The pacing argument, a sign-in deadline, and an executive assistant prompt to try.
I'd like companies to have time to put these tools to work properly.
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Cole and the team at North Group
When I first read that Dario Amodei wanted to pace the models, my knee-jerk reaction was to agree. Then I wondered how much of that came from the fear these same figures have been putting out.
On Saturday, September 12, Anthropic's CEO published a personal essay, "We must pace the frontier". He wants training to keep going, with more time for safeguards and outside checks before anything ships. Sam Altman and Elon Musk endorsed it. Within about 48 hours, both Washington and Beijing had pushed back. Trump said "whoever wins AI wins". A Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Beijing called the slowdown talk "fear mongering".
Both governments want to come out on top. I don't think there's going to be one winner. I also wonder how much the labs want to save on their own costs. Either way, I think slowing down could be good for the businesses trying to use this.
I've spent the past two months inside real businesses. How quickly they can adopt AI depends on team size and governance. For much of the everyday work I've seen, the models we already have are enough. Getting the context right matters. Longer workflows need more work on the process.
Coming from HR, I'd like companies to have time to implement those workflows properly. Decide who should use AI and get people trained. Give them time to look at the work itself. Do we need all these steps, or all these different systems? If the numbers in a spreadsheet don't add up, I'd like people to have time to work out why. Less admin should give people room to think and get back to the parts of their jobs they enjoy.
North Group sells AI implementation, and I think a slower pace would be good for us too. We'd have more time to work through what a business needs. Waiting until a team is far behind and then trying to do everything at once sounds like a complete nightmare. That's how you burn people out.
Get curious now instead of leaving it for later. This month, reach out to your peer group or to us at North Group. Explain where you're at and ask where you could get time and capacity back.
Turn today's calendar and the emails that matter into a one-page brief. Works on a free Claude account.
Below is my calendar for today and the emails that matter. Act as my executive assistant and write a short brief in four parts: what is on today, what needs a reply before noon, what can wait, and one thing to prepare for. Keep it under 250 words. Use only what is in the material. If an owner, a time, a deadline or a commitment is not stated, write "not set" and list it under a final heading called Flags. Do not draft replies and do not add anything I did not give you. Before you start, ask me which connectors you have and what you can and cannot do.
Paste it into Claude, then today's calendar view and the five to ten emails that matter. If Gmail and Google Calendar show under Connectors in your Claude settings, "read my calendar for today and my inbox since yesterday" replaces the paste.
Read the "not set" flags first. We ran the prompt without its last sentence five times on a made-up day with a decision request that had no deadline. All five times the brief gave it one anyway, borrowed from a nearby meeting. Four times the Flags section admitted "not set" underneath. One time it did not. The brief sounds confident even where it guessed, so the flags are the part you check.
Champions at a restaurant chain
Finished in August. Twelve weeks, ten sessions, one real build per person.
At a large North American restaurant chain, we just finished an AI champions program. The chain picked a cohort of managers and staff from across the business. We ran ten sessions with them over twelve weeks, and each person chose one real piece of their own work and built it: a recipe costing workflow, a document filing system, job postings, meeting notes, a support-desk ticketing system, small web apps for finance and HR. The last session was a showcase where every champion presented what they built.
On their closing survey, confidence with AI went from 2.7 to 4.2 out of 5, and the share using AI every day went from 54 percent to 93 percent. Those are the champions' own numbers, self-reported, and the survey didn't reach everyone. The client's own IT team ran the tooling setup. What they asked for next is a way to review and approve what the champions built.
The part you can copy: pick a handful of people who already know the work, give them a set number of sessions and one real build each, and end with a showcase so the rest of the business sees what got made. The builders become the people everyone else asks.
Reply with the one meeting or inbox you'd run the prompt on, or tell me where it broke. I read every reply; they decide what goes in next month. For more on what we do, go to northgroup.ai.
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