Aiming to address these challenges and guided by previous work on amide activation, we herein report a conceptually novel approach to olefin hydroacylation relying on an intermolecular coupling of secondary amides and alkenes, which requires neither a transition metal catalyst nor directing groups and which delivers ketones with high levels of chemo-and regioselectivity. In initial experiments, a range of secondary amides 1 was activated prior to the addition of commercially available alkene 2a. From the outset, trace amounts of ketone could be detected using the simple N-propyl amide 1a (Table , entry 1). Encouraged by this result, we noted that the amide N-substituent critically affects the efficiency of this transformation (entries 1-6).