Alright, let’s talk AI.
We start with the spending shift Black Friday just exposed, move to Hank Givings and what autonomous work actually looks like under pressure, and finish by recognizing the CX operators carrying the weight of the day.
Let’s get into it.
No, But Seriously…
What Black Friday Just Told Every Founder
Black Friday’s loudest signal: 10% now drives 50% of all spending. That isn’t retail news. It’s the market warning every founder that only real value survives.
USA Today broke the number this week. Half of all consumer spend is now concentrated in a small slice of the population. Everyone else is buying what solves real problems and skipping the rest.
Enterprises are behaving the same way.
Budgets are tight. Expectations are higher. The tolerance for “nice to have” is gone. If you aren’t removing work, automating output, or producing measurable impact, you’re the luxury item people walk past on the way to the essentials.
Black Friday isn’t a shopping story. It’s a preview of how B2B buying works from here on out.
Build value or get ignored.
The Drop
We Let a Cloud Employee Run Thanksgiving. Here’s What Happened
I wanted a way to prove our Cloud Employees can work everywhere, chat, email, phone, SMS, Slack, LinkedIn…Then I realized Thanksgiving exists. The chaos is built-in.
So I introduced Hank Givings, the Cloud Employee running our Thanksgiving Help Desk. All week, Hank was live on every channel answering whatever lunacy Thanksgiving threw at us.
Cooking disasters
Timing meltdowns
Family tension that’s been aging since 1998
Logistics that make no physical sense
Side dishes nobody can identify
Last-minute panic texts
If it was part of the mess, Hank handled it. No scripts. No humans behind the curtain. No demo mode. Just one autonomous agent dealing with the exact flavor of unstructured nonsense a holiday built on carbs and unresolved conflict will always produce.
And here’s the real point.
If a Cloud Employee can survive Thanksgiving, it can survive your support queue. If it can handle unhinged timing questions, it can handle your routing logic. If it can decode whatever casserole mystery your aunt invented, it can decode your CRM.
This wasn’t a stunt. It was a stress test. The kind enterprises rarely run… because they’re afraid of what they’ll find.
Don’t believe me try it yourself :)
The Shortcut
Stop and Say Thank You to Your CX Leaders
No day exposes CX like Black Friday, and the people holding it together almost never get the spotlight.
Days like this show the discipline it takes to deliver CX at scale.
The planning, the coordination, and the calm when the volume spikes and nothing goes according to script. In moments like that, we see the sale, but true CX leaders see the system.
So here’s to the operators in the trenches. You’re the reason Black Friday holds together.
Good this weekend today, we’re pulling for you.
P.S. Looking forward to learning from you at the AICX Summit (https://getsignals.ai/events/aicx) next week… after you conquer today’s chaos :)
Full speaker lineup on event site
News
Weekly Wire
The Work No One Wanted AI didn’t break workflows, it exposed how much of our work was fake and built for volume, not outcomes.
The Creative Pipeline Is Shrinking: Creative execution is collapsing from teams to prompts, turning creative capacity into an infinite resource.
AI Is Holding Up the Economy: Strip out AI and the U.S. economy is already underwater, AI is the only sector generating real growth.
Sierra Proves Enterprises Are Ready for Agents: Sierra’s $100M ARR run-rate proves enterprises are finally handing real, operational workloads to agents.
Google Becomes the AI Stack: Google quietly became AI’s full-stack landlord, owning chips, models, cloud, distribution, and cash flow.
McKinsey Confirms the New Workforce
Over half of today’s work is automatable, the winners will be the companies that redesign jobs for humans and AI to share.
That’s it for today. Connect with me on Linkedin if you actually want to understand what an Autonomous Organization looks like in the real world.
