Eighty percent of manufacturing leaders say they are behind their peers on AI. The math says that is impossible. So why does almost every CEO walk into a room believing the rest of the industry has already figured this out?

Bryce Carpenter, COO at Conexus Indiana, sits on top of the data that explains it. Conexus runs the Advanced Industries Council, the state's primary convening body for the 9,700 manufacturing and logistics companies that produce 37 percent of Indiana's GDP. Bryce founded the AIC in 2019 and has watched 120-plus member companies move through the AI experimentation phase in real time.

In this conversation with Harrison Painter, Bryce walks through what he is actually seeing. Why Indiana's $29 billion in 2024 manufacturing investment paired with a 1 percent drop in employment is a retirement story, not an AI displacement story. Why the average tenure inside Indiana manufacturing collapsed from 30 years to 3. How a 52-person Northeast Indiana shop grew to 106 after a single equipment investment. Why the 9,700 companies running their own boutique soft-skill development programs is the most expensive inefficiency in the state. And why he gives Indiana an A-minus on AI progress when most operators inside the state would say B at best.

If you run a 100-to-5,000-person company and you are trying to figure out where your team actually is on AI, start with the free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment at assess.launchready.ai. It takes under ten minutes and tells you exactly which level your team operates at today.

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Further. Faster.

Harrison Painter

Jay Samit has held senior roles at Sony, Universal Studios, EMI, LinkedIn, and Deloitte Digital. He has raised hundreds of millions for startups and been called on by the Pope and the President. His book "Disrupt You!" has been published in 14 languages across 140 countries.

His new book, "The Second Act Advantage," comes out May 5th. In this episode, Jay explains why entrepreneurs over 50 are three times more likely to succeed, how AI is eliminating entry-level jobs faster than anyone expected, and why purpose is the single biggest predictor of a long and healthy life.

Jay also introduces Digital J, a free AI companion that ships with the book. The first book to come with its own AI mentor.

This was a personal conversation. Jay mentioned me in "Disrupt You!" and wrote the foreword to my first book.

The Second Act Advantage is available for pre-order now https://jaysamit.com/

Take the free AI Proficiency Assessment: https://assess.launchready.aiLearn more: https://launchready.ai

AI Ready Podcast with Harrison Painter.

Further. Faster.

For the first time ever, AI skills are the hardest to find globally — beating engineering, IT, and everything else. ManpowerGroup's 2026 Talent Shortage Survey of 39,063 employers across 41 countries just made it official.

In this episode, Harrison breaks down what the data actually says, what most coverage missed, and what leaders need to do right now.

What we cover:

• Why 72% of employers worldwide can't fill roles
• AI literacy vs. AI engineering — and why both are scarce
• What Germany (83%), France (74%), and the US (69%) tell us about the global gap
• The stat almost no headline covered: human skills still top the list
• 3 lessons leaders need to act on today

Sources:

• ManpowerGroup 2026 Talent Shortage Survey
• ManpowerGroup Press Release, Feb 26 2026
• HR Dive, March 2 2026

Subscribe and leave a review if this helped you think differently about AI and your organization.

A robot vacuum just exposed 7,000 homes across 24 countries, and nobody got hacked. One guy with a PS5 controller stumbled into live camera feeds, floor plans, microphone audio, and device locations for complete strangers. All of it wide open.

This is a DJI RoMo story, but it's really a story about what happens when a capable company moves too fast into unfamiliar territory. The flaw wasn't exotic. It was a basic permission error that encryption couldn't fix.

I break down exactly what went wrong, why "encrypted" doesn't mean "safe," and what you need to start asking before you put another connected device in your home or office.

If you found this useful, subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss a first look.

Thank you for watching,

Harrison Painter

www.LaunchReadyAI.com

Sony just built a tool that can look inside any AI-generated song and tell you exactly which artists it borrowed from — down to a percentage.

Think outputs like: 30% Beatles. 10% Queen. For any AI-generated track.

Most people are reading this as a music story. I'm reading it as a preview of where every creative industry is headed. The same logic that lets Sony fingerprint an AI song is coming for AI-written copy, AI-generated images, and AI-produced video.

The wild west window is closing. Are you ready?

In this episode:
• How Sony's system works (and what happens when AI companies don't cooperate)
• Why major labels are going from victims to tollbooth operators
• What this means for solo creators and brand content teams right now.
• Three lessons for leaders navigating this shift

The question you need to answer before attribution tech lands in your industry

Lesson 1: Fighting the technology is almost always the wrong move.
Lesson 2: Attribution will reshape what AI-generated content costs. Start asking your team what your AI tools were trained on.
Lesson 3: Your authentic voice cannot be fingerprinted back to a training dataset. That is your competitive advantage.

Source: TechSpot — Sony's New System Can Identify Original Tracks Inside AI-Generated Music

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AI is already inside your brand whether you planned for it or not. Cat Holt has spent 26 years watching brands get this wrong — and she's here to break down exactly what's happening and what leaders need to do about it.

Cat is the strategic architect behind the Dr. Rick for Progressive Insurance campaign and the Founder of Coologee, a brand strategy firm helping companies navigate AI, disruption, and identity.

In this conversation, we get into what brand actually means and why it is not the same thing as marketing or advertising. We talk about what happens when a founder's personal brand overtakes the company, why OpenAI's brand seems to operate above the normal rules of reputation, and what Bud Light and Cracker Barrel teach us about the cost of getting brand evolution wrong.

Cat walks through the origin of the Dr. Rick campaign — the real insight behind it, why executives were scared to run it, and how it started as a small Facebook test before becoming Progressive's highest-performing campaign a decade later.

Then we get into AI directly: how it is being embedded into brand identity whether companies want it or not, the IP and creative ownership conversation nobody is having clearly, and why AI is still a smart intern — not a creative director.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Brand vs. marketing vs. advertising — the distinctions that actually matter
• Why brand strategy needs to start on Day 1
• The Bud Light and Cracker Barrel rebrands: what went wrong and why it was predictable
• How Elon Musk's personal brand absorbed Tesla and why it may be permanent
• Why OpenAI's brand seems untouchable
• The Dr. Rick campaign: the human insight, the fear, and the process that made it work
• What AI is doing to brand identity right now at the infrastructure level
• AI avatars, Flo from Progressive, and who actually owns the IP
• The Rembrandt slide: why you can't copy without an original
• Why human creativity is about to become more valuable, not less

Connect with Cat:

• Coologee: https://coologee.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catkolodij/

Connect With Us:

• AI Launchpad Community: http://LaunchReadyAI.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrisonpainter/

A San Francisco insider just described a city where people leave parties early to check on their AI agents, where the first thing you do in the morning is grade overnight homework your AI did while you slept, and where the new status flex is not what you built but what is working while you are sitting at dinner not working.

This is called token anxiety. And it is heading to your industry.

In this episode, Harrison breaks down Nikunj Kothari's viral post from inside the San Francisco tech scene, explains what it means for leaders outside the bubble, and delivers three takeaways you can act on before this mindset reaches your team.

Topics covered: what token anxiety actually is, the new AI-driven status culture, agents running overnight, and why burnout from too much AI capability is still burnout. Plus a personal note on why closing the laptop is now a leadership skill.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you do not miss what is next.

Spotify’s co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom dropped a bombshell during their Q4 2025 earnings call:

"Some of our best developers, some of our most senior engineers have not written a single line of code since December. They just prompt."

Crazy, right?

Check out today's AI for Everyone Daily Brief to learn more.

Enjoy!

Harrison Painter