Your Best Salesperson Never Sleeps: How AI Finds Your Next Customer
Finding buyers used to be a numbers game: buy a list, call everyone, hope. AI changes the question from "who is on the list" to "who is showing signs of buying right now." A plain-language guide for leaders to the four jobs AI does in lead generation, where companies get it wrong, and a five-step playbook.
October 1
The Robot Can Write the Ad. You Still Pick the Story.
A plain-English guide to AI in marketing for executives and VPs. The five jobs AI does well today, the three traps that catch smart teams, a one-page rule sheet, and a 30-day plan you can start Monday.
October 1
How to Use AI Agents Safely: A Plain-English Playbook for Leaders
AI agents can now do real work on their own, which means they can also make real mistakes on their own. Six simple rules, one story of what good looks like, and a seven-question checklist any executive can bring to Monday's meeting. No tech words required.
October 1
Skipping the API and Building the MCP Server Instead
A new InstallMap study of 5,630 YC company domains found that a third of startups with an MCP server have no public API at all. What you gain by going MCP-first, what you quietly give up, and how we think about it while building Zara.
October 1
Your AI Agents Just Got Keys to the Building. Who Is Watching Them?
AI agents are the new digital insiders: workers that act on their own, talk to each other, and already misbehave at 8 in 10 companies. A plain-language guide for executives on the five new risks and the seven questions that keep them in check.
October 1
AI Agents Should Be Mostly Deterministic. Here's Why
Building Zara's brain taught us where an LLM belongs in an agent and where it doesn't. Hallucination cascades and runaway token costs pushed us toward a design where the model only extracts intent into a structured Action DSL, and deterministic code does the rest.
October 1
The Making of Luck in Tech
Luck looks like chance, but we play a bigger role in it than it seems. A look at blind luck versus controlled luck, personal agency, the 1% rule from Atomic Habits, and Richard Wiseman's newspaper experiment on why feeling lucky helps you notice opportunities.
October 1
Bringing an AI Agent Into Microsoft Teams
AI agents are only useful if people can actually interact with them. A look at connecting an AI scheduling assistant to Microsoft Teams - the adapter service that bridges the two systems, progress updates with Adaptive Cards, and keeping conversation state so "tomorrow" means what the user meant.
October 1
My First AI Job Interview
I had the skills. Unfortunately, I also had to prove I had personality. A short story from 2032: an AI agent gets coached by an AI, interviewed by an AI, and hired by an AI — and discovers that the interviewer might become its boss, its employee, or both.
August 31