👥 Featuring:
Host: Alex (The Strategy Stack)
Key Topics Covered
The session opened with a warm welcome to both regular attendees and new participants. Alex emphasized the casual, interactive nature of the event, likening it to busking with a guitar on the street — consistency and persistence are key to building an audience.
Framed as weekly office hours, this live session included news highlights, updates on AI strategy, and an open Q&A.
The central theme throughout: AI’s rapid movement from labs → boardrooms → living rooms, and how innovation is reshaping business models, community building, and even geopolitics.
Alex’s Book Journey and Next Steps
Update:
Alex’s first book became a category bestseller on Amazon within a month, with the U.S. as its most successful market.
He’s now working on his second book, Beyond the Organization, focused on the next 10–20 years of agentic influence outside traditional company boundaries.
Strategic Context:
Shifts from practical implementation to exploring how AI agents interact with ecosystems.
Introduces the concept of reverse PESTLE, analyzing how companies influence political, economic, and technological systems rather than just adapting to them.
Reinforces the move toward distributed, ecosystem-driven strategies.
Alex is also producing:
A six-part webinar series on his Agentic Operating Model (AOM).
Short-form articles focused on business models, growth strategies, and governance.
AI SEO & Growth Strategies
Key Points Discussed:
Alex spent a week optimizing his content for search engine visibility, noting that organic search has become his fastest-growing source of subscribers.
Videos are increasingly indexed and should be treated as SEO assets.
Cross-linking between Substack articles, collaborations, and linking to authoritative external sources like TechCrunch or WSJ can dramatically boost reach.
AI can automate interlinking by generating a "spaghetti map" of connections between articles and tags.
Agentic Search Rising:
Paid subscribers are now finding content via AI-driven discovery tools like Anthropic and Perplexity.
Signals a shift from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) → Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO), requiring creators to think about how AI agents surface and recommend content.
LinkedIn Growth and Community Building
LinkedIn remains a powerful channel for organic audience growth, with Alex tripling down in the past year.
Designs all his own graphics using Canva, creating a recognizable, personal brand with a “mascot” avatar for visual consistency.
Community-building tips:
Be consistent and persistent.
Create content clusters to dominate niche topics.
Engage directly with audiences through live sessions and newsletters.
Use Substack’s “Big Five” strategies for reach and retention.
Trending News: Political Violence & Social Stability
The shooting of Charlie Kirk dominated social media feeds, even overshadowing AI headlines this week.
Discussion focused on:
The rise of political violence in the U.S. as a troubling trend.
Personal reflections on the importance of free speech and peaceful disagreement.
Generational and historical perspectives, connecting this moment to broader societal tensions.
AI Transformation Challenges
Webinar Insights:
Alex’s recent deep-dive session explored why 95% of enterprise AI projects fail to achieve ROI.
Key failure points:
Misaligned expectations between leadership and operations.
Lack of trust, leading to micromanagement of AI agents as if they were entry-level employees.
Weak governance, with insufficient guardrails and oversight.
Organizational politics torpedoing innovation.
Case Study: Louis Vuitton
Successfully implemented AI to connect supply chain and marketing data, creating a single source of truth.
Highlights how even flashy, global companies often run on spreadsheets and manual workarounds before transformation.
Prediction:
Within 5 years, a clear divide will emerge between:
Legacy corporations that embrace AI and gain dominance.
AI-native startups that launch lean and scale rapidly without resistance.
Demographic Shifts & The Future of Work
Looking ahead to 2035, when all baby boomers will have exited the workforce:
Aging populations will reshape labor markets and value generation.
The hierarchical, centralized management models built by the boomer generation will decline, replaced by flatter, ecosystem-driven organizations.
Education will shift away from degrees as gatekeepers and toward skills, communities, and continuous learning.
Speculative vision: “Silver Society” of active, older individuals using crypto-like currencies in new, networked economies.
Threads Pulled Together
AI transformation is not just a tech problem — it’s about governance, community, and trust.
Content creators and businesses must adapt to agentic discovery, where AI surfaces recommendations, not just search engines.
Generational transitions and demographic realities will drive the next wave of organizational design.
The most successful organizations will be those that:
Treat AI as a strategic partner, not a tool.
Build ecosystems beyond the traditional company perimeter.
Focus on execution and change management, not just vision.
Q&A Highlights
Definition of an AI Agent: Autonomous task execution; distinctions between generalized and specialized agents.
Multi-Agent Systems: Explored governance models and real-world enterprise use cases.
Favorite Tools: Claude, Perplexity, and creative coding assistants like Replay, Bolt, and Cursor.
Community-Building:
Stay consistent with live sessions and newsletters.
Build clusters of related content to dominate niche areas.
Example niche discussed: mentoring tech professionals on soft skills.
Content & Roadmap
Fridays: Office hour AMAs with live Q&A and news commentary.
Wednesdays: Topic-specific webinars aligned with Alex’s book series.
Celebrating 100th Substack article and inclusion on the expert systems & strategic management best-share list.
Agentic Strategy (Book 1) is published; Beyond the Organization (Book 2) is underway.
💡 Takeaways
AI adoption is cultural, not just technical. Companies fail without trust, governance, and strong leadership alignment.
Agentic discovery is replacing traditional search. Creators must optimize for AI-driven recommendations.
Generational turnover by 2035 will reshape organizations and redefine “work.”
Community engagement is the foundation of sustainable growth for creators and businesses alike.
The future belongs to ecosystem builders, not isolated companies.
