RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique that combines information retrieval with AI text generation. Instead of relying solely on what a model was trained on, RAG retrieves relevant documents at query time and uses them to ground the response. This reduces hallucination and keeps AI outputs accurate and current.
What is AI memory?
AI memory is the emerging set of techniques that let AI systems remember who you are, what you've told them, and how you work, across conversations, sessions, and tools. Most organizations are only using two of its five layers.
ElevenLabs: The AI Voice Platform That Makes Emotion Audible
ElevenLabs delivers AI voice synthesis with emotional nuance that separates it from every alternative. With 3,000+ voices, 75ms latency, and expressive mode across 171+ languages, it is the infrastructure for voice-first AI experiences.
The PIEES Framework: 5 Ways AI Creates New Customer Value
Most leaders understand AI can improve productivity. Fewer have a strategy for creating genuinely new value. The PIEES framework (Personalization, Interaction, Emotion, Experiences, Stories) breaks down the five dimensions where AI transforms what you offer customers.
What Is an AI Persona?
An AI persona is the deliberately designed personality and emotional character of an AI system. It is not cosmetic; it causally drives behavior and adoption.
Disruption by Non-Actors: When Your Customers Become Your Builders
The biggest AI disruption threat isn't from competitors — it's from customers gaining capabilities previously locked behind expertise and capital. An operations manager just replaced a $600K enterprise contract with an AI-built system.
What Is Shadow AI?
Shadow AI is the unsanctioned use of AI tools by employees without IT approval or security review — the 2026 evolution of shadow IT that's faster, harder to detect, and significantly more dangerous.
Value Chain Compression: How AI Is Breaking Pricing Models and Unbundling Industries
Two trillion dollars in software market cap evaporated in 30 days. Insurance brokers lost 12% in a single day. The hourly billing model is dying. Here's the framework for understanding which value chain links are next.
What Is AI Fluency?
AI fluency goes beyond knowing what AI can do — it's the ability to independently apply AI tools to drive measurable results. Only 5% of workers have it. Here's why it matters.
Why Nordic flat hierarchies are both the best and worst thing for AI strategy
Nordic companies deploy AI 20% faster than the European average. Yet only 26% of Nordic CEOs are involved in AI strategy. The same flat hierarchy that accelerates adoption is fragmenting governance. Here is how to fix it.
AI Disruption: Two Lenses for Seeing What's Coming
Disruption means questioning whether your industry's operating model will still make sense in three years. Two lenses — value chain compression and new actor emergence — help you see where it's heading.
What Is an Agent Harness?
If the AI model is the brain, the harness is the body — the infrastructure layer that connects thinking to doing, and the make-or-break factor for agents in production.
What Is Computer Use?
Computer Use is the AI capability to see, interpret, and interact with computer screens like a human — clicking buttons, filling forms, and navigating applications without needing APIs or custom integrations.
What Is Model Routing?
Model routing is the practice of directing different tasks to different AI models based on problem nature, required capability, cost, speed, and quality requirements.
Leadership Principles in the Age of AI Agents
The same principles that built one of the world's most innovative companies are now the playbook for leading AI-powered organizations. Here's how seven of Amazon's leadership principles apply when your team includes agents.
Intent Engineering: The Missing Layer in Enterprise AI
We've taught AI what to know. We haven't taught it what to want. That gap is why most companies still see no tangible value from AI - and the fix starts with something Peter Drucker told us decades ago.
What Are Evals?
This Week's Term: Evals - structured tests that measure whether an AI system is performing to your standards, consistently and over time.
Building AI Agents That Work: 10 Design Principles for Business Leaders
Ten practical principles for leaders building or evaluating AI agent systems - whether for customer experience, internal operations, or any business function.
Shape of AI: A Pattern Library for AI UX Design
In Section 2 I argued that the old design process isn't producing great AI experiences - and that teams need new principles for building products people actually love.
What Are MCP Apps?
In Issue #12, I introduced term MCP - the open standard that acts as a "USB-C port for AI," letting AI models connect to external tools and data sources through a universal interface. Since then, MCP has grown rapidly.
Agent Teams: The Next Frontier of AI Business Value
I ran two sessions this week with AI champions at a customer I'm working with. The topic: what agents actually mean, and what the role of humans becomes when working with them.
What Is AI Orchestration?
This Week's Term: Orchestration - the coordination of multiple AI agents, tools, or capabilities to accomplish complex tasks that no single component could handle alone.
AI Strategic Inflection Points: Transforming Business Models
Drawing on insights from MIT Sloan's Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy program and Gartner research, this framework outlines key principles for successfully leading AI-driven transformation.
Google AI Studio and Gemini 2.5 Pro: Enterprise AI Powerhouse
When Mika writes about paradigm shifts - about recognizing when optimization stops being enough - he's describing something happening right now in one of the most consequential business tools ever built: Excel.
Invent and Simplify: Lessons from an AI-First Leader
Sometimes the best insights come from people who've lived through what the rest of us are only reading about. This issue features a guest article.
What Is an AI Moat?
A sustainable competitive advantage that protects a business from competitors, borrowed from the defensive trenches around medieval castles.
The Unstructured Data Goldmine: Your Hidden AI Advantage
At the MLOps Sweden meetup last week, hosted at AI Sweden, I had two conversations that surfaced something worth spending time on.
What Are Centaur Teams?
This Week's Term: Centaur Teams - human-AI partnerships that combine human judgment with AI computational power, named after the mythological creature that was half-human, half-horse.
AI Readiness Assessment: Where Does Your Organization Stand?
When I work with executives, leadership teams, and AI tasks forces on their AI journey and stratgey, sooner or later a key question comes up: should they build AI solutions in-house, purchase them from vendors, or ado...
What Is AI Inference?
This Week's Term: AI Inference - the process of running a trained AI model on real-time data to generate predictions, answers, or outputs. If training is learning, inference is putting that learning into practice.
Ownership: Acting on Behalf of the Entire Company with AI
When I work with enterprise clients on AI strategy, I sometimes ask the following question: "Who owns the long-term implications of your AI decisions?"
TempoHack: AI-Powered Time Tracking I Built Myself
I watch a lot of podcasts and video content. It's one of my primary sources for ideas, frameworks, and insights that make their way into this newsletter and my client work.
What Is AI Slop?
This Week's Term: AI Slop - digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.
Perplexity for Enterprise Research
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create value.
What Is MCP (Model Context Protocol)?
This Week's Term: Model Context Protocol (MCP) - an open standard that enables AI assistants to connect with external data sources and tools through a universal interface, allowing applications to provide context to ...
Claude Innovation Skills: Systematizing Innovation with AI
Claude Innovation Skills: systematizing innovation with AI
What Is Interpretability vs. Utility?
This Week's Term: Interpretability vs.
From AI Pilots to Production: The MIT Maturity Model
Many organizations have run an AI pilot by now. The interesting question is: what happened next?
Custom GPTs: Building Specialized AI Assistants
In this section I explore one AI-powered capability and demonstrate how it can be used to create business value.
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
I was a few years into my time at Amazon Web Services when this principle was introduced in 2021.
What Are AI Agents? The Five Levels
AI Agents are autonomous AI systems that can reason about problems, decide which tools to use, take actions across multiple steps, and iterate on their work without human intervention at each decision point, moving be...
Miro AI: Putting Intelligence on the Shared Canvas
Most AI tools solve for individual productivity. You ask ChatGPT a question, get an answer, and bring that answer back to your team.
What Is Multimodal AI?
This Week's Term: Multimodal AI - AI systems that can understand and generate content across multiple types of input and output: text, images, audio, video, and code, processing them together rather than in isolation.
Building the Business Case for AI Investments
When I review AI initiatives with business leaders, I see a concerning pattern. Teams are excited, budgets are allocated, tools are being evaluated. But when we ask "How exactly will this create value for your business?
What Is Synthetic Data?
What it means: Synthetic data is artificially generated information that mimics the statistical properties and patterns of real-world data, but doesn't contain any actual observations from reality.
What Is Context Engineering?
This Week's Term: Context Engineering - the practice of deliberately structuring, curating, and providing the right information to AI systems to maximize output quality, accuracy, and relevance.
Insist on the Highest Standards in the Age of AI
Insist on the Highest Standards - your role as a leader in the age of AI.
What Is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is software development where AI generates most or all of the code based on high-level descriptions or prompts - it's all about the vibe, not the implementation details.
Teaching AI Your Workflows with Claude Skills
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
What Is an AI Hallucination?
This Week's Term: AI Hallucination - when an AI model confidently generates false information that sounds plausible but has no basis in reality, essentially making things up rather than admitting uncertainty.
The Five Levels of AI Autonomy
Everyone's racing to build "AI agents," but most companies are thinking about this wrong.