Category: Thinks

WSJ: “AI is improving ad targeting, helping to accelerate the tech companies’ control of the overall advertising market. The results defy the expectations of ad executives and buyers, who had expected an advertising slowdown in light of tariff battles and waning purchasing power among consumers facing higher prices for goods…AI is helping Meta Platforms and Google keep users on apps such as Instagram and YouTube longer by improving recommendation systems. Meta has said that its AI recommendation systems led to a 5% increase in time spent on Facebook in the third quarter. The more time people spend on the platforms, the more ads companies can serve up. Meta, Google and Amazon.com are expected to account for more than 56% of the U.S. ad market this year, up from roughly 51% two years ago, Madison & Wall is projecting. “Although we are in the early innings of AI, we are seeing AI accelerating ad growth for these massive platforms” to unprecedented levels, said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson.”

FT: “Speaking at the FT Future of AI Summit in London, Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned that large language models (LLMs) may eventually replace humans in consuming the internet. “If web pages are all read by LLMs, then people ask the LLM for the data and the LLM just produces the result, the whole ad-based business model of the web starts to fall apart,” he said. This system threatens the collapse of the decades-long advertising-based model that has seen the likes of Google and Meta become multitrillion-dollar businesses on the back of powerful ad networks.”

Forbes: “If you’ve interacted with one of Sierra’s agents, there’s a good chance you were already annoyed. That’s because they take care of the more knotty customer service issues — like returning a pair of shoes or canceling a subscription — that typically required chatting with a bot on a little popup screen on a corporate website, or worse, needing the attention of a human representative. But Taylor and Bavor don’t think of Sierra as a business that only helps handle customer complaints. They think agents will become so powerful that they’ll eventually become the primary way that businesses interact with customers. You’ll engage with them across several channels — text, phone call, app, WhatsApp and more. And they’ll become personal concierges working on behalf of a company, remembering past conversations with customers and making suggestions based on their personal preferences. “One of the promises of the internet was personalization, but the only full manifestation of that we’ve really seen is very targeted ads,” said Bavor, with no tinge of irony for someone who spent almost two decades at Google.”

Rahul Jacob reviews A Sixth of Humanity: “India was at par with China and Korea once, but its industrial story flagged. A new book unpacks why a labour-rich nation couldn’t get an export edge. Policy missteps, misaligned incentives and lost chances all conspired to dim our prospects of export-led growth…As Kapur and Subramanian point out, “The more the low-skilled labour force a country possesses, the cheaper the wages and the more competitive its products ought to be in global markets. Instead, India’s share of global exports is 4.5% when its endowment of people ought to have taken that share to about 22.5%.””

FT: “All the cells we are born with will be replaced many times over during our lives. But we do not believe our identity changes. So what is the essence of our identity? Is it our visible, mutable wetware, which is constantly being replaced? Or is it our invisible, mostly immutable software — our genetic code — which instructs our cells how to reproduce themselves? Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a vice-president of Google and founder of its research team Paradigms of Intelligence, has clear answers to such questions. As a programmer, he naturally believes that the human code is most important. And code can be reproduced in many different substrates, no matter whether carbon or silicon-based. In essence, life is computational.”

Business Standard: “Digital news workflows, transcription, saving reader’s time, building trust (yes!) and reaching new audiences are among the many things that AI is now being used for in newsrooms across the world. That is what an outstanding report from the International News Media Association (INMA), a global community of over 100 news media companies in 90-odd countries, maps in a report released late in October.”

McKinsey: “Agentic commerce—shopping powered by AI agents acting on our behalf—represents a seismic shift in the marketplace. It moves us toward a world in which AI anticipates consumer needs, navigates shopping options, negotiates deals, and executes transactions, all in alignment with human intent yet acting independently via multistep chains of actions enabled by reasoning models. This isn’t just an evolution of e-commerce. It’s a rethinking of shopping itself in which the boundaries between platforms, services, and experiences give way to an integrated intent-driven flow, through highly personalized consumer journeys that deliver a fast, frictionless outcome.”

SaaStr: “The reality emerging from 2025’s GTM trenches is this: AI is succeeding not by replacing human excellence, but by eliminating the need to deploy human mediocrity. And there’s a lot more mediocrity than anyone wants to admit.”

WSJ: “America’s bosses are getting blunt about the reality that AI leads to job cuts. The standard warning goes something like this: If a bot doesn’t replace you, a human who makes better use of AI will. Cue the race to be seen as a power user, which signifies being one of the humans getting the most out of new technology. These are the people cranking up productivity, impressing managers and making the rest of us look like slackers. The good news is we can join them. They aren’t the Ph.D.s who build machine-learning models and command multimillion-dollar pay packages. They are regular workers who have become uncommonly savvy with existing AI tools, often through trial and error. They get more done, faster, and—this is critical—cultivate reputations for being ahead of the curve.”

NYTimes: “Recent innovations in A.I. suggest our anxiety is now pointed toward a more fundamental concern: the fear of others. The industry keeps trying to engineer replacements for such miraculous experiences as “friendship” and “relationships,” outsourcing the grit and grain of human interaction — whether via a necklace that offers deadened commentary on the video game you’re playing or via a devoted chatbot that is always free to listen to your thoughts. The “problem” some modern A.I. is trying to solve is, in effect, us. Cautionary warnings from dystopias past are being deployed, credulously and with minimal irony, as solutions. Would an app’s promise to make society obsolete even seem odd now?”

Boaz Barak: “The bottom line is that the question on whether AI can lead to unprecedented growth amounts to whether its exponential growth in capabilities will lead to the fraction of unautomated tasks itself decreasing at exponential rates.”

Sam Altman: “Email is bad. I don’t know if Slack is good. I suspect it’s not. I think email is very bad. The threshold to make something better than email is not high, and I think Slack is better than email. We have a lot of things going on at the same time, as you observed, and we have to do things extremely quickly. It’s definitely a very fast-moving organization. There are positives about Slack, but there’s also, I dread the first hour of the morning, the last hour before I go to bed, where I’m just dealing with this explosion of Slack, and I think it does create a lot of fake work. I suspect there is something new to build that is going to replace a lot of the current office, productivity suite, whatever you think of docs, slides, email, Slack, whatever, that will be the AI-driven version of all of these things, not where you tack on the horrible — you accidentally click the wrong place and it tries to write a whole document for you or summarize some thread or whatever, but the actual version of you are trusting your AI agent and my AI agent to work most stuff out and escalate to us when necessary. I think there is probably finally a good solution for someone to make within reach.”

WSJ: “What I miss most is closing my eyes at night, then opening them and it’s morning, that total submersion, yesterday’s problems wiped away like algebraic equations on a junior-high blackboard. Or maybe I have it backward. Maybe sleeping did not erase my problems. Maybe I slept like that because I had no problems. That kind of sleep is what we all want to recover. It’s why, when you listen to late-night TV or podcasts, you’re bombarded with commercials for the perfect pillow, the perfect mattress. Everyone seeks the special ingredient that will let them sleep as Adam and Eve slept in the Garden. But the mattress is not the problem. Nor is the pillow. It’s the world, which we can’t escape even in bed at night. It’s not uninterrupted sleep we seek but the ignorance that makes it possible.”

Ben Thompson: “Bubbles may end badly, but history does not end: there are benefits from bubbles that pay out for decades, and the best we can do now is pray that the mania results in infrastructure and innovation that make this bubble worth it.”

Ruth Porat: “I don’t want people who process. I want people who think. Step back and put yourself in my shoes; if I’m having a conversation with a head of state somewhere, think, “Is this material rich, deep, insightful—does it take the conversation to another level?”…[A star employee] is someone who is in my face, because I want them to challenge me in different ways.”

SaaStr: “The game changed overnight: For a decade, SaaS CEOs got really, really good at one game: land-and-expand, PLG motions, consumption pricing, usage-based revenue. Now, seemingly suddenly, you’re competing with AI-native startups that can build in weeks what took you years. Your roadmap is constantly under threat. Your customers are asking about AI in every call…The pace is exhausting: I talk to B2B CEOs every week. Every single one is implementing AI agents, rebuilding products around LLMs, competing with AI-first startups, and explaining to boards why they need to invest millions in AI R&D while maintaining margins. The cognitive load is insane. And if you’re 55+, you’ve already done this dance for 10-15 years through multiple cycles.”

Economist: “South Asia’s largest economy is surprisingly stable. This year the country has been both a victim of President Donald Trump’s trade war, singled out for especially punitive tariffs owing to its purchases of Russian oil, and a participant in a shooting war with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Its economy has barely noticed. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are all participating in IMF programmes, along with Pakistan. Meanwhile, India’s ten-year government bonds yield less than 7%, down slightly from the start of the year and far below the 12% that Pakistan and Sri Lanka are forced to cough up. India’s foreign-exchange reserves sit at around $700bn, or 18% of GDP—sufficient for 11 months of imports. Growth ticks along at 6-8% a year.”

Mint: “Indian companies are raising conditional payouts in total salaries and making sharper distinctions between top and worst performers…“Organizations now prefer a ‘we earn; you earn’ mentality. When the volatility of business outcomes is high, the volatility of compensation is also high. This helps firms avoid an overload of fixed compensation costs in their profit and loss,” said Pawan Dinkar, a director at professional services provider Deloitte India, who focuses on executive performance and rewards.”

FT: “Obscure questions about business scenarios have long featured in interviews for top graduate schemes in consultancies and banks. Now, applicants to McKinsey are being asked to go further — by role-playing as conservationists. The activity is a central scenario in an online assessment now given to applicants to the consultancy. McKinsey’s patented assessment simulation, Solve, judges prospective hires on their performance in a computer game that simulates a virtual ecosystem. It is one of several immersive, game-based tests being introduced alongside, or in place of, traditional hiring assessments at some of the world’s biggest employers. The approach, quietly adopted in sectors from banking to policing, reflects a shift towards assessing practical skills in an attempt to find more diverse candidates and prevent applicants using artificial intelligence.”

SaaStr: “The best investments often come from going against the grain. If everyone is chasing AI at any price, maybe the real alpha is in the overlooked T3D2 SaaS business that you can get at a reasonable valuation.”

NYTimes: “The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them. “I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.” Welcome to the era of “brain rot”…Rather than ask a chatbot to do all the research on a broad topic, Dr. Melumad said, use it as a part of your research process to answer small questions, such as looking up historical dates. But for deeper learning of a subject, consider reading a book.”

Melissa Valentine: “Any flash team with experts who are very good at agile methodology would be very successful. Agile is such a useful methodology. The flash team’s approach is very complementary to agile. It’s good at being iterative and adaptive, which is essential to flash teams. Where flash teams build on agile is that agile is more general. Flash teams incorporate new tools that agile hasn’t necessarily applied. There are millions of people in online labor markets who are registered, expert, and can join the team. There are all types of AI tools or other data tools that can help inform the assembly and management of the team and augment what’s possible with agile. There might be an opportunity to learn where AI can be helpful. Agile is a great framework. The agile framework was developed before AI tools became so much more accessible, so rethinking where AI can help in places it wasn’t noticed before could prove beneficial.”

Bloomberg: “Trader Joe’s has acquired something like cult status. Founded in 1967 by Joseph Coulomb, the store, with its friendly staff and quirky Hawaiian- style décor, is known for its unique and affordable products, such as Everything But the Bagel Sesame Seasoning Blend. The brand has only about 600 stores in the US, most of which are in or around cities, (compare that with the country’s roughly 4,600 Walmart Inc. locations). It doesn’t sell online and its notoriously long checkout lines often stretch throughout the store. For American shoppers, carrying a Trader Joe’s bag might signal a kind of urban sophistication — that you’re clued-in and discerning, with the time and taste to shop for your Speculoos Cookie Butter and fancy yet cheap cheeses in person.”

The Atlantic: “Generative AI…is an isolating technology for an isolated time…Chatbots promise a solution. They seem to listen. They respond. The mind wants desperately to connect with a person—and fools itself into seeing one in a machine.”

WSJ: “For American manufacturing, the postwar world was a golden age. Industry boomed from the 1940s up through the 1970s, fueling tremendous economic growth for the country, soaring profits for companies and bright prospects for workers. Plenty of Americans graduated high school, joined a union and landed factory jobs that paid enough to buy a house, raise a family and retire with dignity. Many Americans believe that the heyday of manufacturing was the natural order of things, and they have pinned their hopes for a vibrant new middle class on a manufacturing revival. Politicians of all stripes invoke this moment as something lost and easily restored via tariffs or buying American. It cannot. The mid-20th century model of American manufacturing wasn’t normal. It was a historical fluke. And we can’t bring it back.”

NYTimes: “Imagine applying for a job. You know you’re a strong candidate with a standout résumé. But you don’t even get a call back. You might not know it, but an artificial intelligence algorithm used to screen applicants has decided that you are too risky. Maybe it inferred you wouldn’t fit the company culture or you’re likely to behave in some way later on that might cause friction (such as joining a union or starting a family). Its reasoning is impossible to see and even harder to challenge. It doesn’t matter that you practice safe digital privacy: keeping most personal details to yourself, avoiding sharing opinions online and prohibiting apps and websites from tracking you. Based on the scant details it has of you, the A.I. predicts how you’ll behave at work, based on patterns it has learned from countless other people like you. This is increasingly life under A.I.”

SaaStr: “If your new Chief Revenue Officer doesn’t meet with any customers their first week, you made a bad hire. Full stop.  The same goes for your Head of Product and Head of Customer Success. They’ll never be hands-on enough, deep enough, to win.    You’ll want to ignore these flags.  Don’t.  You’ll lose a year and so much momentum.”

WSJ: “In recent years, Lego has cultivated a devoted base of adult fans, who might not have been able to afford the pricey Danish kits as kids but now come armed with fervor and disposable income. That creates a new problem, since the biggest Lego sets have thousands of pieces and quickly eat up available display space. Some builders have devoted certain rooms wholly to Lego. Others decorate mantelpieces, bookshelves and walls with their plastic builds, often to spouses’ chagrin.”

Alex Danco: “The more jobs and opportunities created by the productivity boom, the more wages increase in other industries, who at the end of the day all have to compete in the same labor market. If you can make $30 an hour as a digital freelance marketer (a job that did not exist a generation ago), then you won’t accept less than that from working in food service. And if you can make $150 an hour installing HVAC for data centers, you’re not going to accept less from doing home AC service. This is a funny juxtaposition. Each of these phenomena have a name: there’s Jevon’s Paradox, which means, “We’ll spend more on what gets more productive”, and there’s the Baumol Effect, which means, “We’ll spend more on what doesn’t get more productive.” And both of them are top of mind right now, as we watch in awe at what is happening with AI Capex spend.”

Mint: “Agentic browsers are the new darlings of the web now. Perplexity has its Comet, OpenAI Atlas, and others such as Dia, Fellou, Opera Neon, and more. Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge are adding agentic features. These browsers shift the web from a click-and-search world to an AI-powered conversational format where tasks are done for you, autonomously. These new browsers can already perform multi-step tasks that once needed your careful attention. Tell the browser to book a flight, and it will compare fares, fill in your details, and pay with a saved card. Ask it to return an item, and it’ll locate the order, print the label, and schedule a pickup. They can draft emails, post updates, complete forms, and even log into your office dashboard to generate a report—all without you touching a key. That’s why it’s called the era of the zero-click web.”

Manu Joseph: “The analysis that your poor attention span is a creation of modern tech is not the correct way to frame the problem. What’s instead happening is that the people who want your attention are not producing anything engaging enough for you not to stray. Once, they could get away because you didn’t have many choices. But now that you have many distractions to choose from, those people or their industries are exposed, and they are trying to blame it on the times. People have not given up on a great book. They are only bored of acclaimed dull books. They are bored only of monopolies held by a small club of overrated people who produce duds. People were right to get bored of Test cricket, where batsmen dedicated to the dullness of safety could plod forever and survive on sheer banality. And of cinema, where stardom was transmitted from star to star.”

SaaStr: “Pick an agentic AI product. Pick the simplest possible one use case. Deploy it yourself. Train it yourself. QA it yourself. Test it yourself. If you deploy an agent yourself—actually hands-on keyboard—you’ll understand this technology in a way that matters. Not your team. You. Yourself.”

FT: “Artificial intelligence groups are on a hiring spree for a rare kind of software developer who can code and talk to customers, as they race to increase adoption of their cutting-edge technology. Anthropic, OpenAI and Cohere are recruiting for so-called forward-deployed engineers, a new job for generative AI companies, as part of a push to generate more revenues by installing specialists within businesses to help them customise their AI models.”

Dan Wang: “This year alone, China will build about 300 gigawatts of solar. The US is on track to build 30 gigawatts of solar. Right now, there’s 33 nuclear power stations under construction in China. There’s zero under construction in the US.”

SaaStr: “38.6% of 2018 Series B companies are worth the same or less than their Series B valuation today. Add in the companies that achieved only modest 1-2x returns (27.4%), and you’re looking at 66% of Series B deals trading below or barely above a 2x multiple seven years later. For a venture asset class that’s supposed to deliver 3x+ net returns to LPs, that’s not enough…Only about 34% of Series B investments even doubled investors’ money. And only about 20% delivered the 5x+ returns that VCs need to make their fund economics work. So even at the Series B stage, you really have to be in the best ones.”

FT: “The adage about having a face for radio may once have applied to podcasts, too. But as video makes its way into audio, more creators, presenters and guests are being forced to think about make-up and camera angles. Top executives are no exception. In the past two years, some of the biggest corporate podcasts have added a video element. Often interviews streamed on YouTube, they feature executives, staff and external experts exploring issues of importance to the company. The biggest, like Hubspot’s “My First Million”, attract millions of views…In a widely shared article…, journalist Derek Thompson declared that “everything is television” with media from social posts to news reports to, yes, podcasts adopting the visual values of “immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity”. Viewing figures for video versions of podcasts have indeed risen rapidly in the past few years. According to Cumulus Media, 42 per cent of weekly podcast consumers say they actively watch podcast video, up from 30 per cent three years ago.”

Jimmy Wales: “When we think of trust in the context of Wikipedia, it’s pretty intimately tied to how the website works and how the editing process works. If someone makes a bad edit, reverting it takes one click. We can assume good faith on your first edit. Just come [to the site] and do something. If you do something terrible, then we revert it, and, hopefully, you receive a nice message saying, “Hey, knock it off. That’s not what we do here.” If people continue to misbehave, then the community has the ability to block them. You can see everything everybody’s done, and you have to assume good faith is not a suicide pact. You don’t just say, “Well, everybody’s fine, and you do what you like.” Roughly 15 years ago, I wrote on my user page, “Yes, you can edit this page. I trust you.” That was part of the inspiration for the book, although I didn’t know it at the time.”

NYTimes: “Welcome to the new strongman era. If the world seems on edge these days, with alliances fraying, violent conflicts emerging and volatility as the order of the day, there’s a reason. These are the early shocks of a world being shaped by leaders who govern by personal will instead of rules and consensus.”

WSJ: “Hermès has soared to a rarefied place in the luxury stratosphere. The business founded in 1837 is a global empire built on leather, silk and cashmere that has become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Hermès achieved this success by operating unlike the rest of the industry. As conglomerates LVMH and Kering swallow up European brands, Hermès is the rare family-run company that has remained independent. Its signature product is a handbag methodically saddle-stitched by a single person from start to finish. In the age of artificial intelligence, the Dumas family is still betting on artisanship. This strategy of growing through scarcity, not scale, is nothing less than rebellious.”

Dion Lim: “When the brush grows too dense, sunlight can’t reach the ground. The plants aren’t competing against the environment — they’re competing against each other for light, water, and nutrients. That’s what Silicon Valley feels like right now. Capital is abundant — perhaps too abundant. But talent? That’s the scarce resource. Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being courted by three, five, ten different AI startups — often chasing the same vertical, whether it’s coding copilots, novel datasets, customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation. The result is an ecosystem that looks lush from above — green, growing, noisy — but underneath, the soil is dry. It’s hard to grow when everyone’s roots are tangled. And in that kind of forest, fire isn’t a catastrophe. It’s a correction…The real opportunity isn’t in the fire itself. It’s in what continues to grow after—and what entirely new species take root in the ashes.”

Sparkline Capital: “The AI revolution has reached a key inflection point, with the largest U.S. tech firms embarking on a massive AI infrastructure buildout. While the market has rewarded this spending so far, we find that historical capital expenditure booms have typically resulted in overinvestment, excess competition, and poor stock returns – both at the macro and individual firm level. With the AI arms race transforming Big Tech from asset-light to asset-heavy, a model we find associated with inferior returns, our value-based playbook suggests rotating toward a broader set of AI beneficiaries with lower capital requirements and valuations.”

Mint: “India’s lagging states are trapped in a cycle of low income and low public spending, unable to speed up growth even as they devote more of their budgets to development projects. Smarter spending may be the answer. Look at Brazil’s conditional cash-transfer model.”