Everyone these days seems to have a plan for AI. Or at least, they plan to mention it as often as possible in press releases and briefings to analysts. Paying lip service to AI is a dangerous distraction and a missed opportunity. A few may be fooled for a while - but unless you do the hard work now to reimagine what you do, you are likely to be left behind as we shift into a new era of AI-powered competition.

Now that we are in the midst of the world's largest remote work experiment, it's worth asking: what does it take to run a good virtual meeting? It is all too easy to just focus on what can be controlled and configured: security, bandwidth, platforms or devices. However, when it comes to successfully managing a distributed workforce, even more important than meeting connectivity, is having the right meeting culture.

Spoiler alert. It is not about their size. One of the most dangerous traps for corporations is to consume the idea of disruption, without internalizing it. They redesign their offices and add more open-plan spaces; they upgrade their technology and give their employees new collaboration tools; they sponsor a startup accelerator and create an innovation division in a separate office. Fast forward a few years, and nothing has changed. Why?

Here's the story of how Steve Jobs tricked you. When Jobs delivered his keynote address at the Macworld Conference & Expo in 2007, he pretended to be introducing three products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. You know the ending: these were not three separate devices; they were one device, and he called it an iPhone. But Jobs's real trick was yet to come.

We can be so focused on robots replacing humans, that we miss the essential problem of preserving organizational knowledge. The future of work is more than just automation. One of the most significant opportunities for AI in the enterprise is using it to understand the heuristics, practices, and tacit knowledge exhibited by our best people - before they leave or retire. Especially now. Given the current crisis, finding better ways to define and retain talent patterns has never been more critical.