The Agent Is Not the Moat
The agent gets the product name and the animated workflow. The durable advantage is accumulating underneath it: distinctive signal, legitimate customer access, and a learning loop that makes the next response more relevant.
Agentic AI
Essays on agentic AI, orchestration, systems thinking, and what executive leaders need to understand now.
47 posts
Letaido Puts the Marketing Dashboard Inside the Loop
Ahrefs' Letaido points to a shift in marketing software: the dashboard is becoming a window into a persistent agent loop. Routine sensing and analysis can run continuously, while human attention moves toward objectives, interpretation, customer meaning, and creative direction.
When AI Makes Polish Cheap, the Making Becomes the Marketing
Generative AI is making competent polish abundant. A surprise Chinese animation hit suggests the next creative advantage may belong to brands that make their choices, constraints, and authorship visible.
Can a SaaS Output Carry Its Own Renewal Case?
Google's AI ad disclosure points to a broader product shift: when agents become the user, SaaS products may need outputs that carry their own commercial context into budget and renewal decisions.
The AI-Readable Ad Shelf Is Open. Who Is Buying?
AI-readable advertising moves the ad shelf upstream. Brands can now buy presence in publisher pages that AI systems may use to form product recommendations, but a paid placement is still not a recommendation.
An AI Label Can Tell the Truth and Still Reduce Trust
The best AI disclosure is not always the longest. Audiences judge whether AI strengthened the offer or removed the expertise, care, identity, or accountability they thought they were buying.
The Unit of Creation Is No Longer the Asset. It's the Operating Loop.
Adobe’s June 2026 expansion is not “another creative AI feature drop.” It is a product shift that relocates the surrounding workflow into the suite itself. When creative and marketing platforms can execute outcome specs with editable artifacts and clear escalation boundaries, the unit of creation b…
The New Scoreboard Is Placement: What Google's Gemini Sequence Actually Reveals
Reports say Google’s best coding model is about six months behind the frontier. Yet Google shipped Gemini into Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, and Android surfaces. The lag is the decoy. The move is the point: competitive advantage is rotating from model IQ to placement economics and task assignment,…
The Taste Contract: Adobe's New Coworker Turns Brand Judgment Into a Product Primitive
Adobe’s CX Enterprise Coworker uses agentic CX orchestration grounded in brand, customer, and channel intelligence. The real frontier is not orchestration or models. It is treating brand judgment as a machine-readable, runtime-enforceable “taste contract,” including the constraint sets and refresh…
Four Million Videos a Day: How Marketing Became a Specification Problem
Four million cinematic social videos a day is not a creative milestone. It is proof that marketing’s bottleneck is now specification: the “compiler” layer that translates intent into model-executable video plans, and the human acceptance seam that keeps brand meaning intact at scale.
Define 'Good' Before You Ship the Agent
Teams ship ambitious enterprise agents, usage rises, dashboards look alive, and then renewal collapses. The missing piece is not governance or measurement. It is leadership sequencing: define “good” as an objective function and renewal-grade artifact before you wire the agent into the workflow.
The Four Councils That Actually Move AI
Semafor’s Global Advisory Board split into Frontier, Capital, Builder, and Founders looks like a conference taxonomy. My read is that it actually matches how AI power is exercised right now, especially as Europe pivots from AI regulation theater toward compute and gigafactory scale.