Most conversations about AI focus on tools, productivity, and efficiency. What they often miss is culture. AI is quietly reshaping norms, expectations, and behaviors in ways that are deeper and more lasting than any single workflow change. Culture is how work actually happens when no one is watching. AI is changing that layer first, even when organizations believe they are still “just experimenting.” ---------- CULTURE CHANGES BEFORE STRATEGY ---------- Culture always shifts before strategy catches up. People adapt their behavior informally long before policies or frameworks are updated. With AI, this shows up in subtle ways. Faster responses become expected. Drafts appear earlier. Iteration accelerates. Availability feels constant. These changes are rarely discussed explicitly. They simply become the new normal. Over time, they shape how people feel about their work. When culture shifts without intention, misalignment grows. ---------- NEW NORMS, UNEXAMINED ---------- AI introduces new norms around speed, quality, and effort. What once took days now takes minutes. What once required teams now requires one person. Without reflection, this can distort expectations. Faster outputs become baseline. Efficiency becomes assumed. Slack disappears. People feel pressure to keep up with an invisible standard. Burnout increases not because of workload, but because of expectation creep. AI did not create this pressure. Silence did. ---------- AI CHANGES HOW VALUE IS PERCEIVED ---------- AI also reshapes how value is judged. If output is faster and easier to produce, what counts as contribution. People begin to question whether effort still matters. Whether originality is visible. Whether judgment is recognized. These questions affect motivation and identity. When value becomes unclear, engagement suffers. Culture must evolve alongside capability. ---------- THE RISK OF UNINTENTIONAL CULTURE ---------- When AI adoption is framed as purely technical, cultural consequences are ignored. Norms form by default rather than design.

AI can write your emails, analyze your data, and generate your presentations. But there's one skill it can't touch and that's the skill that will determine whether you thrive with AI or get left behind. It's not coding. It's not "being technical." It's not even "understanding AI." It's judgment. The Shift Nobody's Talking About We're watching a fundamental change happen in real-time, and most people are focused on the wrong thing. Everyone's asking: "What tasks will AI replace?" The better question is: "What decisions will AI force me to make?" Because that's what's actually happening. AI isn't replacing your work—it's replacing the easy parts of your work and leaving you with nothing but decisions. Think about what you do all day. How much of it is execution versus deciding what to execute? Before AI: - Spend 20 minutes writing an email - Spend 2 minutes deciding if the email says what you need With AI: - Spend 20 seconds getting a draft - Spend 5 minutes deciding if this is the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right tone The balance just flipped. AI handled execution. You're left with pure judgment calls. And here's what we've learned: Most people are really bad at this. What Judgment Actually Looks Like Let's get specific about what we mean. Judgment isn't "gut feeling" or "intuition" or "experience." Those matter, but judgment is something more concrete. It's the ability to: → Know what "good" looks like before you see it You can't just evaluate AI output, you need to know what you're evaluating it against. What's the goal? What's good enough? What's the standard? → Weigh trade-offs without perfect informationShould this email be short or detailed? Formal or casual? Is it worth taking more time to polish this, or is "good enough" actually good enough right now? → Understand context AI can't see AI doesn't know your company culture, your relationship with this client, what happened in the last meeting, or what political dynamics are in play. You do. That context changes everything.

Time magazine launched an AI agent that lets readers ask questions and generate summaries, text or audio, drawn entirely from its 102-year archive. This isn't just another chatbot experiment. It's Time's biggest bet yet on how people will consume journalism in an AI-first world. The announcement: Time unveiled its AI Agent, built in partnership with Scale AI, that allows users to query and interact with the publication's entire digital content corpus, approximately 750,000 assets spanning over a century. The agent can summarize articles, translate content into 13 languages, and generate audio briefings using Time's voice and tone. At launch, it's available on politics and entertainment articles with plans to expand across the entire site. The tool is currently free and not monetized, though Time plans to explore sponsorships and licensing the technology to other publishers as an enterprise business. Editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs framed it bluntly: "If the mass consumption of the internet is this agentic experience, then Time also must adapt to that moment." What's being built: → Archive-only training: The AI agent pulls exclusively from Time's content—no open web sources, no external articles, just Time's own journalism dating back to 1923 → Multi-capability interface: Unlike basic chatbots, the agent can summarize, translate, generate audio, and conduct semantic search all within one interaction → 13-language translation: Content available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian → Audio briefing generation: Users can request custom audio summaries on specific topics, with AI generating natural-sounding narration in Time's editorial voice → Complex query handling: Example: "Generate a five-minute audio briefing summarizing the most significant political, economic, and cultural events in Brazil throughout 2025" → Future personalization: Time removed its paywall in 2023 but plans to relaunch a logged-in experience later this year that will enable memory storage and personalization

Lightricks just released LTX 2, and this isn't another incremental update to an AI video tool. This is a complete reimagining of what's possible when you need professional-quality video content without the traditional production pipeline. The announcement: LTX Studio launched LTX 2, their next-generation AI creative engine that generates synchronized video and audio together in a single process. The platform now offers three performance tiers: Fast, Pro, and Ultra... Each designed for different stages of the creative workflow. Unlike most AI video tools that treat audio as an afterthought, LTX 2 creates visuals and sound simultaneously, producing everything from dialogue to ambient sounds to music that actually matches what's happening on screen. The system generates native 4K video at up to 50 frames per second with no upscaling required. Videos can run up to 15 seconds with full audio synchronization. The platform operates on a "Computing Seconds" pricing model where you only pay for actual processing resources used. What's being built: → Three performance modes tailored to workflow stages: - Fast Mode: Generates 6-10 second clips with synchronized audio in seconds, designed for rapid concepting and ideation - Pro Mode: Balanced quality and speed for client presentations and stakeholder reviews - Ultra Mode: Maximum fidelity for final deliverables, commercial work, and cinematic projects → Synchronized audio-visual generation: Produces dialogue, sound effects, ambient sounds, and music that match the action on screen in real time → Multi-resolution native rendering: 720p, 1080p, and 4K without upscaling, maintaining sharp detail across every frame → Frame rate flexibility: 25 fps and 50 fps support for different motion aesthetics → Advanced creative controls: Multi-keyframe conditioning, 3D camera logic, LoRA customization for precise stylization → Accessible entry point: Free plan with 8,000 Computing Seconds, paid plans starting at $15/month

Tony says ‘Proximity is power.’ Let’s find out who’s in proximity... Tell us all where you’re from… without actually telling us where you’re from 🤣