Trees Don't Grow to the Sky: 2026 ESOP Update

First, I'd love to start off, if you're willing to share, we talk a lot about AI at Empowered Ventures.

It's definitely helping our work, there's no question, but it doesn't always go perfectly.

I'm wondering if you're willing to share.

Yeah, yeah, so AI is obviously a hot topic.

I mean, we did talk about it some in the update recently with the whole team.

It's interesting, you know, I think it's over the last few years, it's gone from off the radar to, you know, the hottest topic in the world, really.

I mean, to be honest, probably.

I mean, if you had to pick one thing, And, you know, our journey as an organization has been to monitor the progression and try to be on the front edge of just like, what is this thing? Where's this thing going? And, you know, how's it going to impact us? business, our businesses in the future, and then, you know, start to learn from those that are benefiting from it currently the most.

So we've landed in a, I think for now, a pretty clear place where, you know, AI is our view is it's a tool.

It's an extremely powerful tool, but it's not great at everything at all.

It's great at certain things.

Mostly what it seems like right now is it's great at analyzing a lot of data and identifying patterns and helping office workers automate the more monotonous parts of their work.

That's what we're finding in our work.

That's what we're hearing from a lot of people currently not super convinced that it's going to replace people anytime soon in any jobs, to be honest.

Yeah.

I think there's some amount of like, oh, computer programmers or whatever.

That is kind of the cutting edge where it's able to automate the most of what somebody does.

But that's far from most office workers at this point.

And what it's really not great at, which most office workers I think have a lot in their work, is like human judgment.

Making decisions and having a sense of what the right answer to something actually is which you know what we found is it's like once you analyze your own work you're like whoa look at all this stuff that i actually i'm adding my judgment and my experience and my knowledge and that's that's what ai cannot do at all generally speaking so I think we're excited and optimistic about AI in our work at the Holdco and the work at our businesses.

But at this moment, it's really just an opportunity to simplify, automate, and enable all of our employee owners that can use this technology to actually add more value without having to spend as much time on monotonous work.

So that's how I'm thinking about it.

I think that's how we're seeing it as an organization right now.

Yeah.

And we're going to keep following it, keep kind of as it progresses and as things evolve, we're going to keep up with it.