Is Your Boss Using AI More Than You?

Hello,

This is Simon with the latest edition of The Weekly. In these updates, I share key AI related stories from this week's news, list upcoming events, and share any longer form articles posted on the website.

This week at work, we had our new VP over from the San Francisco office, here for a chance to meet the team and attend a customer conference. He say at an empty desk next to me for the week, which meant I got a front-row seat to how he actually uses AI day to day.

One use case was researching a customer ahead of an upcoming executive call. With our Claude Enterprise setup, asking Claude for a brief is genuinely effective, since it's plugged into many of our other systems. But what surprised me more was that he'd also built what looked like a live agenda, complete with diary entries and a simple to-do list, pulling in real data rather than just sitting there static. I suspect this was built using Claude Cowork's live artifacts feature, which feels like a noticeably more advanced use case.

When we picture AI use at work, we tend to imagine more junior roles using it to help with day-to-day tasks, not senior executives. So this felt genuinely interesting to watch. We tend to think of senior leaders as either sceptical of AI or the ones handing down a mandate for their teams to use it, rather than the ones actually rolling their sleeves up and using it themselves.

Similar to last week's edition, this raises the question again: if you're not already using AI at work, are you increasingly falling behind?

A couple of questions for you. Have you seen any of your senior leaders using AI? Do they talk about how they use it? What are their own expectations of AI in the workplace? I'd be intrigued to hear your thoughts.

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In this section, I’m going to bring to you a real world example of AI use. This week, we take a look at global consumer packaged goods company, Unilever.

PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which draws upon over a billion job ads across six continents, has found that companies most exposed to AI are achieving productivity growth 40% higher than those least exposed, and are raising headcount and wages faster than their less AI-intensive peers. Published June 15, the research also found a splitting labour market: some roles are being "professionalised" by AI (growing at twice the speed, with 42% higher wage growth since 2021), while others are being "democratised" (made easier, but with slower growth and flat pay). Junior roles in highly AI-exposed companies are now seven times more likely to require traditionally senior skills like leadership and strategic thinking.

Why it matters: The dominant fear, that AI adoption means job cuts, is not what the data shows for companies at the frontier of adoption. The real workforce risk may be different: a faster-than-expected compression of the career ladder, where entry-level roles demand senior-level judgment from day one, and organisations that don't rethink training and mentorship will struggle to develop the people they need.

A Black Duck Security study published in June 2026 found that 97% of developers are now using AI coding tools, with GitHub Copilot leading adoption at 83% and Claude Code at 63%. However, only one in three of the organisations those developers work for has implemented full governance frameworks covering how AI-generated code is reviewed, who owns the IP, and how security vulnerabilities in AI output are caught before they reach production. AI-generated code is being merged into live systems at scale, at companies that have not yet established the policies to manage it.

Why it matters: For any business with a software team this is an operational risk hiding in plain sight. The question is no longer whether your developers are using AI to write code; they are. The question is whether your organisation has caught up with that fact on risk, compliance, and accountability.

Since writing about using Fable 5 at work, the US government has issued an export control directive that forced Anthropic to suspend Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 globally, after the White House demanded the company eliminate all jailbreaks from the model before it could remain available. Anthropic refused, arguing that zero-jailbreak compliance is technically impossible for any frontier AI model. As of June 21, the models remain offline; enterprise customers who had not filed for refunds by June 20 lost their window to do so. Anthropic's head of international operations said on June 18 that restoration was "very confident... within days," but no date has been confirmed. Prediction markets were pricing about a 60% chance of restoration before July 1.

Why it matters: Any organisation running workflows on a single AI provider just saw that access can be cut off overnight by a government decision with no advance notice. The Fable 5 episode is a practical argument for building AI pipelines that can switch providers — or at minimum, for having a contingency plan when a tool you depend on disappears.

Thanks for reading, and see you next Thursday.

Simon,

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