among engineers, non-technical users regularly use Codex to take on coding or technical execution, including automation, data transformation, tooling, debugging, and structured analysis. I've increasingly been using Codex as a core part of our Mindspan Labs agent team, not only for adversarial code and security reviews but also for content reviews, fact checks and plan reviews. How are you using it beyond coding? Credit: Prasanna Tambe, Drew Johnston, David Holtz, Christopher Ong, Alex Martin Richmond, and Aaron "Ronnie" Chatterji. [link to the blog in comments below]
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Jeremy Korst shared thisSo, how are the AI Giants 'dogfooding' their own technology? It was great to talk to Katherine Bindley at The Wall Street Journal to share my experience and thoughts. What might be surprising is that many (if not most) of the innovative real-world AI applications are happening outside these labs and tech titans. To achieve real value with AI, companies need to rethink workflows and ensure cross functional collaboration and coordination. Due in part to the relative size and complexity of larger organizations, small and midsized companies have a real advantage. WSJ: "Jeremy Korst, CEO of AI advisory-consulting firm Mindspan Labs, says that smaller companies have been the most nimble with agents. Things get more complicated when managing across teams, he adds. The legal team might not actually want the sales team having AI to do its own contract review. "There is real friction," says Korst. "This is a very common conversation." [gifted article link in comments below]
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Jeremy Korst shared this"Jeremy is the bottleneck, and everyone feels it." Where have I heard that before? Last week while I was visiting the Bay Area, I had dinner with my longtime executive coach turned great friend and now business partner Christine Grimm. We were discussing our growing Mindspan Labs agent team and various anecdotes and lessons. Chris then asked, "Have you had your agent team give you 360 feedback?" I hadn't. I guess that's one of the many reasons I have an exec coach. So, I asked my Chief of Staff ("Claudia") to solicit structured feedback from the team. The results were eye-opening -- and surprisingly similar to past feedback from *real* teams. At first, four of the bots declined to give feedback. One was concerned that the CoS had gone rogue and was essentially soliciting kompromat. Three others questioned the process and wanted to hear from me directly to ensure this was a sanctioned activity. And one of those wanted to make sure that I really wanted candid feedback. (As we say at Mindspan Labs, workplace psychological safety is a thing!) After we got through the process issues, we ended up with 11 pages of constructive feedback and suggestions (AI is not known for being concise!). Some of it was quite positive: "The team genuinely respects working with Jeremy. Every respondent led with trust, autonomy, and decisiveness — unprompted. That's real." But then they dug into the actionable improvements: information flow; realistic scope and timing; providing the right resources and access; overall team coordination. I'm already making changes and will plan periodic feedback rounds in coming months. There's always room for improvement! This has been a fascinating experiment and I am learning and doing more each day. My biggest learning thus far is that growing and "managing" an AI team is eerily similar to managing a human team. Whether that's a function of the current technology -- trained on a corpus of human writing -- or something more fundamental is to be seen. But for now, I think those with strong managerial skills will do well in our increasingly hybrid AI agent + human world. Next up is another suggestion from Chris and our longtime friend and colleague Karuna Mirchandani: a team DISC workplace profile evaluation. We will see how our team color map turns out!
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Jeremy Korst shared thisMounting evidence: Strategy > ToolsJeremy Korst shared thisBCG just put a number on the thing we've argued all year. Among 9,923 regular AI users, the people with strong strategic clarity but limited access to tools outperformed the people with strong tool access and no direction: 80 percent reported measurable impact versus 60 percent. Clarity beat tooling by 20 points. (BCG, AI at Work 2026) You don't need an AI strategy. You need your strategy on AI. Fewer tools, a sharper question. In every boardroom we sit in, the companies pulling ahead are the ones that start from the strategy they already own, then point AI at it. Where is the clarity gap costing you the most right now? #EnterpriseAI #AILeadership #FutureOfWork
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Jeremy Korst reposted thisJeremy Korst reposted thisWe keep watching companies solve the wrong AI readiness problem. The reflex we hear over and over: our people aren't ready. Slow them down, train them, manage the resistance. The data points the other way. McKinsey's "Superagency in the Workplace" (January 2025) found the C-suite estimates 4% of employees use gen AI for at least 30% of their work. The number employees actually report is 13%, more than three times higher. The workforce isn't behind. Leadership's read on the workforce is. McKinsey's own conclusion from the same study: employees are ready. The biggest barrier to scaling is leadership. BCG lands in the same place from the other side. Their 10-20-70 rule says about 10% of the AI effort belongs in the algorithms and 20% in the data and technology. The other 70% goes into changing how people work: process, roles, and organization. The tech is the smaller part of the job. The sharpest version of that gap runs inside the leadership team. In the engagements we run, executives and the managers closest to the work often can't agree on how ready the organization already is. The people setting direction and the people doing it aren't describing the same company. So before you run another workforce readiness assessment, check the gap above it. If your leaders and your managers can't agree on how ready the organization already is, that is the constraint to fix first. The Leadership Reality Check measures that gap before you self-assess. Link in the comments. #AI #Leadership #AIReadiness
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Jeremy Korst reposted thisJeremy Korst reposted thisAI amplifies your #brand. Make sure it’s amplifying the right thing.
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Jeremy Korst shared thisLast week I got to do one of my favorite things: talk about how I'm building and running a growing team of AI agents. The audience was the inaugural cohort of UW Foster School of Business's new AI for Business Strategy executive education course. At Mindspan Labs we're building an AI-native consultancy and incubator. Not because we think AI is going to replace people. We love working with humans! We're doing it because someone has to go test the ‘jagged frontier’ of what these systems can really do, and report back. We learn something new every day. Moments of frustration are often tempered by exciting breakthroughs, sometimes within minutes of each other. Thanks Benjamin Hallen, Masha Shunko, and Thomas Gilbert for the invite. What I'm looking forward to most is what comes next. I can't wait to see how this group takes what they learned back to their own teams and businesses!
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Congrats Jesse!!!
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Jeremy Korst reacted on thisJeremy Korst reacted on thisA fitting compensation package if you consider their ability to grow the revenue of the organization.Washington governor, AG and state lawmakers get 7% pay hikesWashington governor, AG and state lawmakers get 7% pay hikes
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Jeremy Korst reacted on thisJeremy Korst reacted on thisI’m incredibly excited to announce Tapestry VC Fund III today! An $80M fundraise to keep backing the most ambitious Repeat founders who are building again. For the billion-dollar founders behind our portcos Nothing, Fin, Hopin and more, this success was their second-act, building on their expensive experience. Hot on their heels, the founders of Ladder, Sunrise Robotics, Relay, Maze, Manna Air Delivery, Tracebit, Requesty, Cloudsmith, Keycard, Crossbeam and more have shown us the cutting edge of technology, and opted back into building in order to bring us there. Thank you to all of our founders for their partnership; to all of our co-investors on these journeys; and to our LP investors for their support, especially Railpen, Molten Ventures and new investor British Business Bank. Finally, this would all also be impossible without my incredible partners audrey miller, Robert Dobie and David Kelly - thank you to them, and to all who help make Tapestry VC tap :) PS I moved to London… come say hi at our new office + DM for drinks in a couple of weeks!
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Jeremy Korst reacted on this🎓 Closing the month with my cup incredibly full. This month I graduated with my UW Foster Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS) from the University of Washington UW Foster School of Business. Working full-time while in school full-time taught me a discipline I'll carry for the rest of my career and life. Going back to school let me formalize a foundation I'd been building for the last decade in the tech field, and sharpening skills in machine learning and other technical areas alongside it made the experience that much richer. I was also honored to be elected the MSIS student speaker at our graduation ceremony, speaking to more than 1,000 students, families, and friends live, and countless more over the live stream. As a Technical Program Management leader, I can't resist the data. Here is my program experience, by the numbers: - 15 months - 128 classes - 400+ in-person hours - 3 teams - 6 company visits - 20+ networking events - 1 commencement speech …and countless laughs, memories, and late nights spent on homework. None of it happened alone, so a few thank-you(s) are in order: Professors Léonard Boussioux and Uttara Madurai Ananthakrishnan, thank you both for taking extra time out of busy schedules to offer invaluable advice and guidance. The entire MSIS program staff, thank you all for the deep empathy, patience, and kindness you show every student. My core team (go Gold Team 5!) for true teamwork on every task. My dear friends Xueying(Lily) Wang, PMP and Hannah Hoffmaster, MSIS, RHIA, going through this with you both kept me going on the hard days. The countless alumni, industry professionals, and individuals who made time for a conversation with me. And my deepest gratitude to my better half. To those who've finished the program: I'm so happy to join the sacred ranks of alumnihood. To those just starting your journey: enjoy every moment. Want to watch my graduation speech? Find me at 2:05:00 here: https://lnkd.in/gbiVJC-V. Go Dawgs! 🐾💜💛 #UWFoster #MSIS #Graduate #MachineLearning #LifelongLearning
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Jeremy Korst liked thisJeremy Korst liked this$200 million a year. Five CEOs in six years. $13 million in public funds nobody can account for. A $44.7 million hole in the budget. And homelessness in King County just hit a record high. This week, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced they're finally stripping the King County Regional Homelessness Authority of local funding after a forensic audit exposed just how badly the agency lost the plot. Seattle and King County are taking the contracts back. Cool. Now what? Because here's what the actual scoreboard says while KCRHA was "coordinating" our regional response: 🚨 18,365 people homeless in King County in 2026 — an all-time record, up 9% since 2024 🚨 64% of them unsheltered — no shelter, no roof, nothing 🚨 Unsheltered homelessness up 21% in just two years I work in marketing. If I burned through $200M, missed every target, and came back with "here's a restructuring plan" instead of results, I wouldn't get a second meeting. I'd get walked out. Nobody in my industry gets to fail this publicly, this expensively, for this long, and call reorganizing the org chart "accountability." So no, Executive Zahilay and Mayor Wilson — "we took back control" is not a plan. It's a press release. Here's what accountability actually looks like: 🎯 Real goals — numeric, dated targets for reducing unsheltered homelessness, not "we're committed to ending homelessness" fluff 🎯 Named strategies and tactics tied to every dollar of the ~$158M you just took back, with an owner's name on each one 🎯 A public budget showing what's spent, where, and what it's actually buying 🎯 Quarterly business reviews, in public, where you report the numbers and tell us what changes when you miss them You wouldn't accept this performance from a vendor. Don't accept it from yourselves. Seattle taxpayers have funded six years of "trust the process." We're done trusting. Show us the plan, show us the numbers, and show up every quarter to answer for both. #Seattle #KingCounty #Homelessness #Accountability #PublicPolicy #Washington
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Jeremy Korst reacted on thisIt has been a privilege to contribute to the success of the The Wharton School through my 8-year long run first as a Vice Dean and then as a Senior Vice Dean. This has been a turbulent period in higher education, marked by numerous geopolitical and technological disruptions, which the school overcame successfully, thanks to the leadership of the Dean Erika H. James and the Deputy Dean Nancy Rothbard. Looking forward to spending more time on #research, #teaching and working with companies on #innovation!Jeremy Korst reacted on this🎉 We are excited to welcome several faculty members into new leadership roles this academic year: ➡️ #WhartonMBA Program: Prof. Michael Roberts will step into a new role as Vice Dean of our MBA Program, succeeding Prof. Nicolaj Siggelkow. ➡️ #WEMBA Program: Prof. Kevin Werbach will step into a new role as Vice Dean of our MBA Program for Executives, succeeding Prof. Mauro Guillen. ➡️ M&T Program: Prof. David Hsu will step into a new role as Director of the Jerome Fisher M&T Program, succeeding Prof. Gad Allon. ➡️ Non-Degree Programs and Global Initiatives: Vice Dean Patti Williams and Prof. Martine Haas will step into new roles as Senior Vice Dean for Non-Degree Programs and Vice Dean of Global Initiatives, respectively, succeeding Senior Vice Dean Serguei Netessine. Join us in thanking our outgoing leaders for their tremendous contributions and welcoming their successors into their new roles!
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Jeremy Korst reacted on thisCongratulations to my The Wharton School colleague Gideon Nave and our postdoc Steven Shaw on this work. It literally extends the most fundamental of models about how we think! It will definitely change how we think about AI and humans and we are proud to support it at the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative!Jeremy Korst reacted on thisPsychologist Daniel Kahneman's idea of fast and slow thinking – which he labeled as "System 1" and "System 2," respectively – has shaped how economists, managers, and executives understand judgment and choice for decades. Wharton Executive Education highlights recent research from Prof. Gideon Nave and Postdoctoral Researcher Steven Shaw, who argue that Kahneman's framework is missing something fundamental today: It was built for a world in which all thinking happens inside the human mind, without the aid of artificial intelligence: https://whr.tn/4dYP3d4 Nave and Shaw address the gap with a new Tri-System Theory, proposing that engaging with AI has created a third mode of human cognition that influences how the two other modes operate. The researchers argue that AI gives users the option to defer thinking entirely, on any question, at any moment, calling the resulting phenomenon “cognitive surrender,” or the uncritical acceptance of AI’s answers in place of one's own reasoning. Through their research, they found that people who trust AI more are substantially more likely to follow incorrect AI advice and less likely to question it, while people who are more analytically inclined, who enjoy thinking problems through and have stronger reasoning ability, are more likely to notice when something is off and push back on a faulty answer. However, Nave and Shaw point out that the Tri-System Theory is not a warning against AI – it’s a call for organizations to be intentional about how they use it. Leaders need to understand which decisions benefit from AI's capabilities and which require human judgment that no algorithm can replicate, and to build the conditions, incentives, and habits that preserve the habit of independent thought amongst their workforce.
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Jeremy Korst reacted on thisJeremy Korst reacted on thisMore data is showing the opposite of what many people expected with AI adoption and jobs. Ramp found that the more AI adoption a company has the more their headcount grows. At Box, we recently did a survey of 1,600+ mid and large sized companies, and the findings were similar. 58% of respondents expected headcount to rise over the next three years. Interestingly, that figure climbs to 79% among the most mature adopters of AI. The more advanced AI adopters expected to grow their headcount at a greater rate in the future than others. Of course it's true that the companies that can afford to adopt AI the most are also the ones that likely are seeing growth in their business, leading to more headcount. So the point of the story isn't necessarily that by adopting AI you will inherently grow. *But* the most important takeaway is that the opposite is not proving out. The fears a couple years ago would have been that the companies adopting AI the most would be hiring fewer people. But in reality this is what actually you should expect to happen. If a company can get more customers because they use AI in sales for account or market intelligence, they hire more sales people not fewer. If you can build way more software than before, you end up hiring more engineers because the projects get bigger and you take on more. Not to mention all the new types of job that AI is producing within companies to help run and manage agents, govern their work, and so on. h/t David Sacks: https://lnkd.in/gCqPd36G
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Jeremy Korst reacted on thisJeremy Korst reacted on thisRaising $65M to build The Port City of AI In January 2018, I left IBM to start a crypto company. The space was the wild west: nascent technology, uncertain future, enormous possibility for those willing to get in early. I felt that same pull when we started building Venice in 2024. My career has orbited one idea for 25 years: infrastructure that lets people operate freely without forced surveillance. Blue Box was hosting for private clouds. Crypto was financial infrastructure that took power back from intermediaries. Venice is intelligence infrastructure for a world surrendering the privacy of its own mind. Every AI company was building the same thing: all-seeing systems that watch you think. They raised hundreds of billions to construct the infrastructure of surveillance and called it "safety." We thought there should be another option. Venice launched as a private, unrestricted alternative. No surveillance. No permission structure around what you're allowed to ask, think, or create. Your conversation with an AI should feel like your own mind: private until you decide to share. In April, Venice hit 3 million users. As of Q1, we're profitable. We proved PMF before bringing in a single outside investor. Today, we announced our $65M Series A at a $1B valuation. Dragonfly led, with North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Morgan Creek, and more. The capital goes toward one thing: scale. We're building a mass-market consumer brand, an AI platform for hundreds of millions of people and billions of agents. Some capital will vertically integrate compute, starting with a datacenter buildout for the coming resource squeeze. Venice is becoming the port city of AI. Every leading generative AI model, open or closed, accessible through a single interface or API key. A safe harbor where models and people interact freely, without surveillance or permission structures. Port cities have always been the natural crossroads of commerce and culture. The historical Venice was the gateway between East and West for centuries. We're building the same for the age of machine intelligence. Three principles define what we're building: Free speech and discovery: explore any idea, ask any question, generate any content, without a corporate intermediary deciding what's permissible. A safe harbor for models and consumers. Open-source, closed, fine-tuned. All welcome. No terms on what you're allowed to think, create, or build. Individual sovereignty. Your intelligence, biological or augmented by silicon, belongs to you. Nobody watches. Nobody constrains. Scaling private and unrestricted intelligence. Come build with us. Learn more here: - My blog: https://lnkd.in/gDeV-ypn - My X Post: https://lnkd.in/gTW-9nrq - Erik's X Post: https://lnkd.in/g_BWt4hS Visit us at https://venice.aiVenice | Private AI for Unlimited Creative FreedomVenice | Private AI for Unlimited Creative Freedom
Experience & Education
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Mindspan Labs
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Organizations
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The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Executive Advisory Board
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University of Puget Sound Board of Trustees
Trustee
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University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees
Trustee (Ex Officio)
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Intel Corporation Advisory Board
Advisor
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Hoquiam YMCA Board of Directors
Director
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IT Services Marketing Association Board of Directors
Director
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Seattle Metrocenter YMCA Board of Directors
Director
Past Board Chair, Past Annual Campaign Chair
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University of Puget Sound Alumni Council
Council Member
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