It's official. I am on @substack now. You can subscribe to it here shama.substack.com/

Do not use your name as handle for @bot. It's going to get very confusing. Use an agentic assistant name so when it's signing up for things or confirming things for you - there is no confusion.

This could usher in the next great renaissance for small businesses, and @Shopify is extremely well positioned. People bought from Amazon because it was the least amount of friction. Now you can support any business that you actually want with the same (greater?) level of ease.

Everyone's asking if AI is moving too fast. Most leaders haven't even stopped typing. On our “How Leadership Is Being Rewritten" panel at Advertising Week yesterday, Anthony DeMaio raised the debate you see in the media all the time: are we moving too fast with AI? It's a good conversation to have. But I'm in the trenches with companies every week, keynoting, running workshops, and working with executives in Rewired. At the personal and organizational level, I'd argue the opposite. We're moving too slowly. The gap between the AI haves and have-nots keeps growing. For leaders, learning these skills isn't optional. Start with the typing. After a lifetime of it, switching to your voice is a real habit to break, and that's why I'm such a big Wispr Flow fan. It's the gateway into everything else, and when you're 4X more productive, so much more can happen.

I brought a keynote and a workshop. They brought a tiara and zero cynicism. Yesterday, I spent the day with the women of WISE (Women Inspiring Success) at a customer appreciation event hosted by Vincit Group. These women lead food safety and sanitation programs around the country. Most have a Dr. before their name. And, they definitely weren’t starting from zero with AI. They’d played with chatbots, summarized a document or two, maybe drafted an email. But the way they worked hadn’t actually changed. Same workflows with the same cognitive load. Just with an AI tab open somewhere. That’s the gap I keep seeing. The tools exist. People have even tried them. But trying a tool and rethinking how you work are two completely different things. You can’t rethink something you didn’t know could be rethought. So we got into it. Keynote in the morning, hands-on workshop in the afternoon. They all downloaded Wispr Flow, and I watched the room shift. When you move from typing prompts into a chat window to speaking naturally and getting your ideas out as quickly as you can think them, something clicks. One created a personalized style app. Another started building multiple versions of onboarding materials for her team. They already had the expertise. What they needed was a new way of thinking about their work and the space to experiment with what is now possible. That’s what reducing cognitive load actually looks like. You take someone who is juggling safety protocols, team training, and compliance documentation and show her that some of the weight she has been carrying can get lighter. The relief is real. And the creativity that follows once that weight lifts is what makes this work so compelling for me. WISE crowned me their AI princess. But what I’ll carry home from Chattanooga is the experience of watching a room full of women with deep expertise realize how much more they could create when technology finally began removing friction instead of adding to it.

$3 BILLION. That's what Ken Griffin just gave Carnegie Mellon. No one person has ever given more to an American university. And $2 BILLION of it is going to a brand-new 35-acre campus in Wynwood!! I'm so excited about this one. CMU ranks among the best tech schools in the world. Brands matter, and this one will pull students to Miami from everywhere. Which raises the question Miami has to start answering right now: Who's going to teach them? Students go where the masters of their craft are. They want to learn AI from people who've built with AI. Marketing from people who've built brands. Business from people who've made payroll. Those people are hard to find in a classroom. Most of them are still building. That's a big reason I said yes to becoming a Professor of Practice at Link School of Business. Almost two decades in the trenches. 17 years building Zen Media before I exited. Now all of that goes straight into a classroom. Miami already has great schools. The next challenge is getting more practitioners in front of students. This can only be a good thing for Miami. And I'm proud Link saw the future early. We've gotten really good at recruiting. Now we have to train.

I found a love note in my husband’s office. A woman’s handwriting. Gushing with love. We’d been dating two months. I was helping him clean… okay, low-key snooping. He turned red from head to toe. She was a Specialist ID customer. Lanyards and badge supplies. Ten+ years as a reseller. One bad order. Team fixed it. She emailed an apology: she was fighting cancer and had been harder on them than she meant to be. So he found her GoFundMe. Pulled every dollar she’d spent with the company for ten years. Down to the penny. Donated it all back to her care. The note was her thank-you. He never told anyone. I only know because I was snooping. Companies obsess over culture. Leadership’s character becomes culture. His did. The company does stuff like this all the time. AI will amplify whatever character a company already has. Cutters will cut faster. Carers will care at scale. How companies use AI will reveal their character faster than ever.

LinkedIn ranked the world's top MBA programs this morning. I'm a professor of practice at a business school, so sure, let me make some enemies. Most MBAs are overrated. The real question isn't where a program ranks. It's where your 2 years should go. That's what an MBA costs: 2 years of compounding career experience you'd never get back, plus potentially six figures. Education and classes no longer have a monopoly on information. So look at what you're actually buying. I think only three things make an MBA worth it: • The signal • The people • The professors Even LinkedIn's ranking measures what happens after: how graduates advance, who hires them, what networks they build, whether they become leaders. If the name doesn't open doors, and the faculty aren't mentors you'd want, easy pass.