Introducing Work After AI Weekly
Every Friday, one signal from the smartest capital in the world, translated into what it means for how you organise work.
A short note before the first issue goes out.
Over the last three years I have had more than a thousand conversations with boards, owners and PE funds across DACH and Europe, mostly about the same underlying question. Everyone can see that AI is changing what a company needs to get work done. Almost nobody has a reliable way to see where that change is actually heading next, before it shows up in their own industry.
I started looking for an early signal, and I found one in an unlikely place. Venture capital is one of the few markets where the smartest people in the room have to place a real bet, with real money, months or years before the rest of the market catches on. When the firms at the very top of the field, ranked by the Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking, start moving capital in the same direction at the same time, that is worth paying attention to. Not because the investors are the story. Because their bets are one of the earliest, clearest signals available for where work, organisations and enterprise software are actually heading.
That is what Work After AI Weekly is. Every Friday I go through the latest deals from ten of the top hundred venture firms in the world, rotating through the full list of a hundred over the course of the year, and I read them for one thing only: what they tell us about the future of work. Not which model is smartest. Not which round was the biggest. What it means for how you organise a company when part of the workforce is software.
Each issue distils that into three core trends and a short section on signals at the edge, the energy, defense and macro shifts that sit underneath everything else. No deal roster for its own sake. No hype. The venture data is the method, not the subject. The subject is always the same question. What is the smartest capital in the world telling us about the future of work, and what should you actually do about it before your competitors do.
The first issue goes out right after this note. It looks at what happens the moment an AI colleague becomes a permanent hire, and who has to manage it. It is not a prediction. It is a reading of decisions that have already been made, by people who had to be right or lose their investors’ money.
If you run a company, sit on a board, or simply want to see the shift before it reaches your desk, this is written for you. No jargon, no consultant framing, just the pattern as I see it, every week.
Subscribe here on Substack for the full issue every Friday, and follow me on LinkedIn for the shorter version of the same signal.
Whoever waits to pay attention to this will find, a few reporting cycles from now, that the shift was already visible in the data, and they never saw it coming.
Gerhard Kürner is CEO of 506.ai, the European platform for Service-as-a-Software and agentic engineering. More than 1,000 conversations over the last three years with boards, owners, and PE funds across DACH and Europe.