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Matt Fitzpatrick is the CEO of Invisible Technologies, an AI platform used to improve models for more than 80% of the world’s leading AI companies, including Microsoft, AWS, and Cohere. The company has raised $100 million and scaled to $134 million in revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally.

Before joining Invisible, Matt was the Global Head of QuantumBlack Labs at McKinsey, where he led large-scale AI and data engineering efforts and helped enterprises move from experimentation to production.

In this episode, Matt draws on years spent inside enterprise AI deployments to challenge the gap between model progress and real-world adoption, and to explain why most organizations still struggle to turn AI into measurable business outcomes.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why enterprise AI adoption lags far behind model performance improvements, and why most organizations still struggle to turn technical progress into real business impact
• The hidden role of messy, fragmented legacy data, and why decades of accumulated systems make it nearly impossible to deploy reliable AI at scale
• Why defining “good” output in generative AI is far harder than expected, and how unclear standards stall deployment across high-stakes enterprise workflows
• The case for redesigning workflows from scratch, and why layering AI on top of existing processes fails to create meaningful efficiency gains
• Why most AI initiatives fail due to lack of business ownership, and how separating technology teams from operators prevents projects from reaching production
• How fear-driven narratives about job loss are slowing adoption, and why AI is more likely to shift work toward higher-value tasks than eliminate roles entirely

Explore this conversation:

00:00 Intro and Fun Fact

03:57 Matt Fitzpatrick's Path From McKinsey to Invisible Technologies

09:56 Scaling Enterprise AI with Modular Platforms and Clean Data

12:44 The Crucial Role of Expert Human Feedback in Model Training

17:56 Why 95% of Enterprise AI Projects Never Reach Production

21:38 The Missing Link: Why True AI Transformation Requires Business Ownership

26:54 Overcoming AI Fear and the Reality of Jevons Paradox

32:24 Responsible AI: Governing Outcomes Over Technology

39:05 The Future of Work: Moving From Administration to Innovation

44:12 Where to Connect with Matt Fitzpatrick and Invisible Technologies

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn
• AI fun fact article
• On How Allison Baum Gates Reveals the Secrets to a Successful VC Career

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Your employees are already ahead of you on AI. The data is in and the question is no longer whether this is happening, but what leaders choose to do about it.

That is one of the key findings from Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, and it is the starting point for this week's special episode. PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin sits down with Matt Firestone, General Manager at Microsoft leading product marketing for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agents, to unpack what trillions of anonymized signals across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem reveal about how AI is actually changing work right now.

What pairing telemetry with survey responses and in-house research reveals about the gap between where employees actually are and where their organizations think they are is striking. And the numbers on how organizations reward, or fail to reward, the people already doing this work will make most leaders uncomfortable. The bottleneck, it turns out, isn't where most people expect it.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why the job of a leader has shifted from designing transformation strategy to changing systems and culture
• How the report reframes agentic AI collaboration, not as a threat to human agency, but as an expansion of it
• What "frontier firms" and "frontier professionals" actually means, and why it's a mental model and rallying cry, not a marketing term
• How building in the open, leaders experimenting visibly and removing the stigma of getting things wrong, is one of the most quantifiably impactful things a manager can do
• Why agent adoption on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is growing at a rate that will surprise even the optimists

Explore this conversation:

00:00 Intro

01:14 Inside Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index

02:22 Telemetry, Not Just Surveys: What the Data Reveal

03:09 Employees Are Ahead of Their Managers on Agentic AI

04:37 The Transformation Paradox and Broken Reward Systems

06:15 More Agentic AI, More Human Agency: The 49% Finding

09:28 How Leaders Should Respond: Build in the Open

11:26 Safety, Trust, and Responsible AI at Microsoft Scale

13:36 Building a Manager Equity Dashboard in 25 Minutes with Copilot

17:31 What Frontier Firms and Frontier Professionals Actually Do

20:04 AI, Toil, and the Fear of Becoming Obsolete

22:52 The 1 Billion Agents Prediction and What Comes Next

Resources

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
• Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index

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Emmanuel Daniel is an author, advisor, and global thought leader on geopolitics, the future of finance, and their intersection with business and society.

As the founder of the research and consulting house TAB Global and a recognized top 10 global influencer in the Fintech Power50, Emmanuel has spent decades looking under the hood of the global economy to understand how nations and institutions truly interact.

In this episode, Emmanuel draws on 25 years of building relationships with central bankers, policymakers, and fintech leaders across 157 countries to make the case that the disruption most financial institutions are bracing for is not the one that is actually coming, and that the leaders asking the wrong questions today will have no runway left when the real inflection point hits.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why financial markets distracted everyone from the real AI disruption, and what happens to large organizations when agentic AI finally reaches the Internet of Things.
• Why the end user no longer interacts with your bank's app directly, and what that means for every institution investing in UX.
• Why Emmanuel argues that debt is the economy, and why the conversation about U.S. debt-to-GDP is asking the wrong question entirely.
• Why state-promoted digital currencies are structurally designed to fail, and what China's eCNY after 8 years in pilot reveals about the limits of government-driven innovation.
• Why stablecoins have enabled a parallel global economy that traditional banking missed, and what that signals for the institutions still holding the rails.
• Why originality of thought is the one human capability AI cannot replace, and why Emmanuel says AI is of no use to you if you cannot form the right questions yourself.

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Emmanuel on LinkedIn
• AI fun fact article
• On How AI Voice Assistants Will Make Meetings More Productive
• Other episodes mentioned:
  • 344: Can Decentralized AI Fix Banking? Crypto, Brain OS, and the Future of Finance with Paolo Ardoino, Tether CEO
  • 358: Inside Mastercard’s AI Adoption Journey: CTO George Maddaloni on Building Trust, Detecting Fraud, and the Future of Payments