The Factories That Got Electrification Wrong When electric motors became commercially available in the early 1900s, factory owners faced a decision that probably felt obvious at the time. They had a steam turbine. Now there was a better power source. So they swapped one for the other, kept the building exactly as it was, and […]
Your Vibe Coder Is Building. Does Anyone Know What They’re Building?
The Citizen Developer Wave Has a Governance Problem Every organization with 50 or more people probably has someone doing it right now. Maybe it’s the ops manager who discovered Claude and started automating her own workflows. Maybe it’s the analyst who connected your CRM to an LLM through an API and saved himself three hours […]
The Forward Deployed Engineer Land Grab Is Real, And Mid-Market Companies Are Being Left Out of It
Anthropologic and OpenAI didn’t suddenly get interested in consulting. What they built forward deployed engineering organizations backed by billions from Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, TPG, and Advent, with service partnerships running through Bain and McKinsey, is not a consulting play. It’s a token economics play. And understanding the difference is the most important thing a mid-market […]
You Already Have the People. You Just Haven’t Given Them the Structure.
The most common thing I hear from mid-market leaders about AI goes something like this: “We want to move on this, but we don’t have the technical staff to pull it off.” It sounds reasonable. It’s also, in most cases, the wrong diagnosis. Wyatt Barnett is Head of AI at the NCTA the Internet and […]
The Frozen Middle: Why Your AI Pilot Failed (And It Wasn’t the Technology)
95% of AI pilots never make it to production. If you’re reading this, yours probably didn’t either. Most people blame technology. Wrong model, wrong vendor, wrong implementation. Brett Schklar has spent two years working with 1,800 CEOs and business owners, tracking AI adoption across every department and industry vertical. His data tells a different story. […]
When Models Lie and You’re Still Paying for the Tokens
The $200 Lesson in AI Reliability Your AI just confidently walked you through a solution that made your problem worse. And you’re still paying for those tokens. This exact scenario happened to my podcast co-host Eli last week. His bike’s electronic drivetrain stopped working properly, a system so reliable he’d never learned to adjust it […]
Why Your AI Productivity Wins Are Making Your Best People Miserable
Your top AI performers are burning out, and the productivity metrics you’re celebrating might be hiding a human infrastructure crisis that threatens everything you’ve built. I had three different conversations last week with leaders running “AI-first” teams. Each was bragging about 10x, 50x, even 100x productivity gains. But when I dug deeper, the same pattern […]
The Implementation Reality Nobody Talks About
Aaron Wilt should be winning at AI. He’s technically sophisticated, runs a 40-person company, understands the technology deeply, and has given his team access to every major AI platform. Six months after his initial rollout, they were still doing most things manually. This isn’t a story about companies that don’t “get” AI. This is about […]
The Microsoft-Claude Connection That Actually Transforms Productivity
The Integration Most Companies Are Missing I’ve been a Microsoft skeptic for years. Word and Excel always felt like digital relics compared to Google’s cloud-native approach. But something fundamental shifted in the productivity landscape that caught me completely off guard. It wasn’t Microsoft Copilot, that’s still an expensive Clippy with better graphics. The breakthrough came […]
Most Organizations Are on Level One. Here’s What the Map Actually Looks Like.
When I ask audiences what they’re using AI for, the honest answer, the one that cuts through the excitement and the strategy decks and the pilot program announcements, is that most people are still opening a chatbot, typing a question, and closing the tab. That’s not a failure. It’s a starting point. But it’s worth […]










