Lean Tech &
AI Journal

Who Thrives in the AI Workforce?

Anthropic and OpenAI are following SpaceX and moving toward massive IPOs in the coming months. Meanwhile, college graduates are booing commencement speakers who even mention AI. At the University of Arizona this spring, Eric Schmidt faced backlash for talking about AI and the future of work. A recent Gallup poll found that a third of Gen Z Americans describe their feelings toward AI as anger.¹ This May, viral videos of graduates booing AI-focused speeches became their own genre.

The Next Value Stream: What Lean Can Learn from the Internet

Most organizations are still trying to apply AI to existing workflows: faster coding, faster document generation, faster analysis, faster search. This risks paving the cow path — making the existing process faster without asking whether the process still makes sense.

Prompt, Do, Check, Act: The New PDCA 

Every lean person knows PDCA. Plan, Do, Check, Act. It is one of the most familiar disciplines in our field.

The Reengineering Is Coming

Leadership Negligence, Not Technology Failure, Sets the Stage for AI's Most Expensive Correction

In 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow made an observation that still echoes: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."¹

The Strange New World of AI: My Second Brain Setup

This article went from concept to published webpage on an afternoon walk. I gave my AI assistant the task from my phone, walked, stopped once on a park bench to review the draft and approve it, and pushed it live. Concept to published page, on a walk. I was not texting with my head down in the middle of the street — mostly I was just walking and thinking while the AI handled the administrative and technical work of getting it online. For me at least that is the waste part I don’t enjoy. The actual thinking came from pieces I previously authored on my computer in various forms and two conversations I had audio recorded with colleagues. What follows is what the AI assembled, formatted, and published to my website — with my direction and editing. 

This is not science fiction. This is a random Tuesday afternoon in 2026. 

Insource What Matters: A Lesson from Toyota for Lean Practitioners in the Age of AI

There is a moment in lean transformation work that almost every practitioner has experienced. You have made real progress on the floor, in the office, or in the clinic. Flow is improving. Waste is visible. People are solving problems. And then you hit a wall, and the wall is technology.

Wait, That's My Job | How AI Exposed the Organizational Immune System Nobody Wanted to Talk About

AI isn't just disrupting work — it's exposing the organizational immune system. Tyson Heaton reveals who's blocking progress and who's quietly building it.

Four Moments from the 2026 Lean Summit that Stayed with Me

I hadn’t attended one of LEI’s lean conferences in over five years. The last one was right before the COVID outbreak shut everything down, and I was honestly curious about what I would find when I walked into the 2026 Lean Summit in Houston on March 11–13 this past week. Would the community feel the same? Would the conversations have moved forward? Would there be energy, or just nostalgia?

Lean Enterprise Institute Launches Formal LeanTech/AI Initiative

A dedicated initiative to help organizations apply lean thinking and practice to the technology layer of their operations, including the design, deployment, and continuous improvement of AI-enabled systems.