Essays - not posts. Briefs from inside engagements, written when the market gives us a reason.
SCORED ASSESSMENT
Twenty questions, about three minutes, and a 0-100 readiness score with the three things to fix first.
MPS BRIEF
OCTOBER 2026
LATEST
Notes from MAICON. AI is raising the floor faster than the ceiling — and a higher bar for substance came with a higher bar for authenticity.
By Jeff Culliton
5 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
OCTOBER 2026
Structure is the easiest thing to see and the easiest thing to change. Before the boxes move, what has actually changed?
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
OCTOBER 2026
We’re spending money on AI faster than we’ve figured out how to make money from it. The value is in the boring part: the problem, the workflow, the owner, the measure.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
SEPTEMBER 2026
A week in Paris with ChatGPT, Google Maps and Google Translate. What AI gave us wasn’t expertise — it was less friction around being somewhere unfamiliar.
5 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
SEPTEMBER 2026
AI capability, AI-company valuation and a company’s ability to capture value are three different questions. Treating them as one is where bad decisions begin.
4 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
SEPTEMBER 2026
Time saved is easy to promise and difficult to value. A CEO’s calendar doesn’t get shorter - so the real return may be the questions that finally get asked.
6 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
AUGUST 2026
68% of enterprises have watched their AI hand them a confident, wrong answer - up from 57% two months earlier. The failure isn’t the tool. It’s the order things got built in.
5 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
AUGUST 2026
I sat there and watched ChatGPT work its way through HubSpot - opening screens, building fields, following the guardrails we’d worked out together. What made it work wasn’t the tool.
4 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
AUGUST 2026
Palantir grew 93% in a year by sending engineers inside the building to make the AI decisions nobody there owned. Renting the deciding works - it also has a lease.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
AUGUST 2026
A 400-person radio company in Milwaukee got 65% of its people using AI every day, starting from scratch a year ago. They bought the same tools you could buy this afternoon - so the tools were never the variable.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
JULY 2026
Your CRM will happily build you a team of AI agents this week. But “shared context” means the data already in the CRM - and your margins, costs and contracts live somewhere else.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
JUNE 2026
88% of companies use AI regularly. Only 32% report tangible impact. Three reports this spring - WEF, Accenture, HBR - all land in the same place. It was never a capability problem.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
JUNE 2026
Everyone’s hiring builders. But the AI stall happens one layer up - where someone has to decide what to build, and that person almost never exists.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
JUNE 2026
HCLTech says 43% of enterprise AI initiatives will fail. The read is right - and incomplete. The gap isn’t enablement. It’s that no one owns the outcome by name.
3 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
JUNE 2026
“Headless” is the term every mid-market CEO is using and almost nobody is defining. What executives actually want, where it breaks, and the unglamorous on-ramp.
6 MIN
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MPS BRIEF
MAY 2026
OpenAI and Anthropic raised $5.5B to embed engineers inside PE portcos and rebuild workflows around AI. The structural read is correct - and incomplete.
5 MIN
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ESSAY
THE METHOD
Four questions, one per stage of the method - the order matters. A reading piece for the leadership team. For a scored assessment, take the AI Readiness Assessment.
4 MIN
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