The Frauds Shaping Your AI Strategy
They have never built anything. They will never own the consequences. You will.
Note: This is not part of the standard Hacking Leadership series. It simply must be said.
There is a class of fraud proliferating on LinkedIn. Not misguided commentators. Not overconfident amateurs. Frauds. Tourists. People who have never shipped a production system, never defended an AI budget, never sat in the room when a projection failed and someone had to explain why. People who speak with absolute authority about the future of technology and work, monetize that authority aggressively, and have structurally arranged their existence to avoid accountability for any of it.
You know exactly who they are because you see them every day on LinkedIn.
The bio says “AI Strategist” or “Future of Work Advisor.” The credentials are assembled from speaking slots that came from previous speaking slots, follower counts that substituted for expertise, and advisory titles attached to companies that would struggle to describe what the “advice” actually changed. The format is always the same: short declarative lines engineered for the algorithm before they are engineered for truth. Four posts a week. Absolute certainty. Every one.
The content runs a specific con. One week AI eliminates entire professions. The next, nobody has figured out durable ROI. In between, every company must become an “AI company” immediately or be left behind, while most AI startups are acknowledged as thin wrappers on foundation models they don’t control. Prompt engineering ends traditional engineering…until code doesn’t matter…until agents do everything…until whatever gets engagement next. The storyline shifts constantly. The certainty never does. They are not updating on evidence.
They are watching what lands and posting more of it.
Block is what this looks like in practice. Dorsey laid off 4,000 people, rebranded a correction for pandemic overhiring he personally admitted to as AI-driven transformation, and watched the stock surge 24%. His own memo eleven months earlier said explicitly the cuts were not about AI. The frauds ran with the rebranding: screenshots, certainty, “the starting gun has been fired;” all because the narrative was useful and verification was not. One executive’s accountability avoidance became their content. Ignorance compounding on ignorance, each layer adding confidence, none adding scrutiny. That is not analysis. That is a retweet with a personal brand attached.
This is not accidental. It is structural.
Incentives govern behavior. Always. When an information environment rewards confidence over calibration, when audiences cannot distinguish mechanism from theater, and when the cost of being wrong is absorbed by operators rather than these frauds, the rational move is to optimize for attention and exit before accountability arrives. These people are not confused. They are not naive. They are responding correctly to the system they are in. The fraud is rational. The environment that rewards it is the problem.
And that environment is you.
Executives absorb this content and repeat it in strategy sessions. Boards demand to know why the company isn’t moving faster. Operators inherit mandates from people who have never shipped anything, never owned a failure, never been in the room when the projection missed and someone had to stand behind it. Real people with real budgets and real headcount are making real decisions downstream of LinkedIn posts optimized for engagement before they were grounded in reality, produced by people who will be on to the next topic before the damage from the last one is visible.
You funded this. You platformed it. You forwarded it to your leadership team.
The receipts exist. Every contradicted certainty, every wild claim, every “the future of work is here” post that hasn’t aged into anything defensible: all of it timestamped, indexed, and searchable. When capital tightens and AI spend gets scrutinized against actual outcomes, the collapse will not be technical. It will be reputational. The frauds will migrate to the next frontier, reassemble the same bio with updated keywords, and begin posting with the same certainty they deployed here. They will not unwind the technical debt. They will not answer for the misallocated capital. They will not explain what happened to the strategy they sold you.
They are never in the room when the bill arrives.
You are. You always are.
Confidence without mechanism, without constraint, without accountability to consequence is not a perspective. It is fraud with good formatting. And every time you engage with it, share it, or let it shape a decision, you are not a victim of misinformation. You are its distribution network.
The frauds exist because the audience keeps paying.
Stop paying.