Yesterday a Chief Commercial Officer at a tech company told me about the week he almost lost control of his own roadmap. One of his team members was buried in pricing math and contract paperwork, so she built herself a Claude tool to handle it. Nobody asked her to. She just noticed the friction and fixed it for herself. Within days, a few colleagues spotted the tool and got excited. They wanted to bend it toward bulk pricing quotes, a job that depends on forecasting and optimization data the...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Yesterday I saw the survey results from a room full of executives with some surprising results. A conference organizer had polled about a hundred attendees ahead of an AI focused event. Eighty three percent said AI had improved their work. Thirty percent said the investment had actually paid for itself. I think we're all experiencing this right now. I call it "modern day magic". AI delivers on so much so quickly. Not always the best, but faster and sometimes better than on our own. So the...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Yesterday I told you about the panic that hit me the night before my son's SAT. I'd given an unidentified company access to my Google account. I had no idea what it could see or do with it. I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but I'd built this before. The agent I built took hours of trial and error to wire up and lived inside Telegram, a messaging app. I gave it access to my Gmail and my Calendar. It could read, draft, edit, and delete emails. It could create and cancel calendar invites. All...
5 days ago • 1 min read
I got early access to instinct.co this week. It's waitlist only right now, rolling out slowly to tech insiders. I still don't know exactly how I ended up on the list. I've been playing with it for a few days now. It's genuinely good. It reminded me of an agent I built myself in early 2025, one that took hours of trial and error to wire up. Instinct does the same thing without any of that friction. Everything people have said about it online is true:...
6 days ago • 1 min read
It's Friday, and if your house is anything like the ones around me, back-to-school season is fully underway. New backpacks, new schedules, and for a lot of families, a new question nobody quite has an answer to yet: what do we do about AI and homework? There's a new study out of Stockholm University and the University of Hong Kong that's actually useful here. Researchers tracked 27,000 Chinese students, ages 12 to 18, over two years. About 80% used AI models like Doubao and DeepSeek for...
10 days ago • 1 min read
A friend of mine in California is helping organize a big event for her kid's school right now. The committee has leaned hard on AI for a lot of the planning, including the creative parts, not just the logistics. When she reviewed what the group had come up with, her reaction surprised me. Nothing was wrong exactly. Every idea worked. But she couldn't point to one that felt alive. "It's like the ideas were already average before anyone even voted on them," she said. There's a reason for that....
11 days ago • 1 min read
Sarah Friar, OpenAI's CFO, said something recently that I'm stealing with pride: enterprise customers have moved from "tokenmaxxing" to "cost per unit of intelligence." Tokenmaxxing is a great word for a bad habit. It's when a team measures AI success by how much they used it. More prompts, more integrations, more seats. Activity as the scoreboard. Cost per unit of intelligence is a different question entirely. It's not "how much AI did we use." It's "what did we actually get for it." Friar...
12 days ago • 1 min read
A founder I talked to this week shared his screen and showed me a file. His client runs crews on road construction sites. Flaggers, cones, lane closures. The file was boring to look at. When overtime starts for each customer, one says after eight hours, another after six. What an hour of crew time costs in a state with prevailing wage rules. What a piece of equipment rents for per day. Then he told me what it replaced. Working out that billing had been three people, two days a week, grinding...
13 days ago • 2 min read
The CIO of a firm got on a call with me last week and described her situation with more precision than most leaders manage. "I'm totally paralyzed by fear of not knowing what I'm doing, not knowing the things to anticipate, and just not knowing what the what is." Twenty years running the organization. Managing hundreds of millions of dollars and a team of half a dozen investment professionals. And she was stuck at the very first move. What broke it loose had nothing to do with a course. She...
15 days ago • 2 min read