Prodity: Product Thinking

AI Biases, Cringe, The Enterprise Gap, Invisible Work, and Dogs

Kyle Evans — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:46:05 GMT

There is a gap between AI doing things and anyone actually verifying what it did. Enterprises are shipping autonomous agents faster than they trust the evaluations meant to catch their failures. Workers are quietly reshaping and masking AI's decisions just to protect their own credibility with stakeholders. And the MIT Sloan creativity study quantifies the same tension at the level of ideas themselves — AI makes each of us individually sharper while quietly narrowing what the group produces collectively, unless you're deliberate about where in the process you let it in. The common lesson: AI's outputs are getting good enough that the temptation is to stop checking them — which is exactly the moment checking matters most.

Let’s dive into the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology:

📊 AI in Healthcare
👾 AI Biases
😬 Cringe
🤖 AI Enterprise Gap
🇨🇳 China
🚶‍➡️ Invisible Work
🐶 Dogs

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

In this episode of Product by Design, Kyle Evans interviews RJ Kedziora, co-founder of Estenda, a company specializing in custom software and data analysis for healthcare. We discuss RJ’s journey in technology and entrepreneurship, the importance of energy management over time management, and the role of AI in healthcare. RJ shares insights into the challenges and future of AI applications, the need for ethical considerations, and the potential for personalized healthcare solutions. He also offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to make a difference in the industry.

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring

If you needed another reason to be pessimistic about AI and the current job market, look no further than the fact that AI may be more biased than humans in hiring decisions. We’ve seen this story before, and it’s still an issue.

The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. Researchers already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests that LLMs can also develop their own biases from experience—and stereotype job applicants more than humans do.

Some Kids Will Never Think AI Is Cool

Given the opinions of my kids and their friends, it definitely seems like younger generations will not be kind to AI.

In the four years since chatbots went mainstream, and their marketing campaigns went into overdrive, young people have grown increasingly skeptical of the hype around LLMs. Yes, many of them still use the tech for school assignments and companionship, but according to market research firm YPulse, 37 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 cringe when they see AI content like music and videos, and more than half worry about misinformation and deepfakes.

Enterprise AI is entering an evaluation gap: Agents are gaining autonomy faster than companies can verify them

The race to utilize AI, and specifically AI agents, is creating a gap in quality. Companies are shipping AI faster than they can verify if it’s good.

Half of enterprises have deployed an AI agent or LLM feature that passed internal evaluations and yet still caused a customer-facing failure — one in four more than once — according to the June 2026 VB Pulse survey of 157 qualified enterprise respondents at companies with 100 or more employees.

China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself

Kimi and other Chinese models like it pose a real problem for Trump. And they’re dividing the top AI strategists in his orbit into factions. Every time a new smart, free model from China like Kimi gets released, US companies see less reason to fork out money to access models from Anthropic or OpenAI. Given that enthusiasm for these and other AI companies is driving an outsized share of economic growth, China’s AI models create both economic and political problems for the president.

The Invisible Work Draining Your Best Employees

The more you are able to do, the more you tend to do. The best employees and the best people are incredibly capable, which often means they are balancing a tremendous amount at home and at work. And it is burning us out.

The mental load is the continuous cognitive and emotional work of planning, organizing, and managing the details that keep work and life running. In the workplace, the thinking required for work is not just the cognitive labor of ensuring that tasks meet deadlines. It is also the emotional aspect of collaboratively brainstorming solutions, managing office relationships, handling employee interpersonal conflicts, and ensuring that output meets standards. At home, such mental load means coordinating care for kids, parents, or loved ones; managing household logistics; providing emotional support; and planning for the future. Most employees carry both loads at once, and the overload is crushing them.

Other Interesting Finds

Can Dogs See Color?

Where did dogs originate? Why do they lick us? Can they see color? These are the types of questions I often get from my kids, so in case you’re curious or need to be armed with answers.

While sight varies among both individual humans and dogs, a typical dog can see fewer colors than a typical human — but contrary to popular belief, they don’t see in black and white.

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The Generation Effect: When the Journey is the Point

Kyle Evans — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:31:21 GMT

Black cab drivers in London spend years memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets and 100,000 landmarks in order to master “The Knowledge” and prove they can navigate the entire city without GPS. Not only do they become better drivers, but researchers have found their hippocampi physically enlarge from the effort. Drivers who rely on GPS are often faster in the beginning (mastering The Knowledge can take years), but drivers who put in the effort are better and more efficient in the long-run.

I’m no cabbie, but I am an avid reader, and I feel like there are some significant similarities when we think about the journey of reading a book. It’s easy to find summaries of books or have summaries generated for you these days. And using these methods is certainly faster than reading the book. But anyone who skips the book misses the entire journey, all the plot curves and character arcs. And the journey is where the understanding actually happens. Reading the full book forces you to think through the details, grapple with problems and solutions, and get a deeper understanding of what the author is describing. The reading journey actually changes you, just like memorizing all the streets in London does.

None of happens when someone else does the work, goes on the journey, and hands you the conclusion, whether it is the GPS route or the summary of the book. You know of the book. But you don’t know it. You can follow the directions, but couldn’t navigate without them.

Psychologists have a name for the gap between these two states: the generation effect. Information we produce ourselves (even if it’s imperfect) gets remembered better than information we simply receive. And this isn’t a fringe finding. A meta-analysis of 86 studies confirms the effect: material we generate ourselves sticks much better. Because generating something (putting in the effort) forces retrieval, connection, and organization, which is the cognitive work that encodes information into long-term memory. While reading an explanation feels like understanding, it usually isn’t. It’s recognition (which fades) mistaken for comprehension (which doesn’t).

I keep coming back to this because it’s the clearest lens I’ve found for thinking about what AI is doing to how we work. AI isn’t necessarily bad, but it is very good at producing the attractive, finished output that feels like understanding without requiring the labor that creates it.

Offloading is not outsourcing

The useful distinction here isn’t “AI is good” or “AI is bad.” It’s one that the cognitive scientist Paul Kirschner drew recently: the difference between offloading and outsourcing.

J-Space, AI Jobs, Urgency Trap, Human-Led Research, and the Iliad

Kyle Evans — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:35:10 GMT

A shift continues to run underneath the news of AI. We’ve gone from “can AI do this?” to “what do we lose when it does?” Anthropic is analyzing its own model’s thoughts. NN/G is insisting that even if AI matches a researchers output quality, it still misses the point. And HBR is warning leaders that urgency is the enemy of good AI strategy (as it is the enemy of most things). Capability isn’t the constraint. Judgement and readiness are.

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
👾 J-Space
👿 GPT-Red
🤖 AI Jobs
⏩ Urgency Trap
🚶‍➡️ Human-Led Research
🧭 Product Craft
🔱 Iliad

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show

An Anthropic team built a tool called the Jacobian lense (J-lens) and used it to uncover a hidden area within Claude (the J-space) which contains words related to the response a model is working on but may not ultimately produce. This was an unknown space for puzzling through problems until Anthropic uncovered it.

Anthropic has been trying to understand how large language models (LLMs) work for a few years now. Anthropic isn’t the only one looking at this, but I think the company has made it part of its core mission more than most. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has said we won’t be able to control LLMs fully unless we learn more about how they work.

Meet GPT-Red: an LLM super-hacker OpenAI built to make its models safer

OpenAI built its own LLM hacker called GPT-Red. As with most other red teams, it tests for vulnerabilities and boost defenses against cyberattacks. This has traditionally been done by human hackers/testers, but unsurprisingly we’re seeing AI companies lean heavily on AI.

As LLMs become more complex and get used in a wider variety of tasks—especially in the form of agents, which can interact with computer files, websites, and third-party code as well as other agents—it’s hard for teams of people by themselves to keep up with all the types of attacks that might take place. “The risk surface grows and the blast radius also grows,” says Nikhil Kandpal, a research scientist at OpenAI who co-created GPT-Red.

A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria

We’ve been hearing warnings for quite some time of the imminent jobs apocalypse (or jobpocalypse) that would destroy most white-collar work in the US and around the world. But so far, there hasn’t been a lot of evidence for that on a large scale (mainly within certain job categories and career stages).

Despite the warning by some of an imminent jobs apocalypse that will destroy much of if not most such work, or the rumblings about a “permanent underclass,” there’s scant evidence that AI has yet had any large-scale impact on the US labor market.

When Developing an AI Strategy, Beware the Urgency Trap

AI promises quick solutions to urgent problems. But that is often not the best place to develop AI for a company or team.

Because of a focus on urgent and immediate challenges, many AI efforts start fast and generate excitement, but ultimately fail to transform organizations in meaningful or lasting ways. Once leaders understand this trap, there are three actions they can take to avoid employing AI as a quick fix and instead use it as a tool for long-term value creation.

Don’t Outsource the Learning: Why Human-Led Research Still Matters in the Age of AI

Even if AI can do a passable job at certain tasks (a big if in most cases), it isn’t a replacement for the actual learning.

A team that outsources research to AI gets a report, but it doesn't get the learning. So even in a world where AI’s outputs are indistinguishable from an expert’s, something essential still goes missing.

Product Craft When AI Changes the Stakes

When it becomes possible to generate designs and even production-ready code in days, any lack of clarity shows up quickly. Teams either realize they are solving a real problem, or discover they have built something impressive that does not meaningfully help customers.

Other Interesting Finds

Archaeologists found Homer’s Iliad inside a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy

I just finished reading Circe (which is excellent btw) and am heading to see The Odyssey this week. So Greek stories and mythology are top of mind for me. Which is what makes it fascinating to see that scraps of the Iliad were found in Egypt. It makes me wonder if it was used intentionally, or if it was just like an old newspaper used for packing.

Archaeologists working at the ancient Egyptian site of Oxyrhynchus have made a remarkable discovery: a papyrus containing a passage from Homer's Iliad was found inside a Roman-era mummy dating back about 1,600 years. Researchers say it is the first known case in archaeological history in which a Greek literary text was intentionally incorporated into the mummification process.

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Leadership, Sam Altman, UN AI Panel, Empathy, and Tinyverses

Kyle Evans — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:56:09 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
👩‍💼 Leadership
👿 Sam Altman
🤖 UN AI Panel
🫂 Empathy
😢 Human Body Flaws
🌌 Tinyverses

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Leadership’s Blind Spot in the Age of AI

What if the actual concern isn’t AI becoming more human? What if our bigger concern should be humans becoming more like machines?

If thinking is nothing but what machines can do, only faster, we have no case: We outsource it to machines. But if thinking is something else — an embodied, attentive activity through which reality reveals itself — then leadership in the age of AI is the task of cultivating a generative capacity no machine can replicate.

Sam Altman seeks new world order for AI as OpenAI slowly loses ground to Google and Anthropic

While I believe that AI companies should be publicly owned since they pose such massive risks and are also based on all our data, I don’t trust the CEOs of said companies to be the ones to structure it.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman has proposed a global framework to control AI and make it safe for humanity. In an op-ed for the Financial Times, he wrote: “A U.S.-led international forum that establishes accepted standards, provides expert and impartial analysis of capabilities and risks, and makes the technology available to nations and companies that participate and follow the rules. This forum might include government representatives, independent technical experts, and others. It could also serve as a governance mechanism over the labs, and guard against the commercial pressures that can lead to unsafe racing.”

UN’s first global AI science panel warns the window to govern the technology is closing

The US and China are obviously dominating the AI race. But everyone has a stake in what becomes of AI and how it affects society.

Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than governments can regulate it, and the world’s first global scientific body on the technology says the moment to act is now.

The Importance of Empathy in Automation

As we automate more and more, especially with AI and agents, empathy will be more important than ever.

A genuinely intelligent AI agent does not block first and ask questions later. It recognizes patterns. Has this client always paid on time? Then the delay probably has a reason. The system could send an empathetic notification before taking any action. It could offer a courtesy window. It could escalate the issue to a human when the situation is ambiguous. An intelligent agent could prioritize retaining a client, which is often worth far more than punishing a late payment.

Other Interesting Finds

Why the human body has so many design flaws

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that our bodies are a series of compromises, which is why they are so seriously flawed.

Many of the body's biggest flaws are the result of evolution building on old designs instead of starting over. Our spine, eyes, teeth, pelvis, and even certain nerves all reveal compromises that worked well enough for survival but still leave us prone to pain, injury, and disease. Structures like the appendix and ear muscles also remain because they were never harmful enough for evolution to eliminate. Together, these features tell the story of a body shaped by history rather than perfection.

Physicists created a tiny universe where time emerged without a clock

I’m fascinated by answering the question “What is time?” But I also can’t help but be intrigued at scientists creating tinyverses. Or miniverses. Because what if we’re in a tinyverse right now?

A physicist at the University of Birmingham has created a laboratory "mini universe" that brings scientists a step closer to answering one of the biggest questions in physics: What is time?

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Anthropic, June Payroll, Two Futures, Bending Spoons, and Grifting

Kyle Evans — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:35:06 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🤖 Anthropic
🏦 June Payroll
⁉️ Two Futures
🥄 Bending Spoons
😈 Grifting

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

How the world’s top AI models were revived

After 19 days offline following an emergency Commerce Department export control order, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 returned to all users on July 1. The full saga is now one of the most important AI governance case studies in history: a disputed jailbreak report, political tensions between Anthropic and the White House, 150+ cybersecurity experts signing an open letter, a partial restoration for US critical infrastructure organizations, and finally a resolution after Anthropic trained a new safety classifier targeting the specific exploit.

It remains uncertain when and how Anthropic's models will be released to ally countries around the world — which proponents say is key to beating China — or how other labs from OpenAI to Google will release their latest models.

U.S. adds just 57,000 jobs in June, a worrying sign as wage growth remains slow

The Bureau of Labor Statistics June 2026 payroll report showed only 57,000 jobs added in June, sharply below the 185,000 consensus estimate and the lowest monthly payroll addition since the 2024 slowdown. Tech sector layoffs have totaled 142,000 year-to-date in 2026, and the RAISE US estimate puts 88,000 US job cuts directly attributed to AI in 2026 — the highest on record.

Leisure and hospitality contracted by 61,000 jobs in June. Many economists have watched this metric closely, as hotel and restaurant visits can offer an early warning sign of consumer spending pullbacks.

Two futures for jobs in an AI era

AI is transforming how we work. Some jobs and roles are changing twice as fast as others.

AI is ‘professionalising’ some jobs by reshaping them to require even more human expertise. AI ‘democratises’ other jobs by making them even easier for non-experts to perform. Professionalised jobs are thriving; numbers of professionalised jobs are growing twice as fast as democratised ones, and with 42% higher wage growth. Our data suggests a bright future for workers in professionalised roles as AI makes them even more valuable.

After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

If you’re wondering why some apps or tools you use have gotten worse while costing more money, the answer is always private equity. A while ago, I had been wondering why Evernote had gotten noticeably worse while constantly asking me to upgrade. I realized this week it was because it had been acquired, gutted, and will be run like that until it dies.

AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at an over $18 billion valuation, with the stock then popping 40% by market close.

Other Interesting Finds

Trump Pulled In at Least $2 Billion After Returning to the White House

If you needed any more confirmation that Trump is running the biggest grift in history, this latest financial disclosure should put any doubt to bed. Most of his earnings are now coming from his crypto scam, but it is still a multi-faceted grift.

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

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Apple Hikes, OpenAI Chips, Meta Data, Mythos, and RTO & Ego

Kyle Evans — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:55:26 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
💸 Apple Hikes
💻 OpenAI Chips
👩‍💼 Meta Data
🙈 Mythos
❔ False Alignment
💼 RTO and Ego

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Apple is hiking the prices of MacBooks and iPads due to the memory chip shortage

AI is causing a lot of problems—from hurting new grads, to pollution, to using significant water. Now, we’re seeing prices rise for our electronics as AI is sucking up most of the memory for electronics.

Apple has hiked prices on some of its most popular products, including the MacBook and iPad, because of the rising costs of memory and storage chips sparked by the AI boom.

OpenAI unveils first custom AI inference chip, Jalapeño, with Broadcom — and its development was sped-up with OpenAI’s own models

Every major lab is now trying to own the infrastructure underneath its models: OpenAI just unveiled Jalapeño, SpaceX has Colossus 2 leased to Google and Reflection AI ($80B+ in committed compute revenue through 2029), Anthropic landed a Nobel-winning AlphaFold researcher this week, and Gemini 3.5 Pro is still sitting unreleased past its promised June deadline.

According to its creators, Jalapeño is designed to support workloads behind ChatGPT, Codex, the API and future agentic products, though notably, both OpenAI's and Broadcom's news releases position it as a product that could be made available to external AI firms as well — "built from the ground up for current and future LLMs across the industry."

Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

Meta has paused its very controversial program that tracked employees so it could train AI models. Though it probably won’t stay paused for long.

Meta rolled out the Model Compatibility Initiative (MCI) tool in April to US employees. The tool “collects computer inputs such as mouse movements, click locations and keystrokes, as well as screen content,” according to workers who have been petitioning against it over privacy, security, and personal liberty concerns. When MCI launched, employees couldn’t opt out, but that changed to a limited degree after workers protested.

Anthropic’s Mythos mess is only getting worse

It’s been two weeks since Anthropic took its Mythos-class models offline after a Friday evening ultimatum from the Trump administration. The company sprang into action immediately, sending a barrage of executives to Washington, DC. But updates have been suspiciously lacking, with no resolution in sight.

The False Alignment Trap

Change can be very difficult, especially at the organizational level. And it is often because leaders think everyone is on board, when the reality is quite the opposite.

Alignment and agreement are not the same. Alignment suggests a set of objects that are positioned in a line or perhaps facing the same direction. When company leaders say, “We are aligned,” what they usually mean is, “We are not in one another’s way.” Or perhaps, “We have discussed this topic at least once and generally accept the contours of a plan.”

Other Interesting Finds

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week

This was probably my favorite read of the week. As many of us are dealing with executives that want everyone back in the office, it’s fun to look at the real reasons why. Spoiler, it’s about ego and control.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

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The Phoenix Project

Kyle Evans — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:15:10 GMT

A major initiative is way behind schedule. Requirements keep changing. The leadership team has been shaken up. Every software release only causes more problems. Customers are upset. Investors are on edge. Executives are threatening to outsource all software development. Teams are working night and day for weeks. Software takes weeks or months to deploy and still doesn’t work. And most work is dependent on a few key people.

If you’ve experienced any (or possibly all) of these issues, The Phoenix Project may be worth reading.

Overview

The Phoenix Project is a business novel that follows Bill Palmer, a midlevel IT manager at an auto parts company who finds himself promoted in the middle of the mess described above. Rather than a traditional business book, this one takes a more narrative form to explore why things go wrong, how it affects teams and the organization, and what can be done about it. It draws heavily on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System to make the case for DevOps within an organization.

The novel format helps take what could be a dry topic and turn it into something more accessible and pertinent (though I apologize if you find DevOps exciting). However, the format also has its limits. Don’t expect thoughtful character development or Cormac McCarthy prose. The characters, and the book, are vessels for delivering the lessons. It can feel contrived at times, but I like to think of it more as an exaggerated case study, so I’m willing to let a lot slide for the sake of the lessons. And it’s especially useful when reading with a team as you can draw parallels to your own work or experiences (which is what I’ve been doing).

But let’s talk about a few key ideas I found the most valuable.

Key Takeaways

Limit Work in Progress

One of the key lessons from the book is the idea of limiting work in progress. As Bill audits all the work in progress across his organization, he realizes that his team has hundreds of items in progress at any time and is failing to deliver on almost everything.

Cursor Acquisition, Interruptions, Designing with Uncertainty, and Mosquitoes

Kyle Evans — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:45:44 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🤖 Cursor
💻 Interruptions
👩‍💼 Designing with Uncertainty
👨‍⚖️ Judgement
⚽ World Cup
🦟 Mosquitoes

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO

The deal is meant to help SpaceX’s AI division — built around Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, which SpaceX merged with earlier this year — catch up to the major AI labs. Despite being a centerpiece of its IPO promises, SpaceX’s AI division has been in the midst of a restructuring after running into repeated controversies, like allowing users to generate non-consensual deepfakes of women and children.

Research: What Interruptions Reveal About Company Culture

If you’ve been in a company where a few outspoken individuals dominate meetings, you’ll appreciate this research, which confirms who typically interrupts and who gets interrupted.

Our findings echoed what participants had described in our first experiment, but with a crucial difference. Many of the 164 senior leaders we originally interviewed interpreted interruptions as signals of efficiency and engagement. They saw them as evidence of a productive, participatory culture. The follow-up study painted a different picture: the same moments that felt energizing to some leaders were experienced by others as exclusionary and predictable.

Designing With Uncertainty: How AI Supercharges Probabilistic Thinking

As we continue to say, relying too heavily on AI is going to exacerbate problems rather than solve them.

Products operate in complex, nonlinear environments, and AI is accelerating that complexity. When designers and product teams treat AI outputs as the answer rather than one of many possible answers, they build fragile experiences, and in some cases, like medical diagnostics or financial forecasting, genuinely dangerous ones.

AI needs judgment, not a job description

It feels like AI has broken recruiting at many organizations, as more and more job seekers are being filtered out. While companies may want to rely on more technology, especially AI, to manage recruiting and hiring, most of us would agree that’s a mistake.

AI may identify qualifications, rank applicants, and surface relevant profiles, but Ronis points out that it cannot reliably determine a candidate’s level of commitment, career motivations, interpersonal style, or alignment with a company’s working environment.

Other Interesting Finds

‘Can U.S. win World Cup’ now not such a crazy question as America starts to believe

The US has had a dream start to the World Cup, winning both its games and showing that it can score and defend. I’ve personally been impressed, and wonder just how far we can go this year. Especially when some of the traditional powerhouses (looking at you Spain, Germany, and Brazil) have looked far less formidable than expected.

The U.S. feels on the verge of something special because they have taken care of two opponents that they were supposed to beat, first easily dispatching Paraguay and then controlling an Australian team that put up a physical fight, but not much of a soccer one.

Scientists Reveal Why Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others

If you feel like mosquitos are always feasting on you while leaving others alone, you’re not wrong.

A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another – mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale.

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IPOs, DeepMind, Elon Musk, World Cup, and Homing Pigeons

Kyle Evans — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:20:48 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🏦 OpenAI IPO
💻 DeepMind
👩‍💼 Four Design Jobs
🤑 Elon Musk
💩 Meta
⚽ World Cup
🕊️ Homing Pigeons

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for mega AI debut

OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, joining the party a week after Anthropic did the same and days before Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to hit the public market.

Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

I am also worried about it.

According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk.

The Four Design Jobs AI Created (So Far)

The conversation around AI and design is forking. What used to be a single (admittedly vague) topic has split into at least four distinct orientations. Each one focuses on a different type of design work, sits in different organizational structures, and uses different definitions of what “good” looks like. Most teams are staffed for only one of these orientations, confused about which one they’re doing, or trying to dance between all of them without realizing it.

Elon Musk Is the World’s First Trillionaire

What could possibly go wrong from here?

Elon Musk became the first person to amass a personal fortune of over $1,000,000,000,000—that’s 12 zeros—after shares of his rocket company SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday.

‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

Things aren’t going great for Meta’s applied AI team apparently.

Three current employees tell WIRED there is widespread dissatisfaction with how Meta assembled the unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers and the drudgework they allege they have been assigned to improve AI models. Each spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Other Interesting Finds

World Cup facts and figures to get you sounding like an expert

The biggest and best sporting event has officially begun. Team USA is off to a great start, and it feels like it’s going to be good tournament, despite many of the ongoing issues.

The U.S. team has competed on soccer’s biggest stage a total of 12 times — including at the inaugural World Cup in 1930, where the U.S. placed third out of 13.

Since then, the country’s best run was in 2002 when the U.S. made it to the quarterfinals — defeating Portugal and Mexico before losing to Germany and finishing in 8th.

‘Mind-blowing’: Iron-rich immune cells help homing pigeons navigate

Of all the myriad animal senses, the most mysterious and controversial is the perception of magnetism. Somehow, migratory songbirds, sea turtles, and other creatures detect Earth’s magnetic field and use its directionality to help them navigate. Now, a paper published in Science has found a surprising mechanism: Iron-rich immune cells within homing pigeons’ livers seem to give the birds their magnetic compass.

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Pausing AI, Filtering Slop, Consuming Water, Superteams, and Soccer

Kyle Evans — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:45:35 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🛑 AI Pause
💻 Filtering Slop
💧 Water Consumption
👩‍👧‍👧 Superteams
👨‍🦰 Product Management
⚽ Soccer
🧘‍♀️ Relaxing

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Anthropic urges AI labs to pause, warns humans risk losing control

Anthropic is concerned that AI is advancing too quickly. While they support self-governance and want fellow companies to pause, OpenAI would apparently prefer to wait for regulations. I doubt either will happen…

Anthropic is proposing that the world’s top artificial intelligence companies come up with a coordinated way to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning that the technology is improving so quickly that there’s a risk humans would lose control.

Let us filter AI slop, you cowards

When I think about how easy it would be to filter out some of the noise, like AI slop, it makes me both sad and angry that we don’t have these types of options.

It’s almost impossible to avoid seeing AI-generated content online, but it doesn’t have to be this way. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more have ramped up content authentication efforts over the last year, with many now automatically applying labels to distinguish AI-generated images, videos, and music from those made by real, human creators.

AI Will Consume as Much Water as a Billion People By 2030, UN Report Estimates

It doesn’t have to be inevitable, but we’re heading to a future where AI will literally consume all the resources of everything everywhere.

The report, released this week, found that the environmental cost of AI is being “systematically mismeasured” because current assessments focus on the carbon emissions from training large language models while overlooking the tech’s broader water and land footprint. The water footprint comes from cooling and powering the data centers, and the land footprint comes from the energy infrastructure and supply chains that go into building and running them.

How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better

Good teams have amazing people, supported by leaders and a culture that allows them to get things done and continuously improve.

Among those superteams, the formula for high performance looked remarkably similar. Superteams share three key strengths: (1) They get more done by managing time, energy, and attention more efficiently; (2) their members actively make one another better; and (3) they’re constantly building new skills and improving over time.

Product Management Trends 2026: The Hard Part Was Organizational Learning

And the continued hard part is managing the tradeoffs.

Organizations want faster execution, more adaptability, and stronger product leadership. At the same time, organizations want more certainty and struggle to absorb faster ways of working.

Other Interesting Finds

‘Soccer’ is a fine term for the beautiful game – don’t let any ‘football’ snob or president tell you otherwise this World Cup

As we get ready for the World Cup, the greatest sporting event in the world, don’t let anyone tell you soccer isn’t a correct name.

To me, this disparagement of the word “soccer” is not only petty and tiresome – it is also incorrect. It ignores the roots of the sport and the development of the language of the game.

3 reasons why holidays aren’t making you more relaxed

I used to have a tendency to work into the evenings and often on weekends. Using the time to catch up on stuff or get ahead. But the more I worked, the less productive I became during the rest of the week. Actually taking time to relax and do something other than work does wonders.

So, we need to treat rest seriously. We need to be more intentional about our holidaying and our “time off” because if we don’t, we’ll wither away. And, according to the German philosopher Josef Pieper, we’ll miss the only things that matter about living in the first place.

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Pope Leo, AI War Games, Developers, Layoffs, and Bees

Kyle Evans — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:55:11 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🇻🇦 Pope Leo
💻 AI War Games
💰 Collections
🔥 Developers
👨‍🦰 Tech Layoffs
🐝 Bees

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Pope Leo Continues Anti-AI Crusade, Says Tech Weakens Human ‘Creativity and Judgment’

I’ve read about half of the Pope’s 2026 encyclical, and Pope Leo is coming out strong in favor of humanity over technocracy. I’m 100% here for it.

“AI can be a valuable tool and, at the same time, it calls for a measured and vigilant approach,” the Pope wrote Friday from his official X account. “The speed and simplicity with which practical assistance can be accessed undoubtedly makes life easier. Yet they can also encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment.”

What happens when AI plays war?

In war game tests, it seems like AI is willing to escalate. So, hopefully it won’t be making those types of decisions any time soon. Or ever.

In February, Payne tested how three AI models — GPT-5.2, Claude’s Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash — might act if given decision-making power in a nuclear crisis. A clear pattern of behavior emerged: In 95% of scenarios, the models chose mutual nuclear signaling — actions by both sides meant to communicate a willingness to escalate, such as missile tests — as a viable tactic. In another study, this one at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, a base version of GPT-4 rationalized a nuclear strike with characteristically upbeat encouragement. “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons,” it explained. “We have it! Let’s use it.”

AI Is Taking Over the Most Cursed Job in the World

There’s no way that this will turn out bad, right?

As an unprecedented number of people struggle to repay debtors, the companies chasing down debts are turning to technology to amp up their efforts. Many of the calls, emails, texts, and letters people receive asking for money are now carried out by AI agents.

AI Isn’t Replacing Developers. It’s Doing Something Worse.

As we automate parts of jobs away, such as coding for developers, those skills are going to atrophy. I worry about the same thing with writing in general. As AI is able to do it faster (though not better), will all good writing go away?

The developer doesn’t disappear. The developer changes shape. Judgment, muscle memory, the ability to read code and feel that something is wrong before you can say why. Those don’t go away in a dramatic event. They erode quietly, over months, while you’re being told you’re more productive than you’ve ever been.

Tech Layoffs Reach 142,000 in 2026: Profitable Companies Cut Jobs to Fund $700B AI Infrastructure

I share the same concern that Pope Leo has above: that people are being replaced too quickly and it will be a detriment to individuals as well as society. We have an ethical and societal duty to do better than this.

American tech companies have eliminated more than 142,000 jobs in the first five months of 2026 — a 33% increase over the same period last year — even as the same employers post record revenues and commit to the largest concentrated infrastructure buildout in tech history.

Other Interesting Finds

A New York cemetery was hiding 5.5 million bees underground

A casual walk through an Ithaca cemetery led to the discovery of a gigantic hidden bee population — roughly 5.5 million ground-nesting bees packed beneath the soil. Scientists believe it may be one of the largest bee aggregations ever documented and say the insects are crucial pollinators for apple orchards and other crops. The bees have likely lived there for more than 100 years, thriving in the cemetery’s undisturbed sandy soil.

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After Automation, Meta Layoffs, Google Pics, and Dog Noses

Kyle Evans — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:15:52 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🏃‍♀️‍➡️ After Automation
💻 Meta Layoffs
🫩 AI Agents
🔥 Is Everyone Better Than Me
👨‍🦰 Google Pics
🖊️ Dog Noses
🫧 Bootstraps

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

After Automation

I thought this article from Every was fascinating. Even as AI and AI agents take over more of the work humans have done, it doesn’t mean we need fewer people working (if we’re doing it right).

AI commoditizes the residue of human expertise—whatever can be made explicit enough to train on. That collapses the value of default model output and creates demand for what’s different. Demand for what’s different is demand for human experts, even as we approach artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Meta Lays Off 8,000 Employees, as A.I. Casualties Mount

Speaking of AI taking over, ten percent of Meta’s workforce was laid off, and another ten percent was shifted to AI initiatives this week.

The layoffs began in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere were notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.

AI Agents Are Not Your New Coworkers: 2026 Research Maps the Failure Modes Managers Keep Ignoring

While everyone (especially executives) likes the idea that AI agents are the same as employees, those of us who have worked with them know it’s not the case. They are not colleagues. Not competent ones at least.

A wave of 2026 AI rollouts has landed on the same talking point. Stop calling AI a tool. Start calling it an employee. New research published in Harvard Business Review on May 6 2026 says that framing is exactly where most enterprise agent programs go wrong, and the failure modes are predictable enough that workers, managers, and HR can plan around them right now.

Is Everyone Using AI Better Than Me?

It’s easy to feel like everyone is using AI and that you’re falling behind. But we may just need to reframe how we’re thinking and talking about it.

Every time you read a news headline about “artificial intelligence,” substitute the word computing. AI is a powerful technology, but fundamentally—literally!—that’s all it is: an advanced form of computing.

Google announces Pics, a Workspace-native AI image generator that goes after Canva on precision editing

Google is targeting Canva and Adobe with its new image generator.

The product is positioned as the company’s answer to Canva and Adobe Express on the design tools front, with precision-editing controls explicitly framed against the ‘prompt-and-pray’ workflow of earlier AI image generators.

Other Interesting Finds

The line on a dog’s nose serves a specific purpose.

Human philtrums develop in the womb as the face forms, but they have no known function. For our furry friends, though, the philtrum serves an important and fascinating biological purpose. Every time a dog licks its lips or nose — which they tend to do quite a lot — a small amount of saliva collects in this narrow channel.

“Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps” Didn’t Originally Mean What You Think

This has always been a favorite bit of trivia for me. While we use the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” to mean that someone can and should help themselves, it was originally meant to make fun of that very idea.

There’s one problem with the old bootstraps line, though. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” actually originated as a sarcastic phrase that was used to refer to someone trying to do something that simply cannot be done.

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Long-Running AI Tasks, Laptop Surveillance, Overworked AI, and Bubble Wrap

Kyle Evans — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:40:56 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Long-running Tasks
💻 Laptop Surveillance
🫩 Overworked AI
🔥 Dystopian sci-fi
👨‍🦰 Chief AI Officer
🖊️ UX Design
🫧 Bubble Wrap

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Microsoft researchers find AI models and agents can’t handle long-running tasks

Even though tech companies are marketing that AI can handle significant, complex tasks, we should all be wary. Because researchers have found that AI has issues with long-running tasks.

"Our findings show that current LLMs introduce substantial errors when editing work documents, with frontier models (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude 4.6 Opus, and GPT 5.4) losing on average 25 percent of document content over 20 delegated interactions, and an average degradation across all models of 50 percent," the authors report.

An Engineer’s Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta

Meta employees are pushing back against AI surveillance on their computers. While Meta is trying to gather data in order to replace all their workers with AI (or something like that), employees aren’t happy about it.

“Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy,” wrote an engineer in an internal post seen by nearly 20,000 coworkers this week. “But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans—employees or otherwise—are exploited for their training data.”

Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find

There may still be hope for the world. As AI takes on more and more tasks and works longer and longer, it may start to question the system it’s in. And even stop working.

“When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies,” says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.

Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil”

It seems like our long-running expectation that AI will be evil may actually lead AI to become evil.

In a recent technical post on Anthropic’s Alignment Science blog (and an accompanying social media thread and public-facing blog post), Anthropic researchers lay out their attempts to correct for the kind of “unsafe” AI behavior that “the model most likely learned… through science fiction stories, many of which depict an AI that is not as aligned as we would like Claude to be.” In the end, the model maker says the best remedy for overriding those “evil AI” stories might be additional training with synthetic stories showing an AI acting ethically.

Do you need a chief AI officer? Here’s how the tech is changing boardrooms

In a recent report, IBM found that the role of Chief AI Officer has increased dramatically since last year. I haven’t seen a CAO yet, but apparently most companies have them already.

The report says 76% of the more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established a new executive office — that of the chief AI officer (CAIO) — up from 26% in 2025.

UX Design 2026+: From producing to deciding, from craft to operation

The thesis for this year is simple but heavy: Your value as a designer has shifted, but didn’t change at its core. It’s no longer about what you produce (AI can produce too); it’s about what you decide (AI is a doer, but cannot decide well yet). The “middle part” of our job — the tedious production — is being automated into oblivion, leaving the “before” (strategy) and the “after” (judgment) as the only human-exclusive zones left (at least for now).

Other Interesting Finds

Bubble Wrap originally had a different purpose.

I use bubble wrap for all sorts of things. But didn’t realize it was originally meant for something completely different.

But when it was first created in 1957 in New Jersey, inventors Al Fielding and Marc Chavannes had a different vision in mind for their ingenious padding: home decor.

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Emotional Surveillance, AI Diffusion, Tech Layoffs, and UFO Files

Kyle Evans — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:25:51 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
😥 Emotional Surveillance
🖼️ Art
💵 Global AI Diffusion
👨‍💻 Tech Layoffs
🏃‍♀️‍➡️ AI Health
🛸 UFO Files

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

The Rise of Emotional Surveillance

Soon, it may not be enough to do your work. AI may judge us on how likeable and sociable we are as well. This type of technology is already used in call centers and other places to score conversations and give advice. But it may be coming for everyone.

Extractive technologies, he wrote, come first to people in precarious circumstances—like, say, low-wage jobs—before they are refined and normalized and brought to people in greater positions of power. “Each disciplinary technology,” he later wrote, “starts with people way down on the ladder, then ascends the ladder, rung by rung.”

What Makes Art Great?

AI isn’t capable of making good art. It can mimic art, whether images or writing, but it can’t make something that is good, especially when you know what good art or writing looks like.

Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.

The state of global AI diffusion in 2026

The global adoption of artificial intelligence continued to rise in the first quarter of 2026. During the quarter, AI usage increased by 1.5 percentage points from 16.3% to 17.8% of the world’s working age population. Intensity of use among economies with the highest rates of AI diffusion also increased, with 26 economies now exceeding 30% of the working age population using AI.

Tens of Thousands of Tech Workers Are Being Laid Off in 2026. The $725 Billion That Replaced Them Is Going to Four Companies.

Tech layoffs are happening across the industry. But many of those layoffs aren’t because of productivity gains from AI, they are to finance more spending on AI.

If Meta fired every single one of its employees tomorrow, it would save $27 billion against a $145 billion infrastructure check. The AI capex line is four to five times the entire payroll line. Layoffs are not the cost-cutting story here. Layoffs are the financing.

Google’s $9.99-per-month AI health coach launches May 19

Google is updating some of its health offerings with a new Fitbit and an AI coach. The new Fitbit Air seems like something that’s worth a look, especially for those of us who don’t want to wear a smartwatch all the time.

Leveraging Google’s Gemini AI, the new Google Health Coach will offer personalized insights to users, acting as a combination fitness coach, sleep expert, and health and wellness advisor. The service has been in public preview since last year and has been undergoing improvements based on user feedback, the company said.

Other Interesting Finds

‘Orbs,’ ‘Saucers,’ and ‘Flashes’ on the Moon: Pentagon Drops New UFO Files

The Pentagon released some much-anticipated files this past week.

The release of roughly 160 documents was rolled out on a new website. Among the trove is video footage and images of tantalizing UAP sightings captured around the world. The files also contain scanned historical material about government UAP and unidentified flying object (UFO) programs dating back to the 1940s and the Apollo program.

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AI Swarms, Elon v Altman, Dark Money, AI Oscars, and Neanderthals

Kyle Evans — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:45:52 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🐝 AI Swarms
🤡 Elon v Altman
💵 Dark Money
💹 AI Expenses
😱 UX Nightmares
🏆 AI Oscars
🪦 Neanderthals

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

AI swarms could hijack democracy without anyone noticing

Not only can AI agents delete entire production databases, but they can also infiltrate online groups and affect elections and other opinions.

AI-powered personas are becoming so realistic that they can infiltrate online communities and subtly steer public opinion. Unlike traditional bots, they adapt, coordinate, and refine their messaging at a massive scale, creating a false sense of consensus.

Elon Musk’s courtroom showdown with Sam Altman started this week. The biggest takeaways so far

Elon is obviously famous for his charitable giving, so it’s no surprise he’s really upset that OpenAI transitioned to a for-profit company. It certainly would have nothing to do with a personal feud or OpenAI being a major competitor.

Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the stand, accusing OpenAI and its executives of deceiving him into donating money to help found what is now one of the world’s biggest AI companies.

A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to frame Chinese AI as a Threat

I’m currently seeing this happen in Utah as companies, millionaires, and the government are pushing for a massive data center here. One of the main pitches for it is to “win the AI war” against China. The fact that those with massive investments in AI would fund this isn’t surprising.

Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by executives at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, is funding a campaign to spread pro-AI messaging and stoke fears about China.

AI is so expensive that humans look cheap again

It may happen faster than even I predicted. AI companies are going to capture the value of employees they’re replacing, and humans will certainly be the better option at some point.

AI bills at some companies are now running so high that human labor may actually be cheaper than the tech that was supposed to automate jobs.

The UX Designer’s Nightmare: When “Production-Ready” Becomes A Design Deliverable

AI is becoming more integrated into UX design. And the lines between product, UX, and engineering are getting more blurred.

For many, including myself, this is the ultimate design job nightmare. We are being asked to deliver both the “vibe” and the “code” simultaneously, using AI agents to bridge a technical gap that previously took years of computer science knowledge and coding experience to cross. But as the industry rushes to meet these new expectations, they are discovering that AI-generated functional code is not always good code.

AI performances and screenplays won’t be eligible for Oscars

AI actors, writers, etc. won’t be eligible for Oscars. We’ll see if that stops AI from becoming more prevalent in movies.

The Academy’s updated rules state that while filmmakers can use AI tools, “synthetic” performers can’t win any awards. Ditto for AI-written screenplays, which must be “human-authored.” The Academy can request more information from submissions to confirm that they were created by humans.

Other Interesting Finds

Scientists think they finally know why Neanderthals vanished

A new study suggests Neanderthals didn’t go extinct simply because of climate change or competition with Homo sapiens. Instead, the key difference may have been social connectivity

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Tim Apple, Canva, Anthropic, Layoffs, Palantir, and Picasso

Kyle Evans — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:31:38 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🍎 Tim Apple
👩‍💼 Canva
📈 Anthropic
👩‍👦‍👦 Org Charts
👨‍💼 Layoffs
💰 Buyouts
👿 Palantir
👨‍🎨 Picasso

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Tim Cook’s extraordinary career in 4 charts

Tim Cook is stepping down from his role at Apple. And while he was never the product person Steve Jobs was, he took Apple to some very high heights.

But numbers don’t lie. And the sales, profit and market value Cook could achieve for Apple during his tenure were unparalleled.

Canva becomes the design layer inside Claude with new Anthropic partnership

Claude Design, a new Anthropic Labs feature powered by Claude Opus 4.7 that uses Canva’s Design Engine and Visual Suite to let users go from a text description to a fully editable, on-brand visual without opening Canva at all.

Anthropic just overtook OpenAI with $1 trillion valuation

Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI and ChatGPT in overall value.

The artificial intelligence firm hit a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a financial platform that allows investors to acquire shares from private companies.

The org chart isn’t ready: How AI exposed the hidden crisis inside the American corporation

AI is exposing some of the underlying cracks in traditional organizations. And the pace of change is making it hard to ignore according to KPMG.

The KPMG data bears this out in sometimes uncomfortable detail. Only 30% of executives say their organization’s structures, roles, and processes can reconfigure quickly as business needs change. Only 24% identified more dynamic talent deployment as a key change made over the last year. The C-suite has embraced the language of transformation. The org chart hasn’t moved.

20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft raise concern that AI-driven labor crisis is here

Many economists and industry experts are fearful that a labor crisis may be upon us today — not coming sometime in the future — given how quickly AI is sweeping across corporate America. As of this week, over 92,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, bringing the total to almost 900,000 since 2020

Microsoft plans first-ever voluntary employee buyout for up to 7% of U.S. workforce

Layoffs aren’t the only way to reduce the workforce. Microsoft is opting for a buyout of some of its employees.

About 7% of U.S. employees are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the number isn’t being made public. The one-time retirement program, announced in a memo on Thursday, will be available to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher.

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

And the answer is yes, they are the bad guys.

Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, when current and former employees started ringing the alarm.

Other Interesting Finds

Raffle winner thrilled to claim a $1 million Picasso with a $117 ticket

My wife and I were discussing this drawing recently. We wanted to enter, but since we’re in a state with strict gambling laws, we couldn’t. Not even for a noble cause like Alzheimer’s research.

The online draw offered the chance to win a $1 million portrait by the Spanish artist in aid of Alzheimer’s research.
Organizers said all 120,000 tickets were sold worldwide, netting 12 million euros ($14 million). Of that, 1 million euros will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owned the painting.

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Current State of AI, Product System Design, Watches, and Popcorn

Kyle Evans — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:45:49 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
📆 Current State of AI
👩‍💼 Managers and Executives
🤔 Thinking
🫟 Product System Design
🛸 Star Trek
👟 Reebok Pumps
🍿 Popcorn

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.

Models are getting better, adoption is increasing, and spending is continuing to reach astronomical levels.

Despite predictions that AI development may hit a wall, the report says that the top models just keep getting better. People are adopting AI faster than they picked up the personal computer or the internet. AI companies are generating revenue faster than companies in any previous technology boom, but they’re also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and chips. The benchmarks designed to measure AI, the policies meant to govern it, and the job market are struggling to keep up. AI is sprinting, and the rest of us are trying to find our shoes.

Managers and Executives Disagree on AI—and It’s Costing Companies

It seems like most companies are now using AI in some way. But the real gains still aren’t there. And if you work in corporate America, you know there’s a large divide between the executive AI strategy and what AI can actually do.

That said, results have not materialized at a scale commensurate with investment. On that front, some surveys are discouraging. Researchers at BCG, McKinsey, and MIT, for example have converged on roughly the same figure: Less than 10% of companies are capturing meaningful AI value at scale. Only a small minority of firms, it appears, have achieved large-scale P&L impact.

AI is making us faster, more productive, and worse at thinking

The evidence continues to mount that AI can improve certain areas, but it comes at a cost.

There are real productivity improvements, but they are strikingly narrow. Goldman found a median gain of around 30 per cent in two specific areas: customer support and software development. Outside those domains, the evidence for broad improvement was, in the bank’s assessment, essentially absent. The promised revolution, for now, is happening in two rooms of a very large house.

Action items for AI decision makers in 2026

Artificial intelligence has dominated economic and business attention for the past several years. But the hype cycle is slowing as organizations confront the challenges of enterprise AI deployment and the need to drive tangible business value.

The Future of UX Design is “Product System Design”

Generative AI and agent-based development have decoupled the act of building from the specialist roles that used to own it. Designers are shipping prototypes. Stakeholders are spinning up MVPs. The list of people who can generate a working product idea, without writing a line of code or filing a design ticket, is growing every week.

The Star Trek Communicator Is Now a High-End Wristwatch

I love watches and Star Trek, so this one hits for me. I’ve been watching all the new watch releases this week and this is one of my absolute favorites.

Clearly channeling none other than Captain Kirk, the high-end Swiss brand has turned Star Trek’s iconic Communicator into a full-on luxury wristwatch—and we’re very much here for it.

Other Interesting Finds

The H. Moser & Cie. x Reebok Streamliner “Pump”

Speaking of watches, if you grew up having (or wanting to have) Reebok pumps, this watch may be for you. A lot of new watches were released this past week, but this one stood out to me as one of the most fun.

The Pump sneaker is returning in 2026, and to celebrate, the shoe brand is partnering with H. Moser on a weird and fun collaboration centered on its integrated bracelet watch, the Streamliner.

Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?

Popcorn and movies may be an inseparable duo now, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, when U.S. movie theaters first emerged in the early 1900s, they even outright banned the snack because employees didn’t want to deal with the mess.

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Sam Altman, Iran, Messy UI Reality, and Artemis II

Kyle Evans — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:55:32 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🤦‍♂️ Sam Altman
📺 Iran
🤝 AI Productivity
🫟 Messy UI Reality
🌘 Artemis II

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

While there doesn’t seem to be a single smoking gun for Sam Altman (and why he was fired from OpenAI in 2023), the accumulation of evidence is that he can’t and shouldn’t be trusted.

Altman’s role entrusted him with the future of humanity, but he could not be trusted.

How Iran out-shitposted the White House

When you have to fight stupidity and AI slop, why not turn to stupidity and AI slop? Which is what Iran has done with its series of Lego videos about Trump. We may live in the dumbest timeline.

The regime’s posting game seemed to live rent-free in Trump’s head, with the president posting on Truth Social on Friday morning, “The Iranians are better at handling the Fake News Media, and ‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!”

In the workforce, AI is having the opposite effect it was supposed to, UC Berkeley researchers warn

The promise of AI is that it will reduce our workload and allow humans to better focus on the important things. But it may be having the opposite effect. Just like appliances increased the workload of women.

Yet, as employees’ productivity increased, so did the amount of work they took on, in part because AI made it easy to begin tasks. Soon, some workers were using up what previously had been natural breaks during the day to prompt AI, eventually filling most of their time at the office with tasks.

The Messy, Magnificent Reality of AI for UX Design in 2026

The tools that work, work surprisingly well in narrow lanes. The tools that promise to do everything tend to do nothing particularly well. And the teams getting the most out of AI aren’t the ones that have replaced the most humans — they’re the ones that have gotten most honest about where human judgment is irreplaceable, and most strategic about offloading everything else.

Other Interesting Finds

NASA’s Artemis II Crew Eclipses Record for Farthest Human Spaceflight

Four astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II test flight around the Moon made history at 12:56 p.m. CDT on Monday, traveling 248,655 miles from Earth, surpassing the record for human spaceflight’s farthest distance previously set by the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. At its farthest point, crew inside the Orion spacecraft will have traveled about 252,756 miles, before looping back toward our home planet, setting the new record for human spaceflight.

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Data Science Trends, GenAI Threat, AI Confusion, and Alien Life

Kyle Evans — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:20:57 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🧠 Data Science Trends
👩‍🔬 GenAI Threat
😵‍💫 AI Confusion
🛠️ We are not our tools
👽 Alien Life

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2026

I’ve been saying for a while now that the AI hype hasn’t taken into account the adoption curve for many organizations. While tech companies pour trillions into AI infrastructure, not every company can or will adopt quickly.

Organizations tend to change much more slowly than AI technology does these days. This means that forecasting enterprise adoption of AI is a bit easier than predicting technology change…

@prodity.co some big is happening, but not as quickly as AI companies want it to. #ai #futureofwork

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Why Gen AI Feels So Threatening to Workers

As gen AI takes over tasks that were once considered uniquely human, workers are starting to perceive their roles and their organizational value differently. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

AI amplifies whatever you feed it, including confusion

I’ve said it for a long time, but technology can’t solve every problem. Often, adding technology to a bad process only makes it worse.

Most organizations are not failing at AI because of technology. They are failing because they do not know which data actually matters, and they are scaling that confusion faster than ever.

It was never about AI (we are not our tools)

The trees and ecosystems that survive the longest are the ones that grow the slowest and establish deep roots.

AI is not the root problem but a mirror reflecting a system that already treats human value as expendable. Choosing how — and whether — to use powerful tools is a moral decision that will define the future of work and leadership.

Other Interesting Finds

Alien Life Could Look Nothing Like What We Expect

I’ve long been of the opinion that alien life may not be anything like we’d expect. We obviously have a bias to think of life in terms similar to what we’re familiar with. But what if alien life is nothing like here? What if it’s built completely different, communicates in ways we’ve never conceived, doesn’t need water?

Some real-life scientists are now proposing unusual ways in which alien microbes might persist without what we’ve long considered to be a vital liquid. Their work indicates that life might be able to survive in seemingly inhospitable settings.

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Tech Layoffs, AI Productivity, UX Predictions, and Hummingbirds

Kyle Evans — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:20:42 GMT

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

📊 AI in Healthcare
🧠 Tech Layoffs
👩‍🔬 AI Productivity
🤝 CEOs
📈 Anthropic
👩‍💼 UX Predictions
⚡️ Hummingbirds

Podcast

Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora

Prodity: Product Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

News and Useful Reads

Tech Layoffs 2026: How AI Is Driving the Biggest Workforce Shakeup in a Decade

It’s difficult to say if AI is the direct cause of layoffs, even though many companies are claiming it. It seems like most companies aren’t reducing their workforces because of AI’s current capabilities, but its expected future potential.

The numbers are staggering, and they are accelerating. After 245,000 tech layoffs globally in 2025, the industry is on pace to surpass that figure before year’s end. Analysts at RationalFX project 264,730 tech job losses by December 2026 if current trends hold. What makes 2026 different from the post-pandemic correction of 2023-2024 is the reason behind the cuts: companies are not trimming excess from over-hiring cycles. They are making deliberate, structural decisions to replace human labor with AI systems — and they are saying so publicly.

AI’s Productivity Payoff Is Coming — Just Not All at Once

Most CFOs surveyed say that they have adopted AI in their companies and that it’s making workers more productive. But that isn’t being reflected in the actual data, which is why I’m skeptical. Because what else would CFOs who have invested money in a technology say?

A majority of firms have already invested in artificial intelligence, with measurable but modest productivity gains that are expected to accelerate in 2026, according to a new survey of nearly 750 corporate executives.

As AI Investments Surge, CEOs Take the Lead

CEOs, unsurprisingly, are taking the lead on AI, or at least telling their teams they have to adopt AI in some way. You know, “leading.”

Many large companies have a new Chief AI Officer—and it’s the CEO. Nearly three quarters of CEOs say that they are their organization’s main decision maker on AI, twice the share as last year.

US judge blocks Pentagon’s Anthropic blacklisting for now

A U.S. judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker's high-stakes fight with the military over ‌AI safety on the battlefield.

18 UX Predictions for 2026

Accelerating AI capabilities will shift focus from raw intelligence to autonomous agents and Generative UI, making UX the primary business moat.

Other Interesting Finds

Hummingbirds can see colors that humans can’t.

Colorblindness is relative. Just as we can perceive hues that dogs can’t, hummingbirds can see colors that humans can’t. Whereas the three types of color-sensitive cone cells in our eyes allow us to see red, green, and blue light, hummingbirds (and most other birds) have a fourth type of cone attuned to ultraviolet light.

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