- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Sarah Franklin, CEO of AI-powered HR platform Lattice.
- The big story: That ceasefire between Israel and Iran? It’s already in pieces.
- The markets: Up, up, up!
- Analyst notes from Goldman Sachs on tariffs, Wedbush on Tesla’s Robotaxi, JPMorgan on the Fed, and EY-Parthenon on U.S. slowdown.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and the future of work. It’s hard not to, what with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years or OpenAI CEO Sam Altman complaining that Meta is trying to poach his people with $100 million signing bonuses. We’re already seeing that entry-level jobs are in short supply and leaders like Amazon CEO Andy Jassy are warning staff that their ranks could soon shrink because of AI. But what effect will AI have on the C-Suite?
I posed that question recently to Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, an AI-powered HR platform for managing employee performance that was co-founded and led by Altman’s brother Jack, who’s now executive chairman. Franklin spent 16 years at Salesforce before joining Lattice as CEO 18 months ago to help grow the $3 billion unicorn.
“We’ve been trained that the workforce is a pyramid. You go to college to get a job on the bottom rung, and you work your way up a ladder to the top,” she told me. “Now, we are all at a very different point. We’re all at the same place. There’s no difference in knowledge levels that we all have, whether you’re an entry-level employee or an executive.”
AI has flattened the knowledge hierarchy, forcing leaders to learn new tools and reimagine everything from business models to job descriptions.
Franklin made waves right away by introducing employee records for “digital workers”—a.k.a. AI agents—only to back down after a backlash that claimed it was disrespectful to her human employees.
Nonetheless she’s convinced that leaders and AI agents will soon be working side by side. “The AI is helpful at really giving us eyes where we don’t have them, removing our blinders, helping us see and understand better,” she says. So while a boss may just see a salesperson achieving quota or a ‘mediocre’ colleague, the AI may surface that the quota was met despite some poor behaviors, or that the mediocre performer is actually stellar at helping their peers.
With 89% of CEOs exploring, piloting, or implementing agentic AI at their companies, according to the most recent Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, I’d love to know what’s working for you. Drop me a line at diane.brady@fortune.com.
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Also, we’d love to get your nominations for companies to consider for Fortune’s 2025 Change the World list, which features companies that are doing well by doing good. You can see last year’s honorees here. The deadline for applications this year is Tuesday, July 29. The list will be published in late September, and will appear in the October/November issue of Fortune magazine. Use this Google Form to nominate a company, including your own. And if you have questions, reach out to our editors at changetheworld@fortune.com.
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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
