The Intelligence Economy
Essays for decision makers on AI, judgement, trust and the economics of abundant intelligence.
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AI & engineering · 5 minAI may be reviving an old sequence: performance first, explanation later. Machine search now produces designs that work before anyone can explain why.
The old sequence was build, survive, copy. The new one may be specify, search, assure - with human responsibility moving upstream into the objectives and downstream into the proof.
Read the essay↗︎AI & engineering · 5 min
AI may be reviving an old sequence: performance first, explanation later - and assurance, not explanation, carrying the burden of trust.
02Agentic commerce · 7 min
When software shops for us, the useful question is not what it can do. It is who the agent works for - and where behavioural rents migrate.
03AI sovereignty · 23 min
Most enterprise AI risk sits outside the contract. Eight levers reveal what a model the organisation does not own hands to someone else.
04Decision rights · 12 min
When agents do the work they absorb the context judgement is built from - leaving humans to decide more and understand less.
05Corporate security · 5 min
Proprietary intelligence is leaving through two doors: the approved model and the shadow system nobody installed.
06Technology risk · 9 min
Why the most expensive technology bet in modern history rests on a capability test most buyers have not run.
07AI economics · 3 min
As intelligence commoditises, value migrates to the relationship layer. Human attachment recognised that scarcity long ago.
08Unit economics · 9 min
The AI economy is two business models pretending to be one. One is laying rails; the other is financing freemium fog.
09Strategy · 4 min
When reasoning is abundant, judgement, trust, context and orchestration become scarce - and that is where value moves.
10Market structure · 4 min
When a credible free alternative arrives, premium pricing does not erode gradually. It changes regime.
11Political economy · 5 min
Cheap intelligence creates the asymmetry cheap manufacturing once did. The last shock’s lesson was the policy vacuum.
12Talent · 4 min
Knowledge work is being automated on the same pattern as the power loom - but the work disappearing is also how experts are made.
13Institutional memory · 5 min
Firms pulling ahead are not using better models. They are building the context systems that make each model interaction cumulative.