Deep Questions with Cal Newport · 2026-07-09 · 20 min · 3,775 words

Do Managers Actually Understand AI? (I’m Not So Sure.) | AI Reality Check

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

Do you ever get that sense? When you're hearing business executives talk about AI, that they seem to be living In a completely different world. than the rest of us. I mean, I get that feeling a lot. I want to give you a recent example. Last week I came across an article from the New York Times business sector that interviewed multiple executives from the German software company SAP.

as well as several European business and economics. Analyst. Now what struck me was how confident everyone was that AI had already started massively disrupting the economy and would continue to do so at an accelerating rate in the near future. Here, let me load the article on the screen here. Look, the title was Can you embrace AI without layoffs?

This company says it's trying and look at the subhead here. The German software giant SAP says it's betting that employees can reinvent Jobs instead of eliminating them. Experts are divided It will work.

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