Your Best Performers Are About to Leave (and it's not for the reason you think.)
I text with a lot of CEOs and founders. At least twice a month now, one of them hits me with some version of: “Sh*t, so-and-so left and we feel so blindsided.”
It is usually their top person. My old instinct was always the same two questions: Who poached them? Were they unhappy?
That is not where my head goes anymore. More often than not, the answer is neither. The answer in 2026 is very different:
They are leaving to do the very thing they kept trying to convince their company to do.
They realized they could make more progress in a weekend with AI tools than they had in the previous quarter - and maybe even the previous year.
They are not leaving their company. They are leaving the gap between their capacity and their organization’s ability to act.
This is a signal. And most of corporate America is waking up to it a little too slowly.
I’ve seen this pattern before
In the Six Signals framework I use with companies across industries to spot hidden growth opportunities, talent movement is one of the most reliable predictors of where a market is heading.
When I chose to write my master’s thesis on Twitter when the platform had fewer than 2,000 users, the reason I was able to see the opportunity was not brilliance. I wish. It was that I noticed the best journalists were migrating to a platform everyone else was dismissing as irrelevant. The signal was not “traditional journalism is dying.” The signal was “the most ambitious people see something here that you don’t.”
The same pattern is playing out right now, but the migration is not toward a new platform. It is away from organizational structure itself.
According to Carta’s data, solo-founded startups rose from 23.7% to 36.3% of all new U.S. ventures between 2019 and mid-2025. That is not a blip. And these are not all twenty-somethings building their first thing. A growing number are experienced professionals walking out of organizations where they spent years developing judgment, building domain expertise, and watching their best ideas die in committee. They just realized they no longer need a team, or anyone’s permission, to build.
Where your best people go tells you what they know that you do not. And right now, they know execution has become cheaper than permission.
The Change-Response Gap is widening
I call this the Change-Response Gap. It is the distance between how fast your market is changing and how effectively your organization can spot the signal, interpret what it means for them, and respond quickly, but strategically. The bigger the gap, the more vulnerable you are.
Here is the change: AI has collapsed the cost of execution. You used to need twelve people to build a product. You needed sprint planning and approvals and roadmap debates. That was just how things got done. The cost and inefficiencies of the overhead was invisible because there was no alternative.
Now, there is an alternative. A person with strong judgment and the right AI tools can go from insight to working product without a team, without a budget cycle, and without anyone’s permission.
Most organizations are hearing about this shift, not responding fast enough. They are still running the same structures, the same approval chains, the same consensus-building processes. Every week they delay, the gap gets wider. Every week the gap gets wider, their best people feel it more acutely. They are the ones sitting in their third alignment meeting of the week thinking, “I could have built this already” or at least, “I bet Claude can help me find a better way to do this.”
What I saw at Rewired
In March, I ran the first Rewired workshop at my home in Miami with eight executives, founders, and operators from different industries.
What struck me was not the technology. It was what happened to people when they could work directly with AI, without the usual organizational drag. No budget approvals. No cross-functional dependencies. No waiting on someone else’s calendar. These are smart, capable leaders who already knew what they wanted to build. The bottleneck was never ideas. It was organizational friction. When that layer disappeared, they moved at a speed that surprised even them.
One attendee had been sitting on a project for months. She had great ideas. She even had the skill to get about 70% of the way there on her own. But getting it across the finish line would require budget approval, cross-functional teams, and a timeline that kept getting pushed. In four hours, with the right AI tools and no permission needed, she had a fully working version. This wasn’t a deck. This wasn’t a Google Doc plan. It was a live, working demo of the very thing she had been wanting to build.
Another attendee discovered a buyer behavior pattern his company had completely missed. He had suspected it for a while but felt hesitant to surface it inside his organization. Doing so meant building a case, scheduling meetings, convincing skeptics, and crossing fingers it would survive the prioritization process. With AI doing the data pull and pattern analysis, he went from hunch to evidence in under an hour.
Here is what I keep watching happen in these rooms. People are slowly waking up to what is actually possible now. At first, everyone assumed AI was deeply technical. Something for engineers and developers. Then vibe coding showed up and people started to wonder if they could use it too. Now it is landing for real.
More and more people are realizing that all it really takes is the idea, the curiosity, and the determination.
But, what about the technical execution? You can figure that out - and even ask AI to teach you the technical steps required to execute. That is the awakening that is happening right now, and it is happening faster than most organizations realize.
Why they leave
When I was running Zen Media, we worked with clients who were so clearly right about what needed to happen next. They could see the signals. They had sharp instincts about their customers, their market, where things were heading. But the things they wanted to do were stopped by two forces. They needed technical people to help build the thing they were envisioning. Or they needed the political maneuvering to get buy-in from the layers above them. Or, often, both.
AI has lowered the first barrier so dramatically that the second one, organizational politics, now feels intolerable.
Many of these people love their jobs. Many of them love their companies. But as Dave Garrison writes in The Buy-In Advantage, employees need three things: they need their work to count, they need their ideas heard, and they need a say in how the work gets done. When the organization becomes the thing standing between them and all three, they start doing the math. And when you can make more progress in a week on your own than you can in an entire year inside your company, that math gets very simple very fast.
Too many companies are confusing gravity for disloyalty. These people aren’t leaving because they stopped caring. They’re leaving because the pull toward what’s now possible is stronger than the friction that used to keep them in place.
The Talent Signal Audit
In my upcoming book, I teach a five-question filter for deciding whether a signal points to your opportunity. One of those questions is this:
Would we be gutted if a competitor moved on this and we didn’t?
Apply that to talent. If your best product person left tomorrow and built the thing she has been trying to build at your company, but as an employee of your competitor, would you be gutted?
If the answer is yes, that is your signal. Here is how you act on it.
Ask your top people three questions:
What would you build if nothing were in your way?
What signal are you seeing that our leadership team is not acting on?
What could you prototype in one week with AI and full autonomy?
If you do not know the answers to these questions, you do not really know where your company’s next opportunity is coming from. Or, your next talent loss.
Then do something with what you hear. Give one person a real problem, AI tools, a clear objective, and a week. Tell them to come back with something working, not a plan for something working. This is what we do in Rewired, and it is where the breakthroughs happen.
If they don’t feel equipped to do that, provide some guidance and tools to get started. With AI’s ability to teach people how to do the thing they envision, curiosity and determination are the two human skills required to start.
The window
Most of your best people have not left yet. After all, the tools are still new - and still evolving. Also, there is still enough uncertainty around AI that many talented operators are watching, experimenting on the side, and trying to figure out what is real and what is hype.
We have not hit the tipping point yet. But, we are close.
Every week, the tools get better. Every week, another sharp operator discovers what they can produce on their own. Every week, the math gets a little harder to ignore. This window is closing faster than most leaders think.
At the end of the day, your best competitive advantage is your people. It always has been. Strategy matters, positioning matters, capital matters. But, the judgment and conviction of your best people is what actually turns signals into growth. Lose that, and everything else becomes exponentially more difficult.
Strategic Urgency is the capability leaders need for all the accelerating forces in the market right now. AI, shifting customer behavior, talent migration. The discipline is the same across all of them: see the signal, interpret whether it is yours, act before the window closes.
The talent signal is the loudest one right now. And, it is pointing at the people already inside your building.
Your best performers are about to leave. When they do, it won’t be because they stopped caring. It will be when they realize they can now move with clarity, agency, and output while your organization is still stuck in process, permission, and delay.
The question is what you are going to do about it while they are still here.