Hope everyone survived the snow. Looking forward to a busy new year in our thriving ecosystem!
UPCOMING EVENTS
Feb 5: BioNJ Annual Dinner Meeting & Innovation Celebration | East Brunswick
Feb 5: TechWalk | Jersey City
Feb 1: DEADLINE: 2026 INNOVATE100 Nominations
Feb 9: Newark Real Estate Summit | Newark
Feb 18: INNOVATE100 Winter Social (invite only)
Hope to see you soon! Onward!
Great pod on convening humans (hope to see you at ours and yours…)
+ two new thought-provoking pieces courtesy of AXIOS worth sharing:
How to AI
The No. 1 pushback we get from AI skeptics or newbies is: "It's overhyped. I asked it something and it spit out an unimpressive answer!"
Truth bomb: It's not the AI. It's you, Jim VandeHei and Dan Cox write.
Why it matters: Ask top large language models like ChatGPT something simple or generic, and you will get a simple or generic answer. Ask the right questions the right way, and you will often get magic.
Jim asked Dan Cox, our CTO and AI leader, to help him craft six ways for ordinary users to get more extraordinary answers. It starts with prompts — the very questions you pose to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Perplexity.
Just in time for performance-review season, here are six tips (for both reviewers & reviewees):
1. 🔁 It's a conversation, not a search engine. The biggest mistake newbies make is treating AI like Google — one question, one answer, done. The magic happens in the back-and-forth. Ask a question. Read the answer. Then push: "Make it shorter ... Give me three alternatives ... That's too formal ... What am I missing?" The best outputs come from the fifth or sixth exchange.
Example: You ask for help requesting a raise. The first draft is generic. You say: "Too corporate. I've been here six years and my boss is informal — make it sound like a real conversation." Now it's useful.
2. 👤 Nail the Who. Start by explaining who you are — your role, experience, anything relevant — and who you want the AI to think like when answering. Be specific.
Example: "I'm a senior account manager at a midsized software company. I've been here six years, consistently hit my numbers, and just took on two new direct reports. I want you to think like a brutally honest executive coach who has helped hundreds of people negotiate compensation."
3. 🧩 Context matters most. Give detailed, real-world framing upfront. The AI doesn't know your situation, your audience, or what you're trying to avoid unless you tell it. Specificity is everything.
Example (building on the Who): "My annual review is in two weeks. I haven't had a raise in 18 months despite a promotion in title. I know the company had a rough Q3, but my division exceeded targets. My boss is supportive, but not the final decision-maker — he has to pitch it to the VP. What's the smartest approach?"
4. 🚫 Just say no. Tell it what not to do. This sharpens output dramatically.
Example (adding constraints): "Don't give me generic advice like 'know your worth.' Don't suggest ultimatums — I'm not bluffing. And don't make it sound like a script I'd read verbatim."
5. 🪜 Say: "Think step by step." When you're dealing with anything complex — a negotiation, a decision with trade-offs, a strategy with multiple variables — ask the AI to reason through it explicitly. This simple phrase dramatically improves output quality.
Example: "Think step by step about how my boss will react and what objections he might raise when pitching this to the VP."
6. 👀 Just dump the image in. The models are extraordinary at instantly understanding screenshots, documents or files. Stop wasting time explaining what you're looking at — the AI can just see it.
Example: Screenshot your company's salary bands from the internal HR portal. Paste it into ChatGPT alongside your title and tenure. Ask: "Based on this, where should I be? What's a reasonable ask?"
⚠️ Trust but verify. AI can hallucinate confidently — inventing facts, statistics, even citations that don't exist. The more specific the claim, the more you should double-check. Use it to think, draft and strategize. But if it spits out a number or a name, verify it before you repeat it.
The bottom line: AI is a power tool. It rewards users who treat it like a sharp colleague rather than a magic box. Be specific. Be demanding. Keep pushing.
📱 How'd you do? How'd we do? What's your power prompt? Let us know:
Go deeper: Jim's video, "Blunt AI advice."
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3 Historic Shifts
You can only fully understand politics, business and your own anxiety in 2026 by reckoning with the three, once-in-a-generation shifts unfolding at once, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write
The ideologies, tactics and tone of governance.
The lightning-fast advancements in AI.
The overnight transformation of how our realities are shaped.
Why it matters: All three are hitting all of us — and all at once. If you focus on only one (like many do with President Trump), you miss the enormity of change pushing our minds and nation somewhere new, different and uncertain.
The good news: Once you see it, you can't unsee it. It helps explain your anxiety, your visceral sense that work and business are evolving, and your confusion about politics and policies. And then you can do something about it.
We plan to spend this year illuminating these shifts bluntly, but helpfully. We're big believers that you can only successfully navigate reality by fully understanding it.
The shifting tectonic plates:
1. A once-in-a-century shift in politics and governance. President Trump reinvented the Republican Party ... then American politics ... then American governance. He has proudly turned Republicans into an America First movement and stretched the powers of the presidency to unprecedented lengths.
His actions — and the reactions to him — are reshaping what the parties believe in, who votes for them, the language and platforms our politicians use, the relevance of institutions and outside experts, and the way other nations view us.
The politics and norms of one short decade ago are unrecognizable today. Democrats, especially California Gov. Gavin Newsom, are adopting many of Trump's most pugnacious tactics. And Democrats are as likely to counter with socialism as they are with more conventional liberalism.
Whatever politics was before, it won't be again, absent a massive reset.
2. A once-in-a-generation shift in how our realities are formed. Stop thinking about news as a way to understand the world. That's no longer how your reality, and what's left of our shared reality, forms. We call this the "post-news era." We're breaking into hundreds or thousands of information bubbles, shaped and hardened based on our age, politics, jobs and interests.
Pick six random people (we've both done this at dinners). You'll often find that most get their information from platforms the others never visit, and trust people the others have never heard of.
The common window we once collectively looked through has splintered into countless pieces. In its place: podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers, and digital and encrypted communities. With attention scattered and trust shattered, we've grown highly susceptible to manipulation, polarization and frustration.
3. A once-in-a-generation technology shift. AI has the promise, and high likelihood, of upending society at a scale greater than the internet — and possibly as profoundly as fire or electricity.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns it could destroy half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in a few short years, and has a 25% chance of essentially wiping out human existence. Sit with that sentence for a minute.
At the same time, there's nothing on the American or global landscape with more promise to cure disease, extend life, stretch our economy and enrich our imaginations. We've no choice but to get this right. You can't slow it or stop it, and government is mostly on the sidelines.
You might find this panoramic portrait of the American landscape horrifying or confusing or electrifying. But it's the most accurate picture of our reality today.
Any one of these shifts could cause grand social or political upheaval. All three, moving at once, crashing into each other, virtually guarantee it.
The bottom line: Never before has the nation needed more people spending more time thinking more originally about how to change government, business and personal thinking to meet this moment.
Never before have your understanding and participation been more imperative.
