The AI No-Show
While Oracle fires 30,000 people to fund AI data centers, fake singers colonize the iTunes charts, and China moves to regulate virtual humans out of existence
Dear Friend,
I honestly don’t even know where to begin – so much stuff is happening in the world right now; it truly is a whirlwind. From your usual (over) dose of AI, to geopolitics – but also a plethora of wild, weird, and wonderful weak signals… Like the bike bell which cleverly defeats the noise-cancelling technology of a pedestrian’s earbuds. Or AI-singers capturing the top spots in the iTunes charts (now, remember – this is iTunes, the $0.99 a song download store, which makes that whole story even more bizarre). Dig into today’s Briefing – the results from this week’s web explorations will keep you busy.
P.S. In case you missed it – I built on Kacee’s excellent post in the last radical Briefing on “Vibe Coding Our Way to 70%” in a LinkedIn post.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
The AI Quiet Quitters. Shadow AI was the story for a while – workers sneaking ChatGPT past IT, doing in minutes what used to take hours, running an underground productivity movement from their personal accounts (or simply freeing up more time to watch TikTok). Management called it a governance problem. Workers called it getting the job done. It felt, in a strange way, like good news (just like the good old days when we all brought our personal Dropbox accounts to the workplace as we were sick and tired of 1980s SharePoint).
That era has quietly ended. A new global survey of 3,750 executives and employees across 14 countries finds that more than 54% of workers bypassed their company’s AI tools in the past 30 days and completed the work manually instead – and another 33% haven’t used AI at all. Eight in ten enterprise workers are avoiding the technology their employers are spending record sums to deploy. Shadow AI has become the AI no-show show.
Now the data tells a different story. The tool that workers once raced to adopt covertly has become, for a large and growing share of the workforce, the tool they’ve stopped using altogether. Not because it doesn’t work. Because they’re afraid of what happens when it works too well.
The piece also surfaces a huge trust gap: only 9% of workers trust AI for complex, business-critical decisions, compared to 61% of executives – a 52-point chasm. Executives and employees are, as the report puts it, describing fundamentally different companies. The fear of obsolescence – FOBO, fear of becoming obsolete – has apparently crossed the threshold from anxiety into active avoidance. Which is, if you think about it, a perfectly rational response to a completely irrational situation.
━━━━━
China Is Coming for You, Lil Miquela. If you know us, you know that we’ve been talking about virtual humans (and more specifically, virtual influencers) for a long time now. Our particular example was always Miquela Sousa, a virtual influencer created by the LA-based design agency Brud. Our particular fascination with Miquela and her brothers and sisters centers around the fact that she never ages, never gets sick, never has a bad hair day, travels anywhere, and works 24/7 without a break. Since we talked about her in 2017, she was joined by an ever-expanding family of virtual humans. Now China is closing in on them:
The Cyberspace Administration of China’s proposed rules would require prominent “digital human” labels on all virtual human content and prohibit digital humans from providing “virtual intimate relationships” to those under 18, according to rules published for public comment until May 6.
and
“The governance of digital virtual humans is no longer merely an issue of industry norms; rather, it has become a strategic scientific problem that concerns the security of the cyberspace, public interests, and the high-quality development of the digital economy,” it added.
━━━━━
Digital Transformation is (Finally) Dead. For twenty years, the world operated on a simple principle: buy standard software, don’t build. The logic made sense, as building was insanely expensive, risky, and slow. The result was highly standardized systems (well hello, SAP!) which we had to stretch well beyond what they were designed for, patch the gaps with middleware, hire consultants to integrate the integrators, and call the whole messy pile “transformation.”
This long piece by EY’s Colm Sparks-Austin makes the case that the economics have fundamentally flipped. AI and modern dev tools have made engineering capacity abundant. The constraint is no longer “can we build this?” It’s “do we know what to build and why?” Colm’s argument is sharp – treat the core (ERP, system of record) as the skeleton: rigid, compliance-bearing, changed rarely. And treat the edge – the customer-facing layer, the last mile – as tissue: built to regenerate when the market shifts.
Standardization is no longer a safety net. It is a ceiling.
The piece is long, but worth your time – especially if you work with or inside large enterprises still debating whether to “buy or build.” That debate is over.
What We Are Reading
Is AI Going to Turn Us All Into Middle Managers? Two of our favorite people, Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale, just gave one of the sharpest takes we’ve heard on AI, management, and the future of work. Go find their Galaxy Brain conversation. @Jane
Crypto Investment Scams Were the Most Costly Type of Fraud in the U.S. in 2025 Investment fraud, specifically crypto investment scams, accounted for 49% of all cyber-related complaints in 2025 to the FBI. @Mafe
AI Fatigue Is Real and Nobody Talks About It The real value is in sustainable output, and learning to work – sustainably – on new rhythms will be a significant piece of the AI transformation puzzle. @Jeffrey
When Silos Hinder Innovation – and When They Can Help Rethinking the innovation dogma… silos aren’t always the enemy; sometimes they can spark the best ideas. @Kacee
Are We Idiocracy Yet? Remember Mike Judge’s masterpiece, Idiocracy? If you have ever asked yourself how far the movie is from today’s reality – here is your answer. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
👨🏼💻 In the same vein as my comment on Kacee’s post from last week’s radical Briefing (see above), a leader at the global consulting firm EY wrote, “Why engineering replaces transformation as the engine of growth.” It’s worth a read.
🕵🏼♂️ The journalist who uncovered the Theranos scandal is behind the (maybe) next big unveil: Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, might have been found.
💻 Here’s a fun anecdote – as the world, once again, seems to be obsessed with LOC (lines of code) as a productivity metric, legendary software developer Bill Atkinson recalls delivering -2,000 lines of code to Apple.
🧑🏼🏫 Some things you just can’t make up: Students record their professors’ lecture, feed it into a speech-to-text AI, to then feed it into an LLM, to then ask/comment/respond to their teacher – in his tone and style (as the AI mimics the import).
🤥 Claude (the AI model) might be a little confused as to who said what: Claude mixes up who said what.
🎙️ The fake singers are coming – and they are coming for your top spots on the charts: iTunes takeover by fake AI singer “Eddie Dalton” – now occupies eleven spots on singles chart, number 3 on albums chart.
🤔 Take headlines like these with a huge grain of salt: “AI models will secretly scheme to protect other AI models from being shut down, researchers find.” Here is the study in question – and you shouldn’t be too surprised about the result, knowing that AI models are modelling their training data.
🔮 On the topic of predicting the future (when it comes to AI), here is the latest update from the folks at the AI Futures Project (yes, those were the folks who did the very optimistic/accelerated AI 2027 forecast).
🤷🏼 Ethan Mollick, the Wharton School professor who coined the term “jagged frontier” in his assessment of LLMs and their capabilities, makes the argument that the IT department is where AI goes to die.
🤳🏼 Take their phones away from them, and the kids will be fine! Well, not so fast… Australia’s teen social media ban is a flop. But there’s no joy in ‘I told you so’
🪫 The AI wars might be won over energy, not compute: Half of planned US data center builds have been delayed or canceled, growth limited by shortages of power infrastructure and parts from China – the AI build-out flips the breakers
👨🏼💼 Fire the people, save money, build AI data centers: Oracle’s 30,000 employee layoffs: Inside the $2.1 billion restructuring fueling a $156 billion AI data center bet.
⚡ Energy markets are turning very, very weird with the rise of renewables: Germany power prices turn deeply negative on renewables surge.
🚲 Signs of the times: A bicycle bell that outsmarts even smart headphones.
🪖 Talking about the future of warfare: Iran threatens “complete and utter annihilation” of OpenAI’s $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi – regime posts video with satellite imagery of ChatGPT-maker’s premier 1GW data center
💼 Surprised is no one: Employers are using your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you’ll accept (but then, employees also write their resumes and cover letters using AI, cheat on tests using AI, etc.)
🧑🏼🚀 Just in time, as Artemis is doing its moon thing – calculate your cosmic distance from the day you were born.
🌘 Talking about the moon – this is as nerdy as it gets: The rebuilding of the Apollo guidance computer in glorious detail.
🌈 The Weather Channel goes full retro with their neat, new retrocast feature.
🚉 Can you identify each line on the London Underground by sound? Try it!
👨🏼🎨 The amazing art that went into the special effects for the Luc Besson movie The Fifth Element. Stunning.
↗ Dive into the deep end: Access our complete collection of 2,700+ radical links.
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.