David Schmidt

What I Learned at CES... and the 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐍𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲’𝐬 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭: CES is loud. But the real signal wasn’t on stage. It showed up in hallways, bars, DMs, and quiet demos. That’s where people dropped the script and talked honestly about what’s not working. There’s a pattern I couldn’t ignore: - If ideas aren’t being shared privately, they’re not landing. - Attention has become the rarest resource in business. AI wins by amplifying thinking, not replacing it. - And community has shifted from a brand play to a retention strategy. 2026 𝐢𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬. 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬. It's what Bhargav Patel has been saying all along. Which meant for me, less pitch, more listening. Less scale-chasing. More substance. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐈 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤.

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One of the boldest product launches in tech started with a fake protest. February 22, 2000. Protestors marched outside the Siebel User Conference in San Francisco, chanting for the "End of Software." Cameras from Channel 22 rushed in to cover the chaos. Except none of it was real. The protestors were actors. The news crew was fake. And the message? Completely intentional. It was guerrilla marketing pulled off by a then-little-known startup called Salesforce. Their idea: CRM should live on the internet, not in bulky on-prem installs. Back then, it was radical. The market was ruled by legacy giants with complex, expensive systems. Salesforce didn't have deep features or broad credibility. But they had clarity. They knew people weren't just buying software. They were buying simplicity. Speed. Freedom from the mess of enterprise sprawl. The protest worked. It cut through noise. It told a story people instantly understood. That's the power of brand storytelling in B2B. When the product is abstract and the value is invisible, the story is the bridge. Is your brand just explaining a product? Or is it showing customers the future they actually want?

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Nobody is telling the truth about how disruptive this is going to be. Maybe since I’m ‘unaffiliated’ for now, I can. 👀 AI isn’t just coming for workflows. It’s coming for the foundations of knowledge work — and for the identities built on it. For CMOs and marketing leaders, this hits hard. For years, we’ve found meaning in our playbooks and how we execute. Now, much of that is being automated, flattened, or redefined in real time. And here’s the part we’re not talking about enough: This isn’t just a professional disruption. It’s a personal one. To survive it — let alone lead through it and flourish — we can’t keep pushing at the same velocity, hoping to outrun the change. We need to slow down. Reground. Rebuild. That means investing differently: Mind – Slowing down to build emotional resilience in a time of accelerated everything. Learning to lead from clarity, not reaction. Body – Remembering we’re not brains on a stick. Stewarding our embodied experience through sleep, movement, and nourishment — so we can actually sustain the work. Soul – Recognizing that our sense of identity is often wrapped up in our work — and that AI will inevitably challenge how we define purpose and value. This season demands we examine those foundations, and do so in community, not isolation. This is the real work of leadership in the Intelligence Age. Not just learning to prompt better. But learning to stay human — when everything else is speeding up.

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I've spent about a decade deeply understanding Apple's approach to product design, usability and all the things since spending time at Flurry Analytics, which saw app usage **every day** on 2 billion smartphones, most of them iPhones. I had unusual access, and it was pretty cool if I'm being honest. Anyway, their approach to layering in AI is very "Apple" which means they have to consider myriad use cases on a massive existing multi-product surface area and they will not rush into it. Remember, Apple is a hardware company first which means they "measure twice and cut once" (maybe even three times). In complex production with massive supply chains, you're working multiple years out, so little problems become existential problems. For people who do "run-and-gun" fast cycle iterative software work, it's very, very different. So it doesn't surprise me that they're first looking for the intersections where AI can add outsized, obvious value and layering those experiences, first, in a slow and measured way. At the same time, a hardware-first company, they are not going to have the leading AI lab building the most cutting edge models. In the early days of AI, they will need that trust, however, as users are experiencing what LLMs can do for the first time through Apple products. And that experience needs to deliver.

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Meta’s Apple-grab is in full swing. Meta is siphoning Apple’s core talent at a scale and concentration unprecedented in Big Tech. The resulting talent flow concentrated in AI, design, and robotics is reshaping Meta into a company with Apple-grade device sensibilities, hardware craftsmanship, and long-cycle engineering discipline. This is Apple’s playbook, inverted and weaponized. • Talent Gravity Shift: Meta is absorbing Apple’s most experienced operators — from COO-track leaders to senior AI researchers — giving Meta institutional knowledge it never accumulated organically. • Design DNA Transfer: Ex-Apple designers like Alan Dye and others are injecting Apple’s obsessive interface and hardware sensibilities into Meta’s product culture, historically its weakest muscle. • AI & Robotics Upgrade: Meta is acquiring Apple’s robotics, machine-learning, and embodied-AI engineers, accelerating its shift from social media to hardware-anchored AI platforms. • Cultural Importation: Apple veterans bring a “finished product, end-to-end ownership” mindset Meta never mastered — raising the ceiling on Meta’s device execution and long-term roadmap. • Strategic Realignment: Poaching Apple isn’t opportunistic; it’s Zuck’s deliberate strategy to rebuild Meta into the next hardware-AI giant — exactly at the moment Apple is structurally weakest. Meta is not just hiring Apple people, it is importing Apple’s organizational memory, device craft, and long-cycle engineering discipline. Apple’s attrition becomes Meta’s capability expansion. If current trends persist, Meta’s next wave of devices, glasses, wearables, embodied AI will look less like Meta 1.0 and more like Apple, with an AI-native core.

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My thoughts on the Great Waymo Outage and what it means for human acceptance of AI/technology. Two quick hits. Waymo needs a more graceful failure mode. Just pulling to the roadside might work in a normal power outage but not in, say, a wildfire or in the aftermath of a quake when people need to get out of harm's way. People also need to reconcile that the big, scary outages are easy to fixate on but mask the overall higher levels of safety and reliability we will be seeing from mature (note the word) AI systems. https://lnkd.in/gwnUA_hJ

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Tristan Harris is a former Google design ethicist and leading voice from Netflix’s The Social Dilemma. He is also co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, where he advises policymakers, tech leaders, and the public on the risks of AI, algorithmic manipulation, and the global race toward AGI. I suggest you check out his most recent interview with Steven Bartlett, one of my favorite interviewers (first comment below). He explains: ◼️How AI could trigger a global collapse by 2027 if left unchecked ◼️How AI will take 99% of jobs and collapse key industries by 2030 ◼️Why top tech CEOs are quietly meeting to prepare for AI-triggered chaos ◼️How algorithms are hijacking human attention, behavior, and free will ◼️The real reason governments are afraid to regulate OpenAI and Google #AI #AGI

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62% of U.S. adults didn't buy anything online until 2020. That stat from Forrester still blows my mind. Not because it was surprising at the time. But because of what it tells us about adoption curves. Nick Paladino and I re-released our most downloaded episode of the past year on The Frictionless Experience this week. It's a conversation with Jean-Louis Hé from YSL Beauty that we originally published in April 2024. We were talking about crypto and NFTs as "emerging tech" back then. Now AI has completely taken over that conversation. Jean-Louis made a point that aged really well. The friction to buy crypto is brutal. Wallets, seed phrases, scam airdrops, obscure coins on websites you're not sure are real. Meanwhile, our banking system removed all that friction over decades. AI doesn't have the same problem. It's accessible. You can use it today without creating a wallet or converting dollars to something else. That proximity to adoption might be the whole ballgame. Listening back, I'm struck by how fast this industry moves. Two years ago we were asking "will blockchain change everything?"  Now we're asking the same question about AI. What will we be asking two years from now?

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Virtuall's AI OS 3.0 just went live, introducing #Nyx, your AI Art Director (beta). This is a step closer to frictionless creation, removing blockers like "Where to start", "What format to use for this campaign", generating consistent, endless video following a storyline, etc. a bit like Lovable but for creatives. ;) #creativeAIOS #studio #ai #workflow

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In partnership with NVE Experience Agency, Cognition Interactive recently made a "Tech on the Go" iPad app for Waymo demonstrating the Waymo Driver's driving scenarios and sensors, featuring video, interactive 3D models, and augmented reality. The interactive experience was featured at Open Streets DC. With Kyle Ruebsamen, Alana Balagot, Liliana Sampaio, Talia Halevy and Paul Rudolph

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Meet Jennifer Pinter✨, Chief Experience Officer at Kapta. My co-founder, Rishabh Pugalia, had a chance to catch up with her in SF last month. In this 1-minute clip, she shares how AI disrupted their day-to-day operations, decision flows, and long-term strategy.

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Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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