Trent Gillespie
August 27, 2026
Bill Gates published an essay Wednesday that is worth your time: "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical."
The short version is that the AI transition will be harder than almost anyone is planning for, and he doesn't see leaders confronting it. He wants new global institutions, "Human Reserved" jobs, and a tax on AI and robots. He closes by telling leaders they still have a chance to act before the damage is done.
Although I agree with Bill in most regards, I'd take the warning more seriously coming from someone with less at stake. Much of what he's describing will run on Microsoft servers. That doesn't make him wrong. It does mean he's arguing hard for guardrails for others, not on where he has the most influence. But I digress.
Here's the part that matters: Almost none of us are regulators or heads of state. We are not going to build a global institution or write a robot tax.
But what we can do is decide how we lead inside our own organizations.
As I say in most of my keynote talks: AI is a leadership challenge, and it is the biggest one of your career.
I'm not saying that abstractly.
Tuesday I did a keynote for leaders in local media. Wednesday, two more organizations asked me to train their leaders on AI, both wanting the same day in December. One is a large credit union. The other is a mid-size manufacturer.
Local media, financial services, manufacturing. Those businesses have almost nothing in common. Different regulators, different customers, different economics. But inside of 48 hours they all arrived at the same place, and none of them asked me to teach their people how to use ChatGPT. They asked about how to prepare their leaders for the future of their organizations.
That's the part worth noticing. The gap companies are trying to close right now is not just a skills gap in the workforce. It's also a confidence gap at the top.
I can only take one of them. And I have fourteen events booked in the next ten weeks. That's the whole thing in miniature: leaders need trusted guidance on how to prepare and run their organizations, and this is real and accelerating. There's no version of me that meets it one keynote at a time.
That's why we launched Leader Lab last Friday.
Leader Lab is how I plan to help as many of you as I can learn to lead with AI. Not just how to apply an agent or keep up with the latest ChatGPT release, but the harder part: where AI belongs in your business, who owns it, and what you're actually willing to change.
I kicked it off last Friday and was glad to see so many of you dial in. I'll bring everything I can to the group, and I'll design it around what you ask for.
Three ways for you to engage, right now.
Watch the kickoff call. One hour. Then tell me what you want next.
Tomorrow (Friday), 9:00 AM Pacific, for association and AMC leaders. If you were at the ASAE CEO Summit, or you want to talk through association AI strategy, dial in. To my association friends: you can shape your industries faster than any regulation will, and I want to help you use that.
Tomorrow Friday, 9:30 AM Pacific, for everyone. This is our weekly open office hours, and I’ll chat on AI skills and Cowork, and offer an Ask Me Anything on AI. We'll stay on until there are no questions left.
Click the links to RSVP. Then help us build it.
Two things I want to highlight.
OpenAI launched a Premium business seat earlier this month at $125 a month, or $100 annually. Five times the usage of a standard seat, and it removes the five-hour cap that used to stop long work mid-task. Any of your staff can ask for it.
Claude has offered a premium seat at the same price for months.
Microsoft charges for the additional capacity in a different shape, billing agent activity by consumption instead of by seat.
Google is still burying it inside Workspace bundles and hasn't shown its hand.
The pattern is important. All four have stopped pricing AI as a flat per-person license alone, and are adding usage-based tiers to create more revenue and pay for those huge data centers. Now, "What does AI cost us next year" is no longer headcount times thirty dollars.
At a time when many businesses are still worried about paying $30 a seat, $125 sounds like a lot. It is. But it's worth it for the right people, with the right guidance.
Who should get one:
Give it to: Heavy users, developers, researchers, and anyone showing you how AI is improving the organization and not just their own to-do list.
Wait on: The rest of your team. A base seat at $20 to $30 is still the right call.
Unclear? Go ask them what they're building and why they need more. That conversation is worth more than the license.
One important note: the people who hit the ceiling on a standard seat are, almost by definition, the people who have actually changed how they work. You don't need a survey to find them. Your admin console already knows. They are your super-users who should become your AI advocates and innovators.
With the huge improvements in AI in the last three months, many more employees are building AI skills, agents, and other capabilities. Then they are sharing them with others, creating more risk than one person using a chatbot.
Three things you need at minimum:
An updated AI policy. It has to cover agents, agentic workspaces, and applications your own people build. Most policies still assume the only risk is someone pasting customer data into a chat window.
A named owner. An AI Champion, or someone else accountable for monitoring and standardizing usage, with protected time to actually do it.
A shared library. A way for people to create, submit, and find AI skills and agents, so nobody spends a week rebuilding what a colleague finished last month.
Leading on AI doesn’t require an international institution. It requires you to decide it matters and assign it to someone.
Gates is right that the choices we make now are critical. Most of them won't be made in Washington or Geneva. They'll be made by someone like you, deciding who gets the expensive seat and who owns the policy.
Watch the Leader Lab kick-off, or join Friday’s office hours, and tell me what help you need. We’ll build it together.
Trent Gillespie is CEO of Stellis AI and a keynote speaker helping business leaders understand and operationalize AI in their companies. He spent almost nine years leading global innovation efforts at Amazon before leaving to help other companies build the capabilities they need to compete. Book Trent to speak to your group or book a call to discuss using AI within your business.
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