Episode 47| The AI Rush of 2025 Set the Skills Agenda Back. Here's What Comes Next | David Blake

🚀 The AI rush of 2025 didn't move the skills agenda forward — it stalled it. That's the contrarian read from the founder of Degreed, the company built to make skills the currency of the workforce. David Blake walks us through why he thinks 2026 is the most important year of your career, what leader-led learning looks like when agents can actually run it for managers who were never trained to teach, and why he survives the SaaSpocalypse by remembering Degreed has always been an education company — not a software company. Plus the disarming answer to how he's run this thing for 14 years: naps. David is the co-founder and CEO of Degreed, the learning and skills platform he started in 2012 with a mission to "jailbreak the degree" — recognize the skill, not the credential. He's the co-author of The Expertise Economy and the co-creator of the Skills Quotient framework. He recently opened the Top of the Hill All Girls Secondary School in Kenya with Mary Murimi. ⏰ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Cold open — "Showing your soft underbelly" 00:31 Welcome and intro 01:39 The Kenya school — Mary Murimi and Top of the Hill GSS 06:01 The 12th Amendment, the VP election, and VICE.RUN 07:18 "Learners will inherit the earth" — Eric Hoffer and the original bet 10:11 The contrarian read — AI set the skills agenda back in 2025 13:13 Amy: AI has skills too — the human + AI hybrid 13:42 Meg: AI fluency to do what? + the simple-simple-simple skills trap 20:14 Sending agents through your corporate training — the corpus as guardrails 21:42 The most important corporate training is "who are we as a company?" 25:40 Edge cases: Singapore, Waymo, and the Disney complexity frontier 27:54 Three quick thoughts — full employment, "2026 is the most important year of your career," dynamic teams 32:29 The Degreed team call — showing your soft underbelly to your whole company 34:54 Parenting kids in the AI tidal wave — set a goal, work backwards 37:26 Meg: "Our experiences are not helpful for our children" 44:17 Maestro, Degree.ai, and the competing narratives on AI wrappers 48:00 Leader-led learning — agents for managers who were never trained to teach 50:30 The Murdoch sale, Vox Media, and where the economic rents actually go 52:00 Why Degreed is an education company, not a software company 56:15 The disarming answer to running this for 14 years: naps 58:01 Wrap 🔑 KEY INSIGHTS: \- AI didn't move skills forward in 2025. It sucked the oxygen out of the room — IT had to roll out AI, attention moved on, and the skills agenda paused across most enterprises. \- The most important "corporate training" content most companies are missing is their own mission. L&D's next role is custodian of organizational context — the corpus your agents actually need. \- Leader-led learning is the agentic system's biggest unlock. Line managers (who were never trained to teach) can now run training-on-demand for their teams. \- Economic rents in SaaS migrate back to the LLMs. The wrappers are exposed. Survival means knowing what kind of company you actually are. \- For kids navigating this: maintain a love of learning AND the meta-skill of knowing how to learn. Your maps don't apply to their territory. 📚 RESOURCES: Degreed: https://degreed.com David Blake's LinkedIn post on Learning Rewired: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidblake/ The Expertise Economy (book): https://www.amazon.com/Expertise-Economy-Smartest-Companies-Succeed/dp/1473677009 Top of the Hill All Girls Secondary School: https://topofthehillgss.org/ Mary Murimi (Top of the Hill founder): https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-murimi-9402b82a/ Patti Constantakis (Walmart.org, on the skills cold-start): https://www.linkedin.com/in/patti-constantakis/ VICE.RUN — bipartisan VP election reform: https://vice.run/ Eric Hoffer — "Learners inherit the earth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric\_Hoffer Sangeet Paul Choudary's Reshuffle (referenced by David — see our Ep 18 conversation with Sangeet): https://www.youtube.com/@TheMegandAmyShow NYT on the Vox Media / James Murdoch sale: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/business/media/vox-media-james-murdoch-sale.html 🔗 CONNECT: David Blake: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidblake/ Submit Leadership Questions: megandamyshow@gmail.com Instagram: @megandamyshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-meg-amy-show YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMegandAmyShow #SkillsAgenda #AIStrategy #LeaderLedLearning #SaaSpocalypse #Degreed #EdTech #FutureOfWork #LeadershipInTheAIEra #MegAndAmyShow