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Writing on AI
in business.

Research digests, practical notes, and briefs on published cases — written so teams can find useful answers in search.

Field note · Workflow automationSep 20, 2026

Where Jev fits in business automation.

Ticket routing, refund gates, alert triage, agent tool choice — high-volume judgments with clear options. Skip it when you still need a paragraph.

5 min read
Field note · Engineering practiceSep 18, 2026

Decision models vs chat models in a real workflow.

Use a general LLM when you need language. Use a decision model when you need a branch. Mixing them up is how bills and latency explode.

5 min read
Research · ModelsSep 16, 2026

What Jev is — and why it spread so fast.

TypeSafe’s System One model returns typed decisions, not chat. Vercel reported the fastest first-day AI Gateway adoption in its history.

6 min read
Research · StrategySep 10, 2026

Two years of AI ROI: what moved.

Across McKinsey, BCG, and Stanford’s AI Index: adoption rose, enterprise EBIT stayed rare, workflow redesign and KPIs mattered.

7 min read
Industry brief · Support operationsJul 14, 2026

Learn It Live cut tickets 40%.

Public Zapier case study: an e-learning team built a chatbot in about an hour and cut support tickets by 40%. Not Tiercel work.

5 min read
Research · Productivity researchMay 19, 2026

Writing tasks got faster—and better.

Noy & Zhang (Science): 453 professionals, ChatGPT on writing tasks—about 40% less time and 18% higher quality.

5 min read
Field note · DeliveryMar 24, 2026

Sprint-based AI delivery.

Pick one workflow, set acceptance criteria, ship a handover, then decide. Fixed scope beats open-ended transformation.

5 min read
Field note · Product engineeringFeb 17, 2026

Agent demos hide the hard parts.

Tools, permissions, loops, observability, and stop conditions are the product. Demos skip them.

5 min read
Field note · ArchitectureJan 20, 2026

Local models when data cannot leave.

On-prem and local inference make sense under hard data constraints. Capability and ops cost are the tradeoff.

5 min read
Field note · AI economicsDec 9, 2025

The cost of retries and review.

Total cost is inference plus retries plus human review plus delay. A cheap model can still be expensive.

5 min read
Research · Industry researchNov 11, 2025

88% use AI. Few have scaled it.

McKinsey’s November 2025 survey: adoption is common, enterprise EBIT impact is not, and agents are rarely scaled.

6 min read
Field note · GovernanceOct 14, 2025

Shadow AI needs a lighter governance model.

Approved tools, data classes, review for external actions, and logging beat a policy nobody follows.

5 min read
Research · StrategySep 9, 2025

Only 5% get AI value at scale.

BCG’s 2025 Widening AI Value Gap: n>1,250 companies, a thin top tier, and a large stuck middle.

4 min read
Field note · AI engineeringAug 12, 2025

RAG fails when retrieval is wrong.

Evaluate the retriever first: citations, golden questions, permissions, and stale documents.

4 min read
Industry brief · OperationsJul 15, 2025

HackerOne’s scheduling automation ROI.

Public Calendly story: 169% ROI, 588 hours saved, more meetings and customers—with SSO/SCIM constraints.

4 min read
Field note · Product engineeringJun 17, 2025

Keep a person in the loop.

HITL patterns that actually ship: draft vs send, prepare vs execute, confidence with sources, clear escalation.

3 min read
Industry brief · Customer supportMay 13, 2025

Rebrandly cut support tickets in half.

A public Zapier story: docs-grounded chat, Slack+Jira escalation, and 16,000+ resolved conversations.

4 min read
Research · StrategyApr 8, 2025

AI Index 2025: what businesses should notice.

Adoption and investment jumped. Reported functional cost savings often stayed under 10%.

4 min read
Field note · Engineering practiceMar 6, 2025

When not to use AI.

Four plain conditions where a model adds cost, risk, or noise instead of leverage.

3 min read
Research · AI economicsFeb 11, 2025

Inference costs fell more than 280×.

Stanford’s AI Index 2025 puts a hard number on how fast GPT-3.5-level performance got cheap.

4 min read
Industry brief · Support operationsJan 14, 2025

Litmus consolidated support. Retention rose.

Public Help Scout case study: Litmus moved off split Intercom + WordPress tooling; early support interaction tied to 26% higher retention.

5 min read
Field note · Engineering practiceDec 12, 2024

One workflow. Then a platform.

A shared AI platform designed before a real workflow exists usually standardizes the wrong things.

4 min read
Research · AI adoptionNov 20, 2024

Gen AI use doubled. EBIT impact stayed rare.

McKinsey: regular gen AI use hit 65% in early 2024. Later survey work still finds most firms report no tangible enterprise EBIT from it.

5 min read
Field note · Product engineeringOct 15, 2024

The prototype is not the product.

A convincing demo is not a system people can depend on. Product work starts when inputs stop being carefully chosen.

4 min read
Research · Engineering productivitySep 10, 2024

Lab speed is not field pull requests.

A controlled Copilot task was 55.8% faster. Field experiments at Microsoft and Accenture show smaller, noisier PR gains.

6 min read
Research · Workforce productivityAug 22, 2024

Support assistants raised resolution 14%.

NBER evidence from 5,179 agents: generative AI guidance lifted issues resolved per hour—especially for novices.

5 min read
Field note · AI economicsJul 18, 2024

Measure the work. Not the tokens.

Token price is easy to compare. Cost per accepted task is what decides whether a model choice is cheap or expensive.

4 min read
Research · AI adoptionJun 12, 2024

Most AI pilots stall before value.

BCG finds only 4% of companies create substantial AI value. Nearly half are still stuck in proofs of concept.

5 min read
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