Relative to your interests, Friday

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Running D&D with AI, Determinism First, and Workflow ROI, with Michael Rishi Forrester – Software Defined Interviews #125 – “Michael Rishi Forrester built his son a homebrew tabletop campaign with AI in the loop – 20 hours of work instead of 60 to 100 – and found out the hard way that the model had quietly started doing the dice math itself. That turns into an argument about why individuals get so much value out of AI while organizations get so little, and why the ROI is at the workflow level or nowhere.”
• I’m not a total AI hater, I’m a finance hater – Software Defined Talk #585 – “This week, we discuss Zuckerberg’s open source AI manifesto, GPUs as securitizable assets, and who actually gets AI ROI. Plus, Buc-ee’s goes to war over beavers.”
• The Epictetus method for task management
• house plants
• Got your PPE?
• AI remove’s labor’s toil, capital doesn’t know what to do with AI – Elusive Enterprise ROI
• Make it easy to use AI with your apps to retain customers
• Once you realize AI is a great tool, you have a new great tool to use to get your work done better
• People want to content from real people
• Gemini has a billion users now

Related to your interests

• Work Just Became Fun for Millions of People – “Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by meetings and process and bureaucracy.”
• 🤖 The AI Subsidy Window Is Closing: Oracle, SAP, and Workday Move to Metered Token Pricing – Enterprise software vendors subsidized GPU, inference, and token costs to drive AI adoption, creating false budget security while companies burned through annual AI budgets in months. Oracle, SAP, and Workday are now moving to metered pricing, which turns AI spending into an organizational design decision: model elasticity across the three uncontrollable pricing variables, retain core human capability to preserve negotiating leverage, and plan token budgets as a direct alternative to headcount.

Upcoming Talks

• AI Connect Riga 2026 – Riga, Latvia, 22 August. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
• Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 – Heidelberg, Germany, 21 September. “Making and Maintaining the Case to Stay on Cloud Foundry”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, 24 October. Keynote, title to come.
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 November. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

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