profile

Dan Newman

I help organizations build AI fluency and governance that actually changes behavior — not the kind that lives as a PDF on a Notion page. 19 years onboarding humans to strange new places (startups, scaling tech, enterprise agencies like GroupM and WPP) gave me a head start when AI showed up as just another strange new place. The TL;DR is my biweekly newsletter for leaders thinking through what AI means for their people.

A chart showing Job title searches (peaked in April 2023) and Skill listed in postings (Peaked 2024)
Featured Post

The TL;DR, Proficient in AI is the new Proficient in Word

A bi-weekly roundup of depreciating skills October 3 - October 16 Stop trying to make 'Prompt Engineering' happen. It's not going to happen! I remember when I was advised to list "Proficient in Microsoft Word" on a resumé. If I did that today, I'd probably look like a doorknob. It's pretty obvious that some skills have become so fundamental in today's workforce that calling them out would work against you, but when will "Proficient in AI" become the new Microsoft Word? Is that day already...

Hi friends, Learn to Scale turns SEVEN today! In dog years that's 49, which CRO Roman Noodles says is old enough to know better but young enough to choose otherwise. Every October 10th I give a present to everyone who has ever crossed paths with Learn to Scale and this year I made YOU a special treat. It's called AI Bootcamp and the whole thing is built around doubting your AI. I made it for one teammate (Kiki) this spring, people kept asking for a copy, and now it's for everyone. In Kiki's...

Toddlywonks, a chaos gremlin cloaked in flames

A bi-weekly roundup of underwhelming SOUL.md files September 19 - October 2 Enthusiastically Parliamentary Meet Toddlywonks. He's a chaos gremlin with a lazy eye and a degree from a for-profit college that went out of business in 2019. According to TW, he's a 'Licensed Arsonist.' Toddlywonks lives in Muse, Meta's new AI personal agent product, and I only allowed it context data about my personal life. Longtime readers already know Tiddlywinks, my Claude-based thought partner, who is all...

a man running over a very small hurdle saying "Wait, that's it?"

A bi-weekly roundup of reliving that first time feeling September 5 - September 18 You Never Forget Your First When I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2019, I did what all the good podcast ads tell me to do: launch a website on Squarespace. For almost seven years, that was good enough. Sure, there were lots of weird workarounds I had to bang together to get all my different tools working together (I'm looking at you, Code Embed Block), but overall, it got the job done. Part of why I...

a scale weighing time and done, with done weighing down the balance

A bi-weekly roundup of sycophancy in 9 minutes August 22 - September 4 Remembering How To Human Quick note: September 16-18th I'll be at HubSpot's UNBOUND conference, doing tarot card readings about AI fluency/anxiety. I've set up a Braindate listing if you're going to be there, or just look for the guy in the Learn to Scale hat and ask for your fortune. I learned how to design trainings way back in my first job after college, in an AmeriCorps program at a charter school. Through a blend of...

a hand holding a shot glass of gasoline

A bi-weekly roundup of napkin math and secret ceilings. August 8 - August 21 Anthropic's 39% of flesh I'm midway through an AI transformation engagement with a climate client and one thing I agreed to chase down for them is a reliable way to measure AI's climate impact. After some research and 6K of ElevenLabs tokens, I had hacked together a short 5-minute podcast between three fake people to explain what I found. Wanna listen? Listen: The AI Climate Paradox Let's acknowledge the absurdity...

a strategy room, full of money and violence

A bi-weekly roundup of how fighting with an AI makes good business sense July 25 - August 7 How To Invite AI To Punch You Right In The Task List My Sunday Scaries tend to hit me on Monday mornings and they are existential. You know those deep-dark forever-empty thoughts, like “Am I enough?” or “Is my life meaningless?” Yep, I get them too. This Monday’s creeping dread was “Am I making enough money?” and as a business owner, that’s uncomfortably adjacent to “Is my business making enough...

A bi-weekly roundup of money-saving hacks in iambic pentameter July 11 - July 24 A Poem For FinOps For next week’s monthly Show Me Something Cool With AI, I issued an optional challenge to get AI to write a poem that sounds like you in the FEWEST number of words/prompts as possible. This challenge is both a curiosity of mine and my forecast where AI Fluency is headed next. First, the forecast: people are using AI. According to Pew Research, about half of Americans are using chatbots in 2026,...

an AI machine vomiting slop into a slopifying news digest

A bi-weekly digestible digest about digests June 27 - July 10 AIndigestion You know what’s an “easily AI-automate-able task” that felt utterly boring? News digests. Back before the Slop Era, newsletters were how I curated my own personal knowledge base. There were a few publications that I treasured for their selection (personal favorites, The Educator’s Notebook and Offbeat) and I trusted them to keep me sharp and informed on my professional and personal interests. It’s actually what...

a tiger made of paper, roaring

A bi-weekly roundup of writing the rules last. June 13 - June 26 Practice Beats Paperwork I had to tell my friend and client Krysta this week that the policy she wanted to publish doesn't exist...and then tell her she was already ahead of companies ten times her size. This exchange took place after the second session of my AI Fluency for a 100% Human Workforce program for her BuildingPPL team. Specifically, I had just sent over the Gut-Check Card from Tuesday's session and 90 minutes later,...