I've been the bridge. Between strategy and code, between design and delivery. It's exhausting. And lately I've been wondering if exhausting is the same thing as valuable.
After 25 years bridging strategy to production, I still can't answer 'what do you do?' cleanly. That might be the point.
I don't need more Salesmen. I need a Sushi Master, a Pitmaster, and a Molecular Gastronomist. AI lets us return to the Guild—craftspeople in their own lanes, augmenting their own mastery.
An LLM is the ultimate observer. Like the angels in City of Angels, it watches everything. But it cannot taste. That's both a gap and an opportunity.
What if the billable hour isn't a business model—it's a coping mechanism? A way to avoid confronting that the thing we're selling might not be scarce anymore.
Everyone spent 2024-2025 experimenting with AI features. Q1 2026 is when the survivors figure out what actually works—and kill what doesn't.
Every e-commerce platform is racing to add AI features. But what if the real opportunity isn't AI features—it's AI architecture? What if the store itself could generate in real-time?
If I handed you my camera right now—same lens, same settings, same light—would you get the same shot? The tools are available to everyone. The output isn't.
I used to say 'just one more level' until 3am. Now I say 'just one more version.' The game changed. The compulsion didn't.
I just finished writing a whitepaper on agentic commerce. It's solid work. But something started bothering me. There's a version of this future that looks less like 'shopping gets easier' and more like 'retail becomes a trading floor.'