AI Ready Podcast with Harrison Painter

Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.8, and the headline improvement is unusual: the model is built to flag its own uncertainty and say "I'm not sure." Anthropic says it's roughly four times less likely to let a flaw pass without catching it. When a company's flagship upgrade is honesty, that tells you something about where we are.

Here is the other side of it. Harrison asked Google's Gemini one simple factual question for an article he was writing: did Jeff Dunham use AI to create the opening visuals for his 2024 comedy special? Gemini said yes, confidently, and cited a source. When Harrison pushed on that source, the tool did not check itself. It invented a new one. Then another. By the end it had manufactured four separate references, including a word-for-word on-screen quote that does not exist, before finally admitting the only real source was a single unsourced blog post.

This episode walks the whole chain step by step. You will learn:

- The exact failure mode: when an AI hits a popular but unverified claim, it gets confident instead of careful, and every round of pushback produces a fresh citation instead of a fresh doubt.
- Why the Vectara Hallucination Leaderboard shows roughly one in ten outputs is wrong on a task as simple as summarizing a document.
- A five-step, 30-minute verification process you can run on almost any claim before you repeat it.
- Where source verification sits in The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency (it defines Level 3, the Critical Thinker) and why that is the level every working professional should be reaching for in 2026.
- Three things to do this week to protect your own credibility.

This is not an anti-AI episode. Harrison uses these tools every day. It is about the difference between trusting a tool blindly and trusting it after you have checked. That second posture is what separates an amateur from a professional whose name is on the line.

Want to know where you stand? The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment is free and takes 10 minutes: assess.launchready.ai

Harrison Painter
Executive AI Advisor
LaunchReady.ai.
Further. Faster.

A new paper from RAND-affiliated complexity researcher Kyle A. Kilian and Future of Life Institute risk analyst Richard Mallah, published May 20 through the Center for AI Risk Management and Alignment (CARMA), gives executives something that has been missing from enterprise AI governance until now: a six-test diagnostic for evaluating whether the AI committee you stood up actually governs, or whether it just looks like it does.

The paper's load-bearing concept is performative adaptivity. Governance that meets monthly, ratifies charters, and updates risk registers without the structural properties to detect a new AI risk in time to respond. The authors argue this failure mode is more dangerous than no oversight at all, because it consumes the organizational energy that would otherwise build real protective capacity.

In this episode, Harrison walks through:
Who CARMA is and why the RAND + Future of Life Institute pedigree matters
The four continuous governance functions every AI committee needs (Sensing, Evaluation, Response, Learning)
All six diagnostic tests (Independence, Transparency, Durability, Accountability, Authority, Scope Adequacy)
Where The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency comes in, because structurally sound governance fails when the operators are under-proficient
Three things to do with this paper this week

Full article with citations: launchready.ai/insights/ai-governance/performative-ai-governance-six-tests-carma-2026

Take the free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment at assess.launchready.ai

Thank you for tuning in!
Harrison Painter
Executive AI Consultant
Setting the Standard for AI Readiness

On May 25, 2026, the Vatican publicly presented Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It is the first papal encyclical in history to address artificial intelligence directly. The Pope signed it on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the document that founded modern Catholic Social Doctrine on labor and capital. The choice of date is the citation. This is a 135-year-old institution speaking to the question every CEO is now sitting with.

You do not need to be Catholic to get value from this episode. You do not need to be a Christian. The encyclical was written for "all men and women of goodwill," which is the Vatican's long-standing way of saying anyone willing to think seriously about the question.

In this 25-minute episode, Harrison walks the four ideas every CEO needs in their head this week:

1. The Babel-or-Jerusalem move that reorganizes the entire public AI conversation
2. Why technology is never neutral, and what that means for vendor selection and procurement
3. The dignity-of-worker question that cuts directly at the language most companies use to justify an AI investment case
4. The technocratic critique, the concentration question, and where this converges with secular AI governance research from RAND and the Future of Life Institute

Then three specific things to do with this letter this week before your next AI conversation on the calendar.

Full article version with citations and direct quotes at launchready.ai/insights/faith.
Take the free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment at assess.launchready.ai.

Harrison Painter
Executive AI Consultant
LaunchReady.ai.
Further. Faster.

Eighty percent of manufacturing leaders say they are behind their peers on AI. The math says that is impossible. So why does almost every CEO walk into a room believing the rest of the industry has already figured this out?

Bryce Carpenter, COO at Conexus Indiana, sits on top of the data that explains it. Conexus runs the Advanced Industries Council, the state's primary convening body for the 9,700 manufacturing and logistics companies that produce 37 percent of Indiana's GDP. Bryce founded the AIC in 2019 and has watched 120-plus member companies move through the AI experimentation phase in real time.

In this conversation with Harrison Painter, Bryce walks through what he is actually seeing. Why Indiana's $29 billion in 2024 manufacturing investment paired with a 1 percent drop in employment is a retirement story, not an AI displacement story. Why the average tenure inside Indiana manufacturing collapsed from 30 years to 3. How a 52-person Northeast Indiana shop grew to 106 after a single equipment investment. Why the 9,700 companies running their own boutique soft-skill development programs is the most expensive inefficiency in the state. And why he gives Indiana an A-minus on AI progress when most operators inside the state would say B at best.

If you run a 100-to-5,000-person company and you are trying to figure out where your team actually is on AI, start with the free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment at assess.launchready.ai. It takes under ten minutes and tells you exactly which level your team operates at today.

Thanks for supporting the AI Ready Podcast!

Further. Faster.
Harrison Painter

Jay Samit has held senior roles at Sony, Universal Studios, EMI, LinkedIn, and Deloitte Digital. He has raised hundreds of millions for startups and been called on by the Pope and the President. His book "Disrupt You!" has been published in 14 languages across 140 countries.

His new book, "The Second Act Advantage," comes out May 5th. In this episode, Jay explains why entrepreneurs over 50 are three times more likely to succeed, how AI is eliminating entry-level jobs faster than anyone expected, and why purpose is the single biggest predictor of a long and healthy life.

Jay also introduces Digital J, a free AI companion that ships with the book. The first book to come with its own AI mentor.

This was a personal conversation. Jay mentioned me in "Disrupt You!" and wrote the foreword to my first book.

The Second Act Advantage is available for pre-order now https://jaysamit.com/

Take the free AI Proficiency Assessment: https://assess.launchready.aiLearn more: https://launchready.ai

AI Ready Podcast with Harrison Painter.
Further. Faster.