Relative to your interests, Wednesday

After reading many of the below and other links in elusive enterprise AI ROI, I wrote this theory on how to be successful with enterprise AI projects. It’s the usual “culture” cliché, but hopefully a little more practical than usual.

• Are PMs becoming irrelevant? – Once you remove the need for a bunch of “paperwork,” product managers can refocus on figuring out how to use software to solve customers problems and run customer businesses better. Speaking of:
• What the Floor at Worldwide Taught Us About Better Technology – “At its best, great technology doesn’t ask restaurant teams to absorb more complexity. It removes that complexity so the experience feels intuitive, even in the middle of a fast-paced restaurant environment… [E]ven the most advanced technology only matters if it makes things easier for the people using it.” For example: “operators want products that move from visibility to action, especially when it comes to helping teams make smarter staffing and shift execution decisions in the moment.”
• Some negative thoughts on AI – Trained against the wrong context ($100bn on savings has to be a telephone games axtual $100bn, at most!), vibe coded apps need more Observablity features, AI to fire people instead of improve the quality of their work: “Most of what’s driving adoption of AI at the moment is cost-cutting, and it mostly the boards that get excited by cost-cutting.”
• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide AI Platforms and Models Market to Grow 63% in 2026 – “Worldwide end-user spending on AI models and platforms is projected to total $64 billion in 2026, up 63.4% from $39 billion in 2025, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company. Spending on GenAI models is forecast to grow 117%, while AI platform spending will rise 36.9% in 2026.”
• How to Cross the AI Code Productivity Divide – Ongoing narrative here: AI amplifies your existing processes. If they’re good, they’ll be better and faster. If your existing processes are bad, they were be badder and faster. This is almost a universals principle of any enterprise technology. See AI summary here.
• 🤖 Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization’s Biggest Problems, so ask and study them.
• Agentic AI’s Real Test Is Process Redesign – “56.0% of enterprise decision-makers say they still prefer to build most applications in-house rather than buy off the shelf, a figure essentially unchanged from the prior half-year.”