As the last of the summer vacation rotations begin, there is a brief calm before the fall rush and its push for next year's planning. Late summer is often a time when our clients find themselves thinking beyond "fixing the now" and drifting to bigger questions.

We find these provocations often find their way into Executive Team offsite agendas and leadership gatherings in the new year, so take a moment perhaps between meetings, or swings on a hammock, to let your mind wander.

Here are some of the summer musings we've been hearing by the poolside this August:

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Four late summer musings before the autumn strat-plan storm

MUSING 1

Where are people approaching AI with radical optimism vs. fear?

"In the Middle East, there is a remarkable emphasis on using AI to foster innovation and creative authorship," says Adrienne Matthews, Partner in the United Arab Emirates. "For example, the American University of Beirut is thinking deeply about empowering its students to supercharge the creative economy. They're aiming to create unique, regionally-sensitive approaches—ones that transcend the traditional Western datasets that make up the dominant AI models."

To emphasize the point, the UAE has become the first country to offer free access to ChatGPT Plus for all residents as part of a strategic AI partnership with OpenAI. One key rationale for the move is that it will enable businesses to tailor AI systems to their specific needs and languages. It's an atmosphere in "stark contrast to the dominant 'labor optimization' and 'cost efficiency' conversations in the West," says Matthews.

MUSING 2

How can you program agentic AI when most leaders don't know what people's jobs are?

"Unclear expectations are paralyzing employees, and by extension, their companies," says Managing Partner Jason Baer. "This lack of clarity also undercuts how effectively organizations can prompt AI. The leaders making progress are the ones bold enough to set a clear vision amid uncertainty and to cascade that vision into the day-to-day roles of teams and individuals."

A recent Gallup study noted a dramatic decrease in the percentage of American workers who feel that they fully understand their roles and responsibilities at work, from 55 percent before the pandemic down to 44 percent in 2024. That presents major problems not just for employees and employers, but also for the prospects of agentic AI. If you don't fully understand what can be automated, what can you automate?

MUSING 3

What does connection look like in the context of increasingly distributed workplaces?

"We are in a loneliness epidemic, especially at work, and yet people are desperate to gather," shared NBCUniversal Chief Talent Officer Cara Stein.

Five years after the COVID pandemic, return-to-office mandates are still dominating US headlines and 79 percent of knowledge workers report experiencing loneliness at work, with those who work extensively with AI report feeling most affected. Yet restaurants are full, concerts are sold out, and international travel rates are booming. People want to gather, just not at work.

The concept of the "third place," a social space separate from both home and work, is undergoing a reimagining due to demand. Starbucks, along with libraries, parks, and other public spaces, are vying to dominate that niche. What can modern work learn from how people are gathering today, especially with offsites and return-to-office commitments on the horizon?

In this article, published at the height of RTO mandates, Partner Carina Cortese states: "Culture requires strong bonds between people, and proximity doesn't automatically equate to connection." The shifts in the last two years only underscore that tension. She notes, "The work of translating how you used to work into this new reality is hard. It's not necessarily intuitive to translate how you used to lead teams in an office to how you now lead teams across in person, remote, hybrid and asynchronous moments. But the old concept of the office is gone, and it's going to fall on leaders to construct new ways to work together."

MUSING 4

How can AI reduce fear and create meaningful value at the same time?

"We are getting a lot of resistance internally because AI hits at the core of our business," shared the CMO of a legal organization. "Things shifted when a colleague suggested we find an opportunity where we felt value is being left on the table but no one has the time to pursue it. We put an AI Agent on it as an experiment, and it worked. Suddenly we were creating high-profit, net-new revenue without human involvement."

That may be the secret to building belief and adoption when fear and uncertainty in the US is so high. A recent Reuters poll shared that 71 percent of respondents said they were concerned that "too many people would be put out of work permanently." Instead, "direct AI at what no one has time to do," says CEO Jessica Orkin. "Ask yourself: where are the pockets of unaddressed value that AI could be pointed at to create net-new value?" There's especially great opportunity to pass off high-risk, high-reward work onto these models. Tasks and ideas that might only have a five percent chance of success would be a lousy return on investment for a person. For AI, that's a perfect opportunity.

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Dispatches from the Collective delivers insights from SYPartners' work through human anecdotes, practical tips, and beautiful questions designed to help C-suite leaders navigate the unknown and act with purpose—shared in the spirit of helping all of us lead in a better way.

SYPartners is a consultancy that partners with clients at their critical turning points to design new possibilities for impact, create paths for long-term value, and build cultures of competitive advantage. For more than 30 years, we've helped transform some of the world's most iconic organizations by fusing strategy and design.