August 14, 2026: I look at OpenAI&#x27;s own study on how companies use ChatGPT at work and why usage volume is not the same thing as ROI. Then I get into the Wall Street Journal&#x27;s &quot;jobless boom&quot; argument and why companies may be growing without hiring for reasons beyond AI. Finally, I unpack Elon Musk telling SpaceX employees they will be Grok&#x27;s &quot;parents&quot; because the AI will be trained on their work, knowledge, and contributions.

OpenAI's AI ROI Problem, Wall Street's Jobless Boom, &amp; Elon Musk Calls Workers Grok's Parents

Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Something weird appears to be happening in the American economy right now, and most people are explaining it wrong or are not talking about it at all. And so what we see is that company profits are climbing, the stock market is at record highs, businesses across all kinds of industries are reporting strong demand, and from all of that, almost nobody is hiring. Now, the easy explanation for all this is, well, you know, AI is taking everybody's jobs, and therefore these companies are not hiring.

And this is the version that tends to spread across X and across social media, but I don't think this is actually the full story. And I think this week, specifically today, we got a few pieces of evidence that make this particular narrative and this particular story a little bit harder to tell. And they actually came from places that you wouldn't expect. So I'm not sure how many of you actually saw this, but OpenAI, I believe it was yesterday or the day before,

they published a 69-page study on how companies are actually using ChatGPT at work. And buried in the fine print, I think it was a table on page 35, is a finding that their sales team, I would imagine, is probably not super happy with. And I'll get into exactly what that was in just a minute. The second piece of evidence here came from a Wall Street Journal's chief economics commentator.

He looked at this same jobless economy, and he concluded that AI is not the main thing driving it. And then there's Elon Musk, who had a, I don't want to say creepy, but a slightly interesting way to talk about AI with his employees.

OpenAI's AI ROI Problem, Wall Street's Jobless Boom, & Elon Musk Calls Workers Grok's Parents

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

OpenAI's AI ROI Problem, Wall Street's Jobless Boom, &amp; Elon Musk Calls Workers Grok's Parents

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

OpenAI's AI ROI Problem, Wall Street's Jobless Boom, & Elon Musk Calls Workers Grok's Parents

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.