Written from inside the work.
Field notes from live operations, and what's actually worth knowing from the AI industry, operations practice, and business management. No hype, no reprinted press releases — and every industry claim carries its source.
Agents scale whatever you already have
Gartner expects agents to outnumber sellers ten to one by 2028 — with fewer than 40% of sellers saying it helped. A multiplier doesn't repair what it's pointed at.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · AUG 2026 · 4 MINNobody wrote down who decides
IBM found seven in ten executives report unclear decision rights in AI-enabled work. The technology arrived on schedule. The authority to overrule it never got scheduled at all.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · AUG 2026 · 4 MINThe 95% is not a model problem
MIT found that 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots delivered no measurable P&L impact. The models weren't the reason — the learning gap was. What the other 5% do differently isn't glamorous.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · AUG 2026 · 4 MINTwo curves: agentic adoption and agentic cancellation
Agents in 40% of enterprise apps by the end of 2026 — and over 40% of agentic projects canceled by 2027. Both forecasts are true. Governance decides which curve you're on.
Read → OPERATIONS · AUG 2026 · 3 MINTwo-thirds of the budget, no idea what came back
67% of supply chain digital spend now goes to AI, and 55% of the officers signing it off can't state the return. That's not an investment problem — it's a baseline problem.
Read → OPERATIONS · AUG 2026 · 3 MINPlanned versus reactive: the ratio that runs your operation
Every operation splits work into what it chose to do and what happened to it. Almost nobody can state their ratio out loud — and that pause is the finding.
Read → MANAGEMENT · AUG 2026 · 3 MINJudgment is a bottleneck you can widen
When every hard call lands on one desk, the problem usually isn't capability — it's that nobody below has a framework they trust. Escalations 7–10 a day became 3–5, and stayed there.
Read → FIELD NOTE · AUG 2026 · 3 MINThe seam nobody owns
Between any two teams sits a handoff with no owner, two systems, and the work that slips through. Start your AI there.
Read → FIELD NOTE · AUG 2026 · 3 MINSo-so automation is the real risk
The dangerous tool isn't the one that fails loudly. It's the one just right enough to trust and just wrong enough to cost you.
Read → FIELD NOTE · AUG 2026 · 2 MINWhy I got burned and didn't change
Experience said trust people less. I never did. Why some values shouldn't be optimized away.
Read →Nothing filed under that heading yet — it's coming.