As always, the Swiss train bringing me to Italy was fairly on time.
It arrived in Milan with a 15-minute delay. I had to run a bit to catch my next train, but that was no problem.

The next Italian train left right on the minute. It arrived at my destination 5 minutes early.

Enough time for me to jump back on the train to grab the suitcase I had left in the luggage rack 😂.

Unfortunately, not enough time to jump back off with it 😅.
So I had to stay on and get off at the next station.

20 minutes later, I caught another train back. This one was also perfectly on time.

On the way back to Switzerland, I was warned about a large strike causing massive disruptions to buses and trains.

My bus to the train station was perfectly on time.
My train to Milan left with a 5-minute delay and arrived right on the minute.

Turns out, the strike was actually limited to a few selected minor routes.
But of course, it was enough for people to claim that “in Italy, nothing works.”

A lot of negative things are said about Italy. Many of them are false or misinformed.

In the picture: the new shiny EuroCity Swiss train from Zurich to Milan.

How would you feel if your colleague upstairs got a $400k bonus while you received just $4,000?

That is what just happened at Samsung.

And it reveals an aspect of the AI frenzy I had honestly overlooked until today.

Until recently, the AI computing story was all about GPUs, mostly designed by NVIDIA.
We all know this story.

But lately, attention has shifted to memory chips, specifically DRAM.
In simple terms, the 16GB, 32GB, 48GB of your laptop.

Only recently did it become clear there is a shortage of advanced memory chips.

LLMs require increasing amounts of memory to operate, as context windows become larger and models more sophisticated.

Even the most advanced GPU doesn’t work efficiently without enough memory.

The result is a massive surge in demand for memory chips.

And an explosion in memory chip stocks!

• SK hynix stock is up 231% year-to-date
• Micron Technology is up 194%
• Samsung Electronics is up 139%

Beware, these sky-high valuations are not just hype. Profits exploded too.

Q1 2026 net income growth vs. previous year:

• SK hynix: +398%
• Micron: +180%

And Samsung: +476%!!

Samsung obviously makes far more than just memory chips:

Smartphones, TVs etc.

The irony is that the consumer electronics business unit is now struggling because of higher chip prices, which in turn massively benefited the chip divisions.

Unions representing Samsung’s chip business units negotiated an unprecedented profit-sharing scheme worth roughly $400k per employee on average.

At the same time, unions from the consumer electronics division requested a court injunction against the scheme.
Their bonus was mostly untouched 😔.

The AI revolution is creating very strange winners and losers.

Love this quote. It's meant for AI investment, but it applies to everything in life. To a career, relationships, friendships.

The risk of not risking is far greater than the risk of risking 🙂.

Everyone wants to become “strategic”.
They want to leave execution to others.
That is what promotions are for, they think.

But when they do get promoted and become “strategic”, they often lose touch with reality.

They stop understanding how the actual work is done.
They stop noticing quality problems early.
They stop learning.

I was reading Ron Friedman, Ph.D. HBR article on "superteams", and one finding stood out.

After surveying more than 6,000 knowledge workers, Friedman found what superteams do differently:

Superteam leaders stay close to the work.
They roll up their sleeves and contribute alongside their team.

The chart below speaks for itself.
78% of superteam employees said their managers were actively involved in the work, vs. 55% for average teams.

They don't stay close to the work to micromanage or to control every detail, but to understand what is really happening. And most importantly, to keep learning and improving.

It might sound obvious.
But in many corporate cultures, seniority equals distance from execution.
The leader "made it".
Now others do the work.

This culture may have been dangerous before.
In the age of AI, it is disastrous.

Technology is moving so fast that no leader can afford to stay hands-off.

AI makes hands-on understanding more important than ever, because the baseline keeps rising. What used to be complex is becoming easier. So to compete, teams need to keep raising the bar.

Superteams experiment, make mistakes, stay curious, learn from one another and practice continuous improvement. This is mandatory in the age of AI.

But that culture cannot exist if leaders talk about continuous improvement from a distance without practicing it themselves.

HBR article: https://lnkd.in/eKyf8K9U

Just back from my favourite place in Europe.

Montenegro 🇲🇪

Tivat and the bay of Kotor are thriving. It’s construction work everywhere. From luxury apartment buildings, to villas, marinas and general infrastructure.

It seems tourists from all over the world are finally discovering this gem.

In the streets you hear a vast array of languages, from the local Montenegrin, to Serbian, Russian, German, American and British English, French, Spanish. No Italian though!

Although there are no Italians in sight, everything is being built as a little Italy. The narrow streets, terrazzas, gelato places.

Luxury developments, shops and restaurants have mostly Italian names: “Porto”, “Brezza”, “Marea”, “Il Posto Giusto”, “Navale” etc.

Italian language is a brand in itself.

Tivat was a small local village until 15 years ago. Now it’s home to one of the most popular and luxurious marinas in the Mediterranean.

There’s a lot of optimism in the air.

Investments are flowing in.

Feeling such optimism in Europe gives me a sense of relief and hope during these strange times.

No surprise Montenegro is the next candidate to join the EU. The national airline planes already proudly show the “28 by 28” livery.

28th EU country by 2028.

I root for them. It will bring a new gem to our beautiful Europe.

The photo is taken from a terrazza in Herceg Novi, probably my favourite spot in the whole bay.

Google Marketing Live 2026 was boring.

Except for one thing.

For the first time I can remember, Google explicitly addressed its direct competitors. Meta and TikTok. Mostly Meta.

Philipp Schindler warned advertisers not to believe what competitors say about their ad effectiveness. Instead, he told us to “check the data” and trust him.

YouTube is the place where most of purchase decisions start, not on social media feeds, despite what Meta or TikTok claim.

Not sure exactly how we’re supposed to check the data other than just listening to him. But hey, I trust him. 🙂

What I heard is that Google is feeling the heat.

Meta made $55B from advertising in Q1 2026, up 33% YoY.
Google made $77B from advertising, up “only” 15% YoY.
Meta is creeping in dangerously.

According to eMarketer, Meta is even expected to surpass Google in advertising revenue in 2026.

That matters because ads still make up roughly 73% of Alphabet’s revenue.

The concern is real.

Meta may be behind Google in consumer-facing AI.
But under the hood, it is clearly very advanced.

As a marketer, I’ve seen Meta and TikTok ad performance improve massively over the past year or so.

A big part of that comes from AI-driven campaign types like Advantage+ and Smart+.

Google’s Performance Max and AI Max are also very powerful.

Clearly, the AI race is not about chatbots.
It is about who can use AI for better advertising effectiveness and monetisation.

Btw, OpenAI also plans to make billions from ads.

Now you see where all that AI capex is going 😅.

Chart courtesy of ChatGPT.

Source: Q1 2021 - Q2 2026 Alphabet and Meta earnings report.

ChatGPT will be your personal finance manager.

But it’s also your personal career advisor.
Your personal life coach.
Your personal trainer.
Your personal everything!

OpenAI is strongly positioning ChatGPT as an all-round personal assistant.

And this new personal finance feature is a perfect example.

Yes, AI is great at coding, automation, agents, and all the technical use cases everyone keeps talking about on LinkedIn.

But those are still niche use cases.

While personal assistance is universal.

Everyone has money questions.

Everyone has career questions.

Everyone has dating questions.

That’s why I’m more and more bullish on OpenAI.

Of course, privacy is the obvious concern.

Would I immediately connect all my financial data to OpenAI?
No.

Would millions of non-tech-savvy users do?
Yes.

That has always been the trade-off with great consumer technology anyway: convenience first, privacy second. For better or worse.

I’m bullish because OpenAI seems to understand that the real prize is not only coding productivity.

The prize is becoming the default interface for personal decision-making.

And I believe it’s much better than Claude at doing that.

Only time will tell what AI truly becomes in the long run:
just an enterprise engine working in the background,
or an everyday companion for billions of people.

My bet is increasingly on the second.

Anthropic is the stock market.

Look at some of its largest investors:
Alphabet
Amazon
NVIDIA
Microsoft
Blackstone
Salesforce
Cisco
Qualcomm
Intuit
BlackRock
Goldman Sachs
JPMorgan Chase
Morgan Stanley

What do they have in common?

They are some of the largest companies in the American stock market.

Together, they represent roughly 28% of the S&P 500’s market cap!

And many of them have large exposures.

Alphabet has committed up to $40B.
Amazon has committed up to $33B.
NVIDIA and Microsoft have also made multi-billion-dollar commitments.

Whatever happens to Anthropic, happens to the market.

And needless to say,
the same logic applies to OpenAI and many other AI ventures.

So yes, we should all pray that AI will finally deliver.

Not only because the technology is exciting.

But because half of our portfolios are already betting on it. 😅

Two companies capture 41 cents of every global advertising dollar.

Neither calls itself an advertising company.

So how is the advertising market doing?

‍

Depends who you ask.

Ask WPP, one of the world’s largest agency groups, and the answer may be: “not great”. Its stock is down roughly 72% over the past 5 years, amid stagnant revenue and profit.

Ask dentsu, another global giant, and you may hear something similar.

Its stock is down by 11% over the same period, following two years of negative net income.

Now ask Google or Meta 😅.

Between 2021 and 2025:
• Google’s advertising revenue grew 41%
• Meta’s advertising revenue grew 71%

Both companies talk a lot about AI nowadays.

Cloud, new technology, changing the world...

Fair.

But follow the money.

Advertising still represents:
• 73% of Alphabet’s total revenue
• 98% of Meta’s total revenue

Together, Google and Meta capture around 41% of the entire global advertising market, based on WARC estimates.

Not digital advertising.
All advertising!
Online and offline.

Exclude China, where they cannot fully operate, and that figure rises to roughly 50%.

That’s the real story.

‍

So when people ask how the advertising market is doing, just look at Google and Meta.

I’d like to make a very important announcement:

Velocity pivot hunger to win relentless execution insatiable appetite artificial intelligence tokenmaxxing tokenised toecurling double-digit growth transformational volatility fireside chat drinking from a fire hose burning platform general pyromania augmentation not automation it’s not AI that will take your job but the person using AI headcount reduction tough decisions rightsizing.

Innovation powerhouse three horizons four Ps five whys six is too many town hall watercooler conversations think like an owner speed up fast forward step back step up zoom in zoom out I’m feeling quite dizzy helicopter view deep dive top-down bottom-up downside upside rotating turnaround no really I am going to be sick.

Change management strategic strategising waterfall agile sprint cascade tentpole brainstorming whiteboard miro board bored senseless modernising digitisation revolution not evolution not revolution vibe-coding value-added MVP SVP FIFA CRO MCP PRD BBQ BAU KPI DEI though we don’t talk about the last one much any more.

Data is the new oil models are the new oil oil is the new oil surplus abundance multiplier effect 10x 100x 1,000x oh what the hell 10,000x impact deep impact really deep impact supercharged superexcited superpower superintelligence supermarket superstars tipping point inflection point choke points three-point turn lean elevate sharpen reach out circle back converge spin up spin down spin out.

Edge cases use cases suitcases frequent flyer lounges platinum member air miles in flight dynamic environment shifting landscape new industrial revolution bias for action actionable traction tractionable is that a word? It is now reimagine reinvent reinforce revamp renew redefine resilient grit growth mindset futuristic heuristic holistic optimistic systemic getting the ic.

Transforming the value proposition propositioning transformational value delighting customers strengthening communities leveraging insights other verb-noun combinations end-to-end workflows deployment training inference stack full-stack slack attack geopolitics geoeconomics geotechnology geography is back top-right-hand quadrant total alignment partial alignment non-alignment disagree and commit together.

Unfolding ever-changing fresh perspectives instant personalised large-scale multi-year multi-service long-term investment pipelines embedded ecosystem leaders leading through leadership leaden prose new normal new paradigms paradox parabola hockey-stick J-curve K-shaped A-game C-suite B-yoncé.

Improved outcomes purpose values mission behaviours customer-centricity customer-obsessed sounds a bit creepy to be honest bold audacious daring restless ambition world-class industry-leading game-changing topline metrics blueprint corporate DNA digital workforce orchestration agentic compute fuelling propelling driving accelerating never braking

Happy Sunday LinkedIn!! 🥳

Masterpiece by: Bartleby on The Economist.