Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
For a while this year, Stephen was the busiest he has ever been and was getting almost nothing done. He explains how AI agents that took one to three minutes per task left him with forty tabs open in his head, why a new report from inside Anthropic says he was not alone, and the simple thing that fixed it. Then a lightning round on attention, money, people and power.
In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:
- Forty tabs open. Short waits on AI agents turned into five, ten, fifteen open tasks, forgotten work and a tracking process that became a second job managing the first one. Stephen calls it the escalation from efficiency to inefficiency.
- It is not willpower. Usability research summarized by Jakob Nielsen says that past about ten seconds of waiting, people go do something else and then have to reorient.
- The outside proof. Anthropic reports that its agents sit idle around 80 percent of interactive session time waiting for a human, the share spent managing the work rose from 10 to 22 percent, meeting time is up 20 percent, and one engineer described facing an army of Claudes.
- What fixed it: speed. Much faster tools meant answers came back while he was still thinking. Fewer threads, more clarity, more depth. Fast tools are what let him be deliberate.
- Your homework. Watch the gaps, not the benchmarks. Time how long your team waits for an AI answer, and ask your leaders how many AI tasks they have open right now.
- Lightning round: an AI that opens forty tabs for you. OpenAI's GPT-6 Pro runs several agents on parts of one task. Parallel inside one task can help. Parallel across many tasks is the trap.
- Lightning round: Accenture's lunch allowance. A 29 dollar monthly Claude cap is reasonable as a first gate, as long as people learn which model fits which job.
- Lightning round: the cast, not the castle. Disney will pay about 20 million dollars for Character.AI's technology and about 180 million over three years for roughly 65 of its people.
- Lightning round: the data center with no plug. Microsoft pulled out of anchoring Nscale's site in Loughton, Essex, because grid power is not expected until the 2030s.
Sources:
- Anthropic, 16 October 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic
- TechCrunch, 17 October 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/17/anthropic-says-its-workforce-has-become-less-junior-and-is-spending-more-time-in-meetings/
- Nielsen Norman Group: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/
- OpenAI release notes, 16 October 2026: https://openai.com/products/release-notes/
- 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/accenture-tells-employees-they-can-now-spend-only-29-on-claude-per-month/
- The Next Web, 19 October 2026: https://thenextweb.com/news/disney-character-ai-staff-180m-bankruptcy-filing
- TechCrunch, 18 October 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/18/disney-agrees-to-hire-the-majority-of-character-ais-workforce/
- Reuters via Yahoo Finance, 19 October 2026: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/microsoft-pulls-uk-nscale-data-135037959.html
The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.
