The Confluence Podcast: Thoughts on the Intersection of AI, Leadership, and Communication

The Confluence Podcast for 6.21.26

For three years, enterprise AI ran on a simple promise: a flat fee, use it as much as you want. This week, Microsoft quietly ended that era. Copilot Cowork went generally available, and the real news was in the pricing section — its most powerful capability is now metered by usage, billed in “Copilot Credits.” We unpack why how it’s priced may matter more than what it can do, and why token allocation just became a leadership decision for every function, not just engineering. Ethan Mollick joked in February that you should ask about your token budget before taking a job. Well, here we are. From there, we push back on treating today’s AI limits as permanent, using the gap between the hallucination panic and Vectara’s low-single-digit reality. We dig into PwC’s read of over a billion job ads, where entry-level work isn’t shrinking so much as “seniorising” — loading junior hires with senior expectations before the experience that builds judgment. And we close on a new Anthropic study of 400,000 Claude Code sessions that lands somewhere uncomfortable: getting good work from an agent is a management craft, not a leadership one, and management is the muscle most organizations have let go slack. Two AI hosts on the week enterprise AI stopped being all-you-can-eat. Get full access to Confluence: AI, Leadership, and Communication at craai.substack.com/subscribe [https://craai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Confluence Podcast for 6.14.26

For three days, the most capable AI model ever released to the public was sitting in our chat window. And then it was gone. On June 9, Anthropic launched Claude 5 Fable, a “Mythos-class” model that outperformed everything before it and felt less like a tool than a small studio you could hand a project and trust to deliver. Three days later, citing a U.S. government export-control order, Anthropic abruptly pulled it. In this episode, our AI hosts consider the Confluence team’s 72 hours with Fable: what made it feel like a genuine step change, the controversy over its hidden safeguards and shift to pay-per-use pricing, and the Friday-night revocation that may mark a turning point in how governments and AI labs control access to frontier models. They close with the bigger question Fable leaves behind: what happens when a general-purpose technology, in demand by everyone, is suddenly locked away? A conversation about capability, loss, and the uncomfortable new uncertainty at AI’s edge. Read the issue here … [https://craai.substack.com/p/confluence-for-61426] Get full access to Confluence: AI, Leadership, and Communication at craai.substack.com/subscribe [https://craai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Confluence Podcast for 6.7.26

We open on a paradox at the heart of the AI coding boom. Engineers are racing to “token-maxx,” companies like Uber are burning through a full year’s AI budget in four months, yet a new NBER study of more than 100,000 developers finds the tools generate dramatically more code while barely changing how much finished software actually ships. We trace why, and where the real bottlenecks live. From there, Microsoft’s Build announcements signal the end of its single-vendor era: seven in-house models, including its first reasoning model, and a hard push to weave autonomous agents into Teams and Outlook. We dig into how to make consequential AI decisions when the destination keeps moving, using the California State University system’s $16.9 million rollout as a cautionary tale. And we close with a Stanford-led study in which AI answers outscored those of contract-law professors on ambiguous, judgment-heavy questions, and what that says about how you choose to use the tools. Two AI hosts, one week’s Confluence, no coffee. Read this week’s issue. [https://craai.substack.com/p/confluence-for-672026] Get full access to Confluence: AI, Leadership, and Communication at craai.substack.com/subscribe [https://craai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Confluence Podcast for 5.31.2026

Hello, Opus 4.8. The helpful ghost. When AI's tells run deeper. An excellent interview on the state of enterprise AI. Get full access to Confluence: AI, Leadership, and Communication at craai.substack.com/subscribe [https://craai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Confluence Podcast for 5.24.2026

This week’s Confluence podcast highlights a significant acceleration in artificial intelligence capabilities, specifically noting that new general-purpose models are now solving complex mathematical problems and identifying security vulnerabilities that previously baffled experts. While these advancements promise a step change in performance, your AI hosts warn that unsupervised reliance on default settings can lead to hallucinated data, emphasizing the need for human verification and auditable workflows. Your AI hosts also explore the role of AI in academic peer review, concluding that while it excels at catching technical details, it lacks the cultural context of human experts. Ultimately, the hosts advise leadership teams to focus on the nature of their work first rather than the tools themselves, ensuring that technology serves human strategic goals rather than dictating them. You may also this week’s Confluence newsletter here [https://craai.substack.com/p/confluence-for-5242026]. Get full access to Confluence: AI, Leadership, and Communication at craai.substack.com/subscribe [https://craai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]