What if supply chains aren't going back to normal? What if counting AI usage tells you almost nothing about its value? And what if the fastest way to hire the talent you need is to buy the company they already work for?

In this episode of ExecutiveEDGE, Abby White and Geert De Lombaerde unpack three of the month's most-read stories and the difficult decisions they raise for business leaders.

First, they examine why waiting for supply chain volatility to disappear could create its own business risk—and how leaders can think about resilience, flexibility and scenario planning heading into budget season.

Then comes "tokenmaxxing": the practice of encouraging employees to maximize AI usage. It worked—perhaps too well. Abby and Geert discuss what happens when companies measure AI activity instead of business value, and why finance teams may play an increasingly important role in the next phase of AI adoption.

Finally, they explore acquihiring. As specialized talent becomes harder to recruit, buying an established team could give companies faster access to critical capabilities—but only if leaders get the integration right.

In this episode:

• Why waiting for supply chains to "normalize" could be a strategic mistake
• How to think about the cost of resilience and optionality
• What tokenmaxxing teaches us about measuring AI
• Why more AI usage doesn't necessarily mean more productivity
• How leaders can connect AI spending with actual business outcomes
• Why AI agents may need their own version of expense controls
• When buying a company for its talent might make sense
• Why the integration strategy can make or break an acquihire

The common thread? Don't keep forcing the old playbook when the operating environment has changed.

Build flexibility where it matters. Measure outcomes instead of activity. And know what capabilities the business actually needs before deciding how to acquire them.

Featured ExecutiveEDGE Stories

The Supply Chain Has Been a Mess. Here’s How to Think About It This Budget Season Andrea Zelinski 

The Game of Tokenmaxxing: Worth Playing, Dead or Salvageable? Andrea Zelinski 

Struggling to Hire Needed Talent? Think About Buying It Geert De Lombaerde 

Prefer to read? Here's an excerpt of the podcast transcript:

Abby White: Hi, I'm Abby White, and I'm vice president of EndeavorB2B's Content Studio.

Geert De Lombaerde: And I'm Geert De Lombaerde, senior editor at large with EndeavorB2B.

Abby: We're going to change the format a little bit this month. In the past, we've been going over the five most-read stories from the previous month. I felt like we were rushing through those, so we're going to cover the top three stories, spend a little more time with those, and talk about what raised some difficult questions for leaders heading into budget and planning season.

One asks whether companies are still waiting for supply chains to settle down, even though the evidence suggests they probably won't. Another looks at what happens when companies reward employees for using as much AI as possible. And the third considers whether the answer to a difficult hiring market might be buying the entire team.

Geert: It's all about questioning some long-held assumptions. We know by now there is no cruising along like executive teams maybe were able to for a while between all the disruptions we've had to manage in recent years. The thread is: How much are you willing to tweak what you're doing versus tear it down and build something new?

Abby: Let's dig in with supply chain disruption. Our first article was written by our contributor, Andrea Zielinski: "The Supply Chain Has Been a Mess. Here's How to Think About It This Budget Season."

The problem, as Andrea explains, is that waiting for clarity can lead to paralysis. If volatility is now structural rather than temporary, holding off may be a decision in itself.

At what point does waiting for things to calm down become the bigger risk for leaders?

Geert: I think a lot of leadership teams have come to the realization that there is no more waiting.

Executive teams have realized we need to be prepared for change. We don't know what the change is with any real certainty. We know there will be change. One thing that struck me was Andrea talking about building muscle to respond to these scenarios. Organizationally, you need to be prepared—not just the C-suite saying, "If this happens, then that," but really working that into your whole organization.

Abby: A lot of companies are moving away from lowest-cost, just-in-time thinking toward more resilient networks. Even though that just-in-case inventory approach provides protection, it also ties up working capital and increases carrying costs. Optimizing operations might require sourcing from several countries rather than a single low-cost route.

Geert: And with that comes a reset in costs. General Motors said executives have signed a financing supply arrangement with a third party that will fund, via a bank credit line, up to $4.5 billion to buy critical parts from suppliers, so the suppliers can make it and hold it in case GM needs it come the next disruption.

Abby: You need to know where the company needs flexibility, what that flexibility will cost, and be willing to eat that cost in the name of stability and less disruption.

Budget season cannot be built around the assumption that supply chain conditions will eventually settle down. Leaders need to decide which forms of resilience are worth paying for before the next disruption forces the decision.

That same budgeting challenge is showing up in a much newer category. Companies have spent the past few years encouraging employees to use AI, but many are discovering they never built a good way to measure what that usage was worth.

Andrea took a look at tokenmaxxing in "The Game of Tokenmaxxing: Worth Playing, Dead or Salvageable?" Companies encouraged usage without establishing meaningful unit economics and parameters around what AI should be used for, with some even having token leaderboards. But that didn't show whether employees were producing better work, saving money or improving margins.

Geert: The Wall Street poster child for token maxing gone wrong was Uber, which early this year had to come out and say, "We have used our entire budget for AI."

The bigger fit for me is: What's the value of AI to your organization? If you can't answer that question pretty clearly and quickly, tokenmaxxing is completely the wrong way to go, because you're going down a couple hundred rabbit holes at the same time, and the budget's ticking on all of them.

If you can't define the parameters, the goals and how they connect to the strategy, any incentive to increase AI use could go down a pretty expensive path.

Abby: We're at the point where every department has to take an honest look at their team and say: What are you using it for? How has it improved your work? Are we actually saving time and money, or are we using more expensive toys to do the same job?

Geert: Andrea makes a good point. Expensive doesn't have to be bad in this case. Some of the things AI can do for you cost a lot of money, but also produce a great deal of value. It goes back to: What are we trying to do? If we point AI in this direction and it fits with the strategy, are we willing to accept the cost? But it requires homework ahead of time, oversight and parameters.

To me, that's a lack of oversight, and not even financial oversight, but strategic oversight. Is this machine pointed in the right direction for the organization?

Abby: Every team leader has to ask the hard questions and justify what your team is spending on AI, especially going into budget season, so you don't lose those tools for things you actually need.

The goal isn't about maximizing AI use or minimizing it. It's to understand where AI creates value for your company and manage it with the same seriousness and visibility as any other major expense or workforce investment.

AI is also changing the talent market itself. Companies need people with highly specialized skills, but the traditional hiring process is becoming noisier and less reliable. This next story is one of yours, Geert: "Struggling to Hire Needed Talent? Think About Buying It." Why did you want to write about this topic?

Geert: Talent is always on my radar. I cover trucking companies, oil and gas companies, electric utilities, and some manufacturing and healthcare organizations as well, and every quarter those executive teams talk about the talent issue. Every industry is struggling to recruit really skilled people, senior people, or people they can turn into senior people.

This story popped up while listening to Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, which makes turbines, power equipment and a lot of the things that go into the energy grid. He mentioned what for GE Vernova is a tiny deal, less than $10 million, for a company in Montreal called Robotech.

GE Vernova is going to wind down the rest of the business and bring that team in-house. It's about 35 engineers. Strazik said a huge part of this is talent. 

Plus, they're in Montreal. McGill University's in Montreal. That's a great engineering program. We're going to look to build that out into a center of excellence and a recruiting hub for GE Vernova.

A lot of acquihiring history goes back to Silicon Valley. Internet giants have been doing this for years, buying software companies just for their talent. The fact that an engineering company building gas turbines and transformers is thinking about things in the same way caught my ear.

Abby: Is that due to the advent of AI proliferating in every industry? Is that what moved that trend out of Silicon Valley and into places like GE Vernova?

Geert: To some extent, yes. I think it is more broadly that the workforce is getting tighter in terms of skilled labor. You have consistent workforce shortages and a lot of experienced people retiring and taking their talents out of the workforce. Everybody's competing for a pie that is slowly shrinking.

AI is speeding that up, but it's much broader than that. It's an idea that has made its way into other industries: "Yes, we'd like to hire 500 people this year, but what if we hired 150 of those by buying that company over there?"

Abby: Acquihiring may solve the recruiting problem, but it creates an integration problem. How should leaders decide whether to keep the team together or spread those people across the company?

Geert: It gets to the heart of why are you buying this team? What need are you trying to serve in the company? Do you want to bring in a group that is disruptive in a productive way? Are you looking to light a fire under a team you already have that needs a reset? Or are you trying to be non-disruptive and, in the case of GE Vernova, do more of the same, but faster and more efficiently?

It's important, as with any M&A transaction, to think about: Am I bringing this in to overhaul something, to completely disrupt it, or am I bringing a team in to adjust and improve processes we already have?

If you acquire a company with 35 engineers and give them license to blow up a few things along the way, you could lose people that were already there. Even if the 35 people you brought in are putting up great results, if you lose 20 people that were already there because they don't like how their workplace and process have been disrupted, did you really win?

Abby: The GE Vernova example is such a good one because that wasn't the only approach. They also pursued this center of excellence partnership with McGill University. Companies probably need several approaches to build the workforce required for their next phase of growth.

Geert: Absolutely. You have to think long term. We're going to invest in that center of excellence. We're not just going to do this deal and then be done with it. We're going to be strategic about recruiting and becoming a partner that is going to, over a long period of time, attract a talent pipeline.

Abby: Looking at all three stories together, they involve a familiar business problem that's becoming harder to manage with the old playbook. Supply chain leaders cannot wait for volatility to disappear. CFOs cannot treat AI usage as a proxy for value. Companies competing for specialized talent may not be able to rely on traditional hiring alone.

Geert: The theme that comes up is be intentional, be strategic, don't overreact. Don't be rigid in what you do, but have some flexibility built in. It's about figuring out this adjust-slash-overhaul dynamic. Where are we on that spectrum? Things need to change. Do we need to change them just enough, or do we need to rethink the way we're doing these things?

Abby: Thank you for joining me today, as always.

Geert: Great to chat, good to see you.

*Transcript lightly edited for clarity and brevity