YPO Technology Network AI Brief

Who Made That Call?

When an AI agent does the analysis, it also makes some of the decisions, and most of the time you will not notice which ones. A new Anthropic study shows how that happens

The Platform Bet And The Amazon Question

The biggest cloud platforms are spending around $800 billion on data centers and chips this year, and if your business runs on one of them, that is mostly good news. Plus

Your ERP Is Getting A New Interface

Your ERP is getting a new interface, and it is the chat window your people already have open. Stephen on OpenAI and Oracle bringing Fusion and NetSuite into ChatGPT, how

Read The S-1 Like A Buyer

Anthropic opened its books. Read the S-1 as a buyer, not an investor. Stephen on eighty percent consumption billing, why the meter will flatten, where labs go next into v

Your Keywords Still Matter — The Scoreboard Changed

Keywords still matter. The single rankings and sessions scoreboard does not. Stephen on why SEO is not dead after the answer box, why CEOs need two scoreboards under one

Zero Payoff

Apollo's Torsten Slok says AI has delivered zero financial payoff outside Big Tech. Stephen on why the payoff is real but not being collected, the Bill of Work problem, t

My Agent Has A Real Computer

Most people still picture Grok Bot as a chat window. It is not. It is a computer. Stephen on why a real Linux box, named tools, Infisical secrets, and a nightly Amazon S3

Investor's Corner: Sell the Shovels, Keep the Cash

Weekend Investor's Corner. Stephen opens a periodic investing deep dive: AI shovels versus AI loans, gold miners that finally keep the cash, uranium against oil, a word o

Door Policy

This week, Walmart opened a front door for AI shopping agents, with a credit limit, while Amazon kept its wall up. Stephen explains why very few companies can afford that

Fifty Dollars A Break-In

This month, breaking into a big company cost about fifty dollars, less than a business lunch. Stephen explains how one hacker's AI agents got into more than a hundred com

Forty Tabs Open

For a while this year, Stephen was the busiest he has ever been and was getting almost nothing done. He explains how AI agents that took one to three minutes per task lef

AI Receipts

Every company has an AI vision. Very few have AI receipts. Last week Manulife showed its receipts: three hundred million dollars in measured AI value, with a target of on

Can You Turn It Off?

Reuters reported last week that America's top bank regulators have started asking banks whether they can control their AI agents, and whether they can turn them off. Step

I Fired My Second Brain

About a year ago, Stephen's company built what he still believes was the right AI knowledge system for the tools of the time: a dedicated machine, a folder per client, No

Slow Is Fine. Deliberate Is Better.

On Tuesday, Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, said his group will go more gradually on AI than it planned a year ago, and will not spend out of fe

Buy The Plumbing, Not The Model

On Monday, HCLTech, India's third-largest IT services firm, announced a business unit dedicated entirely to Anthropic, adding to its Gemini business unit and its OpenAI p

They Raised The Flag. Then They Were Gone.

About two weeks ago, OpenAI fired three of its own safety researchers. They published an open letter, OpenAI published a long reply, and the two sides now agree on almost

I Call It The Bill Of Work

Stephen Forte puts a name on the record: the Bill of Work™. Every manufacturer knows its bill of materials: every part, what it costs, the order it goes in. Almost no com

My Agent Will Call Your Agent

On Friday, Sierra and Meta published Draft 0.1 of the Personal Agent Protocol, nicknamed "Poppy": the first draft of the rules for what your customers' AI assistants may

Your Dashboard No Longer Needs A License

On Thursday, Anthropic shipped Claude Dashboards in beta: connect your data warehouse or an app like Salesforce, ask a question in plain English, and get a dashboard wher