Adoption · DeliveryOctober 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Frictionless Is Still the Promise
Customers were promised frictionless AI customer service. What many are getting is a smoother conversation, not a faster fix.
Essays
Writing for the people who have to land it
Everything here is about the part of the work that AI cannot compress.
GovernanceOctober 18, 2026 · 5 min read
When the Seller Becomes the Advisor
Between May and July 2026, the companies that build the technology also became the ones paid to advise on it. I think that changes what a second opinion is worth.
DeliveryOctober 18, 2026 · 7 min read
What Is Actually New About the Forward Deployed Engineer
Four vendors committed about $9 billion in 2026 to putting engineers inside their customers. The role is mostly not new. I think two things about it are.
Governance · Part 2October 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Decision Authority, Earned in Steps.
What an agent can decide should depend on what it has demonstrated, how far mistakes can reach, and what can be reversed.
Governance · Part 1October 16, 2026 · 4 min read
Same Unresolved Decision. Two Different Clocks.
Agents can't let an old, unresolved decision sit. The same ambiguity that waited months now surfaces in minutes.
GovernanceOctober 2, 2026 · 4 min read
Governance Is How New Technology Becomes Ordinary
What a room above a Chicago fire station can teach us about testing, trust, and the technologies we're rushing to deploy.
Reporting · GovernanceSeptember 30, 2026 · 2 min read
The PM Role, Rewritten
Verification runs at the speed of delivery, and judgment is worth more because producing the work keeps getting cheaper.
DeliverySeptember 28, 2026 · 2 min read
Trust Compounds One Commitment at a Time
Repayment happens on a schedule, and the schedule matters as much as the total.
Delivery · Governance · ReportingSeptember 14, 2026 · 3 min read
A Dozen Small Yeses
How scope creep hides in plain sight.
Delivery · ReportingSeptember 9, 2026 · 5 min read
The Trade-off Most Recovery Plans Skip
"We're a bit behind, but we'll catch up." A recovery plan that promises to make up lost time without saying what gets smaller, later, or different is asking for more trust than it is earning back.
Governance · AdoptionSeptember 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Ten Years of Edge Cases Don't Compress
AI can write a custom solution in weeks now. The time it takes to have already been wrong in ten thousand small ways is unchanged.
Delivery · GovernanceSeptember 7, 2026 · 6 min read
Start With What Can't Be Reversed
Every recovery starts with three or four things broken at once. The fire that gets fixed first is usually the loudest one, not the one closing a door permanently.
Reporting · DeliverySeptember 1, 2026 · 4 min read
How Late the Bad News Arrives
Every recovery I have walked into had the same giveaway: someone knew before the steering committee did. The cost sits in the gap between those two days.
Governance · DeliveryAugust 28, 2026 · 5 min read
Testing Automation Is a Verification Question
Most developers don't fully trust AI-generated code. Fewer than half verify it before it ships. More automated testing is the obvious fix, and it treats the symptom.
Adoption · ReportingAugust 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Adoption Isn't the Same as Trust
When Copilot is the only tool available, adoption hits 68 percent. Give people a free choice and it falls to 8. The dashboard was never measuring what we thought.
Delivery · GovernanceAugust 19, 2026 · 6 min read
Delivery Decides What Survives
AI took away the grace period bad delivery used to get. The failure mode hasn't changed. Only the amount of warning before it costs something.