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Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

80% of People Trust AI Even When It's Wrong And It's Making Them Feel Smarter

·42 min·4 clips
Wharton finds 80% of people follow AI answers even when they're wrong, making them feel more confident.
The episode opens with host Jacob Morgan introducing four stories for analysis. He first covers Andreessen Horowitz data, which shows 29% of Fortune 500 companies are live paying customers of AI startups, countering MIT's narrative of stalled adoption. Morgan highlights coding as the dominant use case and emphasizes verifiability as a key pattern for AI success. Next, he addresses Gallup's report on declining global employee engagement, arguing that engagement scores are overrated and often gamed, with minimal historical fluctuation. Morgan suggests HR should focus on business metrics like productivity instead. The third story delves into Microsoft Research's future of work study, revealing that 40% of employees receive 'work slop'—polished but inaccurate AI-generated content—and that AI users face social stigma. Morgan introduces 'human prompting' as a leadership skill to extract human judgment from AI-assisted work. Finally, he examines a Wharton study finding that 80% of people follow AI answers even when wrong, leading to 'cognitive surrender' and increased confidence. Morgan warns this creates a quality problem in organizations and stresses the need for verification checkpoints. The episode concludes with a preview of an upcoming interview with CHRO Kathy Patterson and a quote from Donella Meadows on measurement.

As heard by us

A pointed case for judging HR by business outcomes, not engagement scores.

This episode brings together four work-world stories - A16Z enterprise AI, Gallup's global employee engagement decline, a Microsoft Research study, and a Wharton item - to make a familiar point with some urgency: companies should be judged by outcomes, not by survey movement…

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Why you'd press play

If you want enterprise AI, engagement scores, and HR metrics in one brisk run, press play.

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