Tuesday morning, five forty-seven. Coffee in hand. Eleven tabs open. Three AI’s humming in the background. The screen flickered loading something, and for two seconds I caught my own reflection in the dark glass.

The face was moving. The face was not thinking.
And I asked myself the question I want to put to you for the rest of the week: what is my pace set by?
I could tell you what my pace was. I could not tell you what set it. That gap is the whole problem.

Here's what nobody is saying out loud. AI did not change the operator's job in 2026

— it changed the speed at which the posture you came in with compounds. Panic- pace just got louder. Covenant-pace just got sharper. The tool is an amplifier on a signal that was already there.
The rest of this newsletter is what I think we do about it.

— Deon.

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This week's Wisdom Live sat with one of the quietest threats inside modern leadership — hurry. Not urgency. Not pace. Hurry: the operating system that confuses speed with progress and slowly corrupts your direction in motion.

Solomon saw it three thousand years ago. The hasty leader still moves. They just miss their way — making fast wrong decisions that create twelve slow, expensive corrections downstream. Hurry costs you discernment. It costs you relationships. It costs you presence.
The episode lands on a binary worth carrying into the week: you can be a leader whose pace is set by what you are running from — or one whose pace is set by who
you are answering to.

Got an AI tool you'd recommend? Hit reply on this email — I read every one.

Zoom didn't bolt another chatbot onto a sidebar this week — they shipped an AI teammate that sits inside the meeting, then goes and does the work the meeting decided on. It drafts the follow-up, updates the CRM record, books the next call, builds the deck — out of the conversation that just happened, before you've closed the tab.

$20 a user a month, rolling out across North America first, global to follow. I'm not recommending it because most of you run on Zoom (most of you don't).

I'm recommending it because it's this week's cleanest example of the pattern this newsletter keeps tracking: the tools have stopped waiting for you to open a tab and ask. They're already in the room, listening for the moment the talking turns into a task — and moving before you do. That's not a reason to be afraid of it. It's a reason to be precise about what you feed it. An agent that moves the second the meeting ends will move at whatever pace — and whatever standard — you've set going in.

Panic-pace, it ships the panic faster.
Covenant-pace, it ships the covenant faster. The amplifier doesn't choose the signal. You still do.

"The tool didn't change what you do. It changed how fast what you do becomes undeniable."

SeoX, sounds complicated. It’s not. And you should be enjoying this right now. Your company deserves it, and so do you.

We broke it down twice last week.

Have a look here: