How to Read "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" as a Leader

A fictional memo from June 2028 has been making the rounds this week, and my inbox is flooded with leaders talking about it. 

"The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" from Citrini Research paints a vivid picture. It depicts a future state where AI agents remove friction at scale, white-collar jobs collapse, consumer demand spirals downward, and the S&P 500 drops 38% by mid-2028.

As someone who's spent decades studying disruptive transformation, I see the memo as a powerful stress test for leaders, not a literal prediction.

It's a Thought Experiment, Not a Crystal Ball

This piece compresses what could be 10–20 years of potential AI impact into just a few years. That's what makes it both alarming and useful. 

The scenario isn't meant to be a roadmap of what will happen. It's designed to make risks vivid enough that you actually think about them.

As you read it, ask yourself these questions:

➡️ If this were our sector's worst-case path, where would our revenue, demand, or balance sheet be most exposed?

➡️ Which assumptions about our customers, pricing power, and credit quality would break first if agents really did remove friction at scale?

➡️ What would have to be true (in terms of adoption speed, policy response, and customer behavior) for this scenario to get anywhere close to reality for us?

These aren't comfortable questions. But leaders who run stress tests before crises arrive are the ones who survive them.

Two Ideas Leaders Should Take Seriously

You don't have to buy the whole scenario, but the memo presents two core ideas worth deep consideration.

The first is zero-friction agents. The report imagines AI agents that relentlessly optimize search, price, and terms on behalf of customers and employees. In this world, many traditional "friction moats" evaporate. Distribution advantages, switching costs, and complexity that kept customers locked in all get arbitraged away by agents that never sleep.

The prompt for leaders: If agents were negotiating and switching on behalf of every customer and employee, which of our offerings or partnerships would be most vulnerable? 

The second is the intelligence displacement spiral. The memo's central loop is stark: white-collar layoffs lead to cost savings, which get reinvested into more AI, which drives more layoffs, which compresses spending. This creates what the authors call "Ghost GDP," output that looks good on paper but never circulates through the real economy because the people who used to earn that income are no longer spending it.

The prompt for leaders: Where in our business are we counting on high-income customers or employees whose incomes could be compressed by AI, and how would that ripple into our own demand? 

Where Reality Will Be Messier (and Slower)

The most likely path isn't a clean doom spiral. It's messy and uneven. That matters for how you respond.

Adoption speed is not the same as transformation speed. Even when a new technology is clearly better, organizations take years to re-platform how they actually work. SaaS is a useful precedent here. It took roughly a decade to move from early adoption to majority use, and nearly two decades for SaaS to dominate enterprise software spending despite obvious cost and agility advantages. The technology was ready long before organizations were.

Entry-level roles are being redefined, not erased. Early moves from large employers like IBM suggest that the first response is not to eliminate entry-level positions, but to redesign them. Juniors are increasingly working with AI from day one, doing more customer interaction, problem framing, and oversight of AI outputs instead of routine grunt work. IBM's public stance on expanding and redefining entry-level hiring in the AI era is a concrete signal of this shift.

Three Questions to Take Back to Your Leadership Team

When someone on your leadership team asks, "What's our take on this report?" you don't need a 30-page analysis. You need clear questions that drive action.

Consider your business model and demand
1. If agent-driven zero friction hits our market, which revenue streams, customer segments, or channels are most exposed, and what experiments are we running now to adapt?

Evaluate organizational design and talent
2. How will we redesign roles for early-career talent and middle managers so that people are orchestrating AI, not competing with it?

Prioritize pace and sequencing
3. Given how slowly we really change, where do we need to accelerate AI adoption, and where do we need to slow down to avoid the instability this memo dramatizes?

What You Need to Know

"The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" is best used to test your assumptions about demand, talent, and resilience. The memo isn't telling you the future. It's asking whether you've stress-tested your strategy against a world that could look very different very fast.

The leaders I respect most are the ones who can hold two ideas at once: that the doom scenario probably won't unfold exactly as written, and that ignoring its core insights would be foolish.

💭 Your Turn

Here's my challenge for you: Pick one of the three leadership questions above and bring it to your next ELT meeting. Not as a presentation; as a genuine question you don't yet have the answer to.

Then watch what happens. Do your colleagues engage with it seriously, or dismiss it as too speculative? Do they have data to inform the discussion, or are they guessing? Does the conversation lead to action, or just more analysis?

How your team responds will tell you a lot about whether you're ready for the disruption the memo describes, or whether you're the kind of organization it's warning about.

What I Can't Stop Talking About

Dr. Katia Walsh and I wrote “Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success“ to help you turn stress tests into concrete plans. The book shows you how to run the experiments, make the org changes, and build the talent capabilities that create resilience. It will soon be available for preorder!

And the response to last week's newsletter on AI differentiation was overwhelming. Many of you wrote in with stories about where your organizations fall on that spectrum. The pattern I keep seeing: the gap between leaders and laggards is widening faster than most boards realize.

My Upcoming Appearances/Travel

Mar 12: Private event, Oklahoma City, OK
Mar 25: Private event, Las Vegas, NV
Apr 16: Private event, Washington, DC
May 7: YPO Global Marketing Summit, Keynote, San Francisco, CA

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