Thinking Out Loud

The Customization Tax Nobody Talks About A mid-sized logistics company spent $400,000 on enterprise AI software last year. Great product. Proven ROI. Used by dozens of their competitors. Six months later, they wondered why their AI investment hadn’t created competitive advantage. The answer was simple: they’d paid for efficiency, not differentiation. Every one of their […]

The Most Expensive Question You Never Ask A founder came to my office last month with a twelve-slide pitch deck. Beautiful design. Impressive revenue projections. Three different market opportunities, each requiring different capabilities, different partners, different brand positions. “Which one should I pursue?” he asked. Wrong question. The right question: “Which one am I actually […]

I asked Claude to calculate the Net Promoter Score for a dataset last week. Forty-seven survey responses, mix of scores from zero to ten. The AI returned an NPS of 34, showed its work, and the math checked out. It had miscounted the categories. Treated some sevens and eights as promoters when they should have […]

This week, a cybersecurity startup called CodeWall pointed an autonomous AI agent at McKinsey & Company’s internal AI platform. No credentials. No insider knowledge. No human in the loop. Just a domain name and what the researchers called “a dream.” Two hours later, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production […]