"Clearly, the thing that’s transforming is not the technology — it’s the technology that is transforming you.”

—Jeanne W. Ross, Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management

What MIT’s Iceberg Index Signals About Work

MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new way to measure how AI interacts with the U.S. workforce.

Instead of looking at job titles or industries, their Iceberg Index evaluates more than 32K skills across 151M workers and compares them to the capabilities of production-grade AI tools. It is one of the first attempts to quantify how much of today’s work is technically within AI’s reach.

The Overlap Is Much Larger Than Expected

The highly visible tech disruption represents a narrow slice of exposure at 2.2% of national wage value.

The larger share sits in administrative and cognitive work, where the Index measures an overlap of 11.7%. These are jobs that involve moving information along, verifying details, coordinating steps, and keeping operations stable, which makes them highly susceptible to automation.

Geography Doesn’t Predict Exposure Anymore

A second finding cuts against conventional assumptions. Regions known for logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, and public-sector employment show significant exposure because their workforces rely heavily on the kinds of routine cognitive tasks AI already handles well.

Unlike past technology waves that clustered around metro hubs, AI’s reach follows the structure of work rather than the location of tech employers.

Economic Indicators Won’t Catch This Early

Another notable insight comes from the absence of correlation. Traditional indicators like GDP, unemployment, and income explain very little of the variation across states.

The pressure created by AI’s capabilities emerges inside workflows long before it appears in macroeconomic data, which means leaders will likely experience operational shifts before the statistics catch up.

What This Means for Auto Retail

Dealerships operate squarely inside the part of the economy where the Index shows strong capability alignment. Scheduling, document flow, communication loops, reconciliation, and analysis all map closely to tasks AI systems already perform reliably.

The advantage will go to operators who can separate tasks worth automating from tasks worth elevating.

The AI Shopping Assistant That Quietly Dominated Black Friday

Rufus still isn’t a household name, but it is quickly becoming one of the most influential tools in online shopping.

Launched broadly in 2024, Rufus is Amazon’s built-in AI shopping assistant that lives inside the app and website. It helps customers compare products, interpret reviews, sort through specs, ask follow-up questions, and navigate Amazon like a conversational search engine rather than a traditional grid of listings.

Rufus flew under the radar for most of the year, which makes its Black Friday impact even more striking.

Sessions that used Rufus doubled purchase rates compared with the previous 30 days, while non-Rufus sessions rose only 20%. Day over day, Rufus-assisted conversions jumped 75%, more than twice the lift in standard sessions.

Adobe Analytics captured the same momentum across all retail, reporting a nearly 800% surge in AI-driven site traffic and a 38% higher likelihood to purchase when shoppers arrived from an AI tool.

With personalization, visual search, and growing agentic capabilities, Rufus is steadily becoming the most quietly powerful tool in Amazon’s ecosystem.

The real story is not that it boosts conversion. It’s that it changes how product discovery works, and early adopters will set the patterns everyone else has to match.

We spend a lot of time asking AI to “rewrite this” or “make it better,” which is basically handing it a sledgehammer and hoping it hits our ambiguous mark.

Alignment works differently. It shows you what’s already in the draft, what’s missing, and what’s possible.

Here’s a prompt that helps you see your work clearly before you try to improve it:

• Management & Operations: Genspark
  An all-in-one AI workspace that functions more like a digital operations team than a chatbot. It handles tasks like calling vendors, building spreadsheets, writing emails, and generating sales decks across a single integrated platform.
   

• Company Culture: Awardco

  A platform for employee recognition and rewards that helps companies streamline how they celebrate achievements, milestones, and everyday wins. It integrates with tools like Slack and HRIS systems, automates key moments like birthdays and anniversaries, and offers a wide reward network through Amazon Business, gift cards, travel, and charity options.
   

• Content Creation: Fal.ai
  A generative media platform that provides fast, scalable access to AI models for creating images, video, audio, and 3D content. It offers API integration, customization tools, and flexible deployment options suited for advertising, e-commerce, and gaming applications.

What if your dealership’s biggest AI problem isn’t AI at all?

In this episode of The Dealer Playbook, Michael Cirillo and creativity guru Nir Bashan dig into why dealers glued to data and dashboards might be starving the one thing AI can’t replicate: real human creativity.

Nir breaks down why tiny mindset tweaks beat massive overhauls, and how to leverage your imagination to your advantage.

If you want AI in your store without turning into a robot yourself, this one’s worth the watch—catch the replay here.

• Between 10AM and 2PM on Black Friday, online shoppers spent $12.5M every minute. 🛍️

• A New York state law now requires retailers to disclose the use of personalized pricing. 🤑

• Leaked code suggests that OpenAI may be preparing to introduce ads to ChatGPT. 🛒