WSJ: “Agencies have long billed marketers by the number of hours their employees spend producing client work, using rate cards to charge different amounts for contributions by people according to their role. Now, AI is eroding the number of people, hours and roles required to deliver for clients, and agencies may find the standard billing arrangement comes up short. AI is helping agencies rapidly produce personalized creative images, for example, or altering elements like color, position, lighting and language—tasks that were once highly manual. It’s also letting copywriters, who once may have needed several hours to write 50 variations of copy for a given ad, now generate 100 variations immediately, then choose to edit and curate them.”
Dan Nguyen-Huu on Managed-Service-as-Software: “Whether your AI tools are used internally to drive efficiency or sold to external customers, the key is their usage. Modern startups can potentially do both, making the question more about sequencing rather than where you start and end up. Leveraging the new paradigm of AI and decreasing GPU costs should eventually lead to the creation of more M-SaS driven companies. These companies will transform from labor-intensive operations to technology-enhanced services with SaaS-like margins and, consequently, SaaS-like valuations.”
The Daily Economy: “What Milei’s administration is hoping to achieve through liberalization is nothing short of extraordinary, and it represents the perennial challenge nations have faced since Western Europe’s miraculous growth in the 18th century. Douglass North, a Nobel laureate economist, illustrated this challenge through the lens of institutions and credible commitments. In a famous paper co-authored with Barry Weingast, North attributes England’s economic success to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, when the Crown made credible commitments to protect property rights and not expropriate private wealth whenever they wanted. “Free markets must be accompanied by some credible restrictions on the state’s ability to manipulate economic rules to the advantage of itself and its constituents,” they write. A classical liberal economist, Milei understands the importance of credibly committing to economic reforms. He’s furiously slashing needless government programs, which have metastasized over decades of Peronist rule. In shocking style, he has closed 13 government ministries and laid off more than 30,000 public workers, or about 10 percent of federal employees. Milei’s raft of budgetary cuts have generated eye-popping fiscal results.”
WSJ: “Early in a chief executive’s tenure, inherited problems can be easily addressed. Later it’s harder—there is no one else to blame.” More: “An openness to different paths is essential for start-ups hoping to navigate periods of rapid innovation in technology.” [Both are from book reviews.]
FT: “Concerns about artificial intelligence’s disruptive effects on the workplace often dominate discussions about how the emerging technology will impact the labour market. Much commentary on the topic veers from bleak predictions of the destruction of jobs and outmoding of traditional skills to celebrations of the fortunes on offer to those who can unleash AI to boost performance. However, for some employers and educators, AI is already helping to smooth out the acquisition of skills, and to improve existing jobs. They say the technology can help organisations assess worker skills, plan for emerging needs and train their staff — boosting corporate productivity and staff career prospects. “What we’ve found is that one of the best ways to learn about AI is to use AI,” says Jim Swanson, executive vice-president and chief information officer at Johnson & Johnson.”
