📬 A focused Sunday briefing to complement your regular issues.

⏱ 4-min read

^{Issue # 45}

Each Sunday, we cut through the noise to surface the AI signals that actually matter for builders, operators, and career-minded professionals.

Inside this issue:

Featured Spotlight: McKinsey says agentic AI is creating four new service roles.
New This Week: Meta and Microsoft cut jobs while spending bigger on AI.
Builder Signal: Google’s AI Agents Challenge offers cash, cloud credits, and a path to Marketplace.

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McKinsey surveyed 200 C-suite execs. The finding: 80%+ are running agentic AI pilots. Half plan scaled deployments within six months.

The tension: core IT services could shrink 20 to 30%. But new agentic spending could unlock $100B to $400B by 2030.

Four roles are emerging:

So what, for builders: The question isn't whether agentic AI disrupts your business. It's which role you're building toward.

Read the full McKinsey report →

Manual marketing had a good run.

But the teams winning right now aren't briefing, approving, and repeating. They're directing AI agents that execute the whole strategy for them.

The Agentic Marketing Summit (May 4–8) is a free, five-day event that shows you exactly how it works in practice. Not theory. Not a PDF checklist. Step-by-step insight to help you become an expert in AI marketing agents.

Hosted by 3x Inc 5000 founder Manick Bhan alongside the sharpest minds in the marketing world today.

The era of doing it yourself is over!

Join Free Today!

For builders and operators who want exposure to applied AI, infrastructure, and real-world systems.

📌 AIM 2026 | San Francisco | April 27 – 29
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning from researchers and industry leaders.

📌 ODSC AI East 2026 | Boston | April 28 – 30
Hands-on, production-ready AI and data science with deep dives into LLMs, generative AI, and MLOps.

📌 AI Dev 26 x SF | San Francisco | April 28 – 29
A developer-focused event on agentic AI, multimodal systems, and real-world AI deployment.

📌 TiEcon 2026 | California | April 29 – May 01
Where AI, entrepreneurship, and innovation meet across founders, investors, and operators.

📌 Enterprise AI Innovation Summit | Virtual | April 29
How enterprises move from AI experimentation to scalable business impact.

Meta is cutting roughly 10% of its global workforce starting May 20 and canceling 6,000 open roles. Microsoft is targeting 7% of U.S. employees. Both companies are posting record revenues.

The pattern is clear. Headcount down. AI spending up. Tech leaders are betting that leaner teams powered by AI agents can do more with fewer people.

The counter argument. U.S. employment is near all-time highs, and 640,000 new AI related roles have been created since 2023. The jobs aren't disappearing. They're shifting.

So what, for builders: The companies spending the most on AI are also cutting the most people. Whether that means AI is replacing jobs or reshaping them depends on which side of the skill gap you're on.

MCPs give your agents access to information, not understanding. The teams pulling ahead are using a context engine to give agents the right context for every task, so they stay on track without the set up tax or the correction loops. Join live on May 6 (FREE) to see how.

Register now

For professionals building fluency, not just familiarity.

🎓 [Intermediate] Manage Agents with AWS Agent Registry
Learn how to govern, organize, and manage AI agents at scale across the enterprise.

🎓 [Intermediate] Building Multimodal Data Pipelines
Learn how to process text, images, audio, and video for advanced AI workflows.

🎓 [Beginner] Drive Business Value with AI Solutions
Explore how to align AI initiatives with real business goals and measurable outcomes.

🎓 [Beginner–Intermediate] Building with the Claude API
Learn how to build AI applications with Claude using prompt design, tools, and agent workflows.

Google just opened an AI agent challenge, and every eligible startup gets $500 in Google Cloud credits just for registering.

Three tracks:

$60K cash + $37.5K in cloud credits. Winners get VIP access to a Google event and virtual sessions with Addy Osmani and Google DeepMind experts.

Why this stands out: Track 3 gives you a direct path to listing on Google Cloud Marketplace distribution most startups can't buy.

Deadline: June 5, 2026.

Apply now →

For builders, engineers, and leaders working on real-world AI systems.

👩‍💻 Staff AI Engineer | Hybrid, Palo Alto
Lead the architecture of production AI systems, RAG pipelines, and agent workflows.

👩‍💻 AI Support Engineer (OpenAI) | San Francisco
Help customers solve technical issues and improve adoption of OpenAI platforms.

👩‍💻 Member of Technical Staff – Multimodal Understanding (xAI) | Palo Alto
Build AI systems that reason across text, images, audio, and video.

Build an MBA-caliber network and earn a Wharton Online certificate in 8 weeks. Join the next Private Equity Certificate Program starting June 8. 

Use code SAVE300 to save $300 on tuition.

Explore the Program

The roles are shifting. The ones who move first get to choose where they land.

If this week’s issue helped you, forward it to one person who’d love faster smarter workflows.