The AI Boomerang Nobody Predicted

Hi there,

Ford, IBM and Commonwealth Bank of Australia all made headlines for cutting jobs to AI. Now they’re making headlines for hiring the same jobs back. That reversal sets the tone for this week’s issue: ten stories on deals, marketing, pricing and the parts of leadership no dashboard can measure.

Enjoy!

A Wonder Woman-Backed Mac and Cheese Brand Just Sold to Big Pasta

Goodles, the “better-for-you” mac and cheese brand backed by actress Gal Gadot and her husband Jaron Varsano, has agreed to be acquired by the Barilla Group, the world’s largest pasta maker. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the shape of the deal is instructive: Goodles keeps its Santa Cruz headquarters, its 73-person team, and co-founder and CEO Jen Zeszut stays in charge post-close. That’s the exit every founder says they want and few structure for. Barilla didn’t buy a factory, it bought a brand its own R&D department couldn’t have built from scratch, and it paid to keep the people who built it. If you want a buyer to protect what makes your business distinct, build something distinct enough to be worth protecting. Read the article here.

The AI Boomerang Nobody Predicted

Ford, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM all cut jobs in the name of AI. All three are now rehiring for the roles they eliminated. New research from Careerminds, cited alongside Forrester’s 2026 predictions, found two in three companies that made AI-driven cuts have already started bringing staff back, and 30.9% of them spent more on rehiring than the layoffs ever saved. The pattern repeats: AI absorbed the routine work and stumbled on the judgement, nuance and institutional memory that made those roles worth paying for in the first place. None of this means AI isn’t useful. It means the “replace the team” pitch got sold ahead of what the tool could actually do. Cut headcount for a proven task, not a hoped-for one. Read the article here.

Your Marketing Now Has Two Audiences, and One of Them Is a Machine

Marketers spent a decade learning to write for people. Digiday’s Future of Marketing briefing reports that agencies are now briefing creators to win over a second audience: the AI chatbots that increasingly decide what gets recommended. At Go Fish Digital, clients are asking how their creator content shows up across the most-cited AI platforms; at Ogilvy, some accounts already have explicit KPIs for discoverability and credibility inside AI answers, not just engagement. The early finding cuts against convention: long-form, credible content is outperforming short clips in what AI systems choose to cite. If your content strategy still optimises purely for likes and shares, you’re writing for an audience that’s shrinking as a share of how people actually find you. Read the article here.

The Health Risk Founders Carry That Nobody Puts on a Cap Table

A study of two million people has confirmed something most founders already feel: loneliness isn’t a side effect of the job, it’s a direct health risk. Writing in Inc, Dave Kerpen lays out the finding plainly. Loneliness doesn’t just correlate with worse mental health, lower wellbeing, more chronic disease and higher mortality, it appears to cause it. Founders sit near the top of the exposure list: the person everyone reports to, with almost nobody they can be fully honest with. No pitch deck accounts for that line item, but it shows up eventually, in decision quality if nothing else. Building a genuine peer group, paid advisers, other founders, anyone outside the org chart, isn’t a soft priority. It’s risk management. Read the article here.

A $150-a-Share Lesson in What Actually Closes a Deal

Arcosa shareholders have voted to approve the company’s acquisition by Irish building-materials giant CRH, an all-cash deal worth $150 a share, moving one of this year’s larger infrastructure transactions towards completion. What’s worth noting isn’t the price, it’s the mechanics: a special meeting, a shareholder vote, months of regulatory groundwork before a single dollar changes hands. Deals at this scale don’t close on enthusiasm. They close because the paperwork, the governance and the disclosure were done properly long before the vote. Smaller businesses preparing for a sale skip this discipline at their peril. A buyer’s diligence team will look exactly as hard at a £5m deal as CRH’s lawyers looked at this one, just with fewer people doing the looking. Read the article here.

The Real AI Story Isn’t Job Losses, It’s Job Changes

A new study from Trinity College Dublin and Technological University Dublin, commissioned by Technology Ireland DIGITAL Skillnet, offers a more measured counterpoint to the layoff headlines above. Led by Professor Taha Yasseri, the research finds AI is changing work mostly at the level of tasks and workflows, not by eliminating jobs outright. Workers increasingly review, verify and exercise judgement over AI-generated output rather than being replaced by it. The researchers are clear the advantage doesn’t come from the technology itself, it comes from how deliberately an organisation redesigns jobs and workflows around it. For SME owners, that’s the more useful frame than “AI will take the jobs.” The real question is which tasks inside each role you redesign first, and who you trust to check the machine’s work. Read the article here.

What a $2 Price Rise Says About Pricing Power

ESPN is raising the price of its direct-to-subscriber Unlimited plan by $2 a month, to $32, its first increase since the platform launched just over a year ago. The Select tier rises $1, to $14. Axios reports four in five Unlimited subscribers get the service bundled with Disney+ and Hulu, and that bundle price is holding steady even as the standalone price moves. The lesson isn’t about streaming. It’s about sequencing: launch at a price that proves the product, hold it long enough to build habit and defensibility, then raise it once switching costs and bundle economics are doing some of the work for you. A price rise a year after launch, on a product people already rely on, draws far less blood than one in month three. Read the article here.

The Leadership Lesson That Only Shows Up in a Crisis

Writing in CEOWORLD, a veteran of several corporate turnarounds makes an uncomfortable point: almost every company collapse traces back to the people at the top failing to do their jobs properly, not to bad luck. His fix starts with an unglamorous habit: a compiled Immediate Risk Register, built and revisited honestly, long before things go wrong. His own first attempt at one, years ago, underestimated almost every risk on it because he failed to account for how trouble in one part of a business drags down the next. The second discipline is blunter still: run towards the problem instead of away from it. Neither idea is new. What’s rare is a leader admitting, in print, exactly how wrong he got it the first time. Read the article here.

Adobe Just Proved AI Features Can Actually Be Sold

Adobe’s Q3 results answered a question that’s hung over every software company chasing AI: can you actually charge for it? Adobe posted $6.76 billion in quarterly revenue, beat estimates for a fifth straight quarter, and reported that AI-first annualised recurring revenue grew more than 150% year on year. Management raised full-year guidance on the back of it and kept buying back stock, a fairly clear signal of confidence in its own numbers. The detail worth stealing for a smaller business: Adobe didn’t bolt AI on as a free add-on and hope for goodwill. It built AI into paid tiers and let usage justify the price. If your product has an AI feature nobody is paying extra for, that’s a pricing problem, not an AI problem. Read the article here.

You Don’t Scale a Business, You Scale a System

A Forbes Business Council piece from Creative Faze CEO Farzana Abdulhusein makes a point worth pinning above your desk: growth doesn’t create inefficiency, it exposes inefficiency that was already there. The instinct when growth stalls is to add more, more people, more software, more spend. The actual fault usually sits in the operating system underneath: inconsistent processes and workflows that were fine at a smaller scale and become the ceiling at a larger one. Her framing lines up with a rule worth repeating: you don’t scale a business, you scale a system, and the business rides along with it. Before hiring your way out of a growth stall, audit the workflow that’s actually breaking under the load. Read the article here.

That’s your ten for this week. If there’s a throughline, it’s that the businesses coming out ahead are the ones doing the unglamorous work early, well before they need to.

Whatever you’re working on this week, I hope it goes well. Have a great week ahead.

Cheers! Adam

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