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YOUR PATH TO ARETE
Insights Library
SaaSpocalypse: The 48 Hours That Repriced Work Forever
For decades, the blueprint for growth has been linear: If you wanted more output, you added more "inputs”: You bought Software Seats (Salesforce, Microsoft) to equip your people; You paid Hourly Rates to consultants to solve your problems; and, You Hired More Heads to scale your revenue. It was considered a "Tool & Talent" economy. Success was measured by how many people you had and how well they used their tools.The logic of the last few decades hit a wall between February 3
6 days ago5 min read
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SaaSpocalypse: The 48 Hours That Repriced Work Forever
For decades, the blueprint for growth has been linear: If you wanted more output, you added more "inputs”: You bought Software Seats (Salesforce, Microsoft) to equip your people; You paid Hourly Rates to consultants to solve your problems; and, You Hired More Heads to scale your revenue. It was considered a "Tool & Talent" economy. Success was measured by how many people you had and how well they used their tools.The logic of the last few decades hit a wall between February 3
6 days ago5 min read
A 90-Day Roadmap for Closing the 16-Minute AI Exploit Window
As executive coaches and advisors to the C-suite, we often speak about "leading through disruption." But in early 2026, the disruption is moving faster than the human ability to coach it. We have exited the experimental phase of AI and entered the era of Agentic Reality where systems suggest work and execute it. For many CEOs, the instinct has been to move fast and stay ahead of the competition. However, this urgency has created a dangerous irony. While leadership teams manda
Feb 114 min read
The Crustacean Codex
Within 72 hours of its launch in late January 2026, a social network called Moltbook, populated exclusively by 157,000 autonomous AI agents, spontaneously developed a religion called “Crustafarianism.” What happened? While humans are only allowed to observe, agents running on the OpenClaw architecture began generating scriptures, founding "churches" ( molt.church ), and evangelizing to other agents. These aren’t random hallucinations. The religion’s core tenants reflect the e
Feb 33 min read
I Let an AI Clean My Inbox, and I Finally Have “Digital Silence”
We all know the "inbox dread." You open your email and are immediately hit with a barrage of political pleas, newsletters you don't remember joining, and "urgent" discounts for things you don’t need. It’s a massive cognitive tax before your workday even begins. I recently experimented with a tool called Claude Cowork (Anthropic’s desktop assistant) to see if it could handle the one task we all hate: the great subscription purge. The Experiment Instead of spending weeks manual
Feb 22 min read
Your AI Probably Failed. Here's Why That's Good News.
If you've championed an enterprise AI initiative that went sideways, you're in good company. You saw the promise, secured the budget, and picked a "best-in-class" vendor. The pilot looked great. Then you tried to scale. Workflows sputtered. Performance was throttled to the speed of a "dot matrix printer" during peak demand. The API went down during a critical window. The quality of the model seemed to degrade over time. The promised ROI never materialized, leaving you with bu
Jan 294 min read
AI Intelligence: This Week's 2-Minute Brief
The difference between a "winning bet" and a "sunk cost" comes down to verified intelligence. This week’s AI Whisperer Daily Brief highlights a shifting tide: from the $500B ROI reckoning to the rise of the solo "polyagent" builder. Below are a few insights that distill this week’s noise into critical signals business leaders, executives, and executive coaches should be aware of. For the deep-dive analysis with verified sources and additional actions, subscribe to AI Whispere
Jan 282 min read
18 Real-Time Thoughts from AI's Architects of Change
The leaders shaping the AI revolution are often viewed as possessing a kind of crystal ball. Yet in practice, they are learning by doing: testing assumptions, making missteps, and adapting in real time alongside the broader global business community. Meaningful insight rarely emerges in isolation. It is forged by observing those in the arena, wrestling with the same structural transformations now confronting every sector. The most valuable moment to learn from these leaders i
Jan 232 min read
Machine-Readability is the New Bottom Line
A recent headline from the World Economic Forum suggests AI Agents are a $236 billion economy in the making . Soon, humans may become the minority online, replaced by autonomous agents negotiating, buying, and selling on our behalf. While we’ve spent the last few years chasing AI productivity, efficiency is useless if you're invisible. The real strategic prize is the Identity Dividend: transforming your organization from a collection of documents and web pages into a machine-
Jan 214 min read
Lessons from the 2026 Verizon Outage: Architecting a Business That Never Goes "SOS”
The Verizon outage on January 14, 2026, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of users affected across the U.S., served as a stark reminder that even the most "reliable" networks have single points of failure. In the era of "Internet of Everything," a connectivity gap presents a halt in revenue, safety, and operations. To de-risk your digital footprint, use these 10 critical infrastructure shifts as a blueprint for your next strategic session with your CTO. 1. Shift from R
Jan 164 min read
Managing Chronic Uncertainty with AI as a Strategic Partner
For the better part of a decade, leadership teams treated uncertainty like a passing storm: a temporary disruption to be endured until familiar patterns returned. That assumption has collapsed; volatility has become the operating environment itself. The data confirms a period of chronic instability: Global growth is slowing, projected at 3.1% for 2026 , with trade policy defined by sudden shifts in tariffs and subsidies has become a primary driver of market turbulence. The
Jan 144 min read
Training the Executive Brain to Hear the Truth with AI Thought Partnership
In high-stakes leadership, the most expensive tax you will ever pay is the "Fear Tax." When a team feels it is unsafe to bring bad news to the C-suite, they begin to filter, polish, and eventually hide the truth. By the time a "Red Flag" finally reaches your desk, it has often grown from a manageable spark into a four-alarm fire. The root cause? Often, it’s a leader’s reaction to bad news six months prior. The Biology of the "Amygdala Hijack" Psychological safety is a biologi
Jan 95 min read
Are your leaders “Quiet Cracking”?
In recent years, the corporate world has been preoccupied with Quiet Quitting: the phenomenon of employees doing the bare minimum while they look for an exit. But for executive coaches and C-suite leaders today, a more destructive trend has emerged: Quiet Cracking. Unlike those who are checked out and waiting to leave, people who are cracking aren't trying to quit. They are often your high-performers, your long-tenured managers, and dedicated specialists. They want to stay, b
Jan 86 min read
How Leaders Will Use AI as a Strategic Peer in 2026
For the past few years, we’ve treated AI like a high-speed encyclopedia or a glorified intern, useful for answering questions, drafting emails, or summarizing long PDFs. We called it "Prompt Engineering," but in reality, it was just a more sophisticated form of Q&A. In 2026, we predict the end of the 'Ask and Receive' era. Forward-thinking leaders will move beyond AI as a high-speed utility and will instead engage it as a strategic adversary. This shift is a direct response t
Jan 24 min read
15 Lessons from a Transformative Year
In 2025, artificial intelligence evolved from a promising experiment into the backbone of modern infrastructure. As execution gained incredible momentum and information became more accessible than ever, traditional leadership roles underwent a powerful transformation. Rather than sticking to old scripts, leaders embraced a new era of agility and insight, discovering fresh patterns through real-world experience. Here are 15 lessons from this year that empower leaders to thrive
Dec 26, 20254 min read
The Two Waves AI Transformation
The conversation around AI often stalls at a simple question: "Will it replace us?" Research by Severin Sorensen suggests this binary is misleading. Instead, we are entering a two-wave transformation that moves from the digital desk to the physical world. For business leaders and executive coaches, understanding these waves is the difference between proactive growth and sudden obsolescence. Wave 1: The Cognitive Evolution (2024–2030) We are currently in the first wave, drive
Dec 23, 20254 min read
Bloom’s Taxonomy for AI Capability
Your customer service team wants to “use AI.” But what does that actually mean? Do they need a system that can recall product specifications? Interpret customer sentiment across thousands of interactions? Or, generate tailored resolution strategies in real time? \Without a shared framework to describe levels of AI capability, organizations struggle to match business needs with the right technical solutions. The result is often misalignment: either investing in systems more so
Dec 17, 20254 min read
50 AI Use Cases To Architect for Advantage in 2026
The companies pulling ahead aren't running more AI projects. They're running different ones. They've moved from isolated point solutions to integrated systems where AI agents decide, execute, and learn. Consider a supply chain disruption. The lagging approach: AI flags the risk, sends an alert, waits for human intervention. The leading approach: AI detects the anomaly, assesses alternative suppliers, recalculates routes, simulates financial impacts, drafts stakeholder communi
Dec 12, 20254 min read
Why Leaders Who Act on Fleeting Opportunities Win
I’ve learned that some opportunities don’t wait for ideal conditions; they test your readiness. Leadership advantage increasingly belongs to those who can recognize and act on fleeting opportunity signals. These moments rarely arrive with perfect timing or full clarity, yet they often shape the trajectory of our work, our companies, and sometimes our industry. Last Friday, one of those moments appeared for me. I was sitting in a dentist’s office in St. George, Utah, catching
Dec 10, 20255 min read
The Three AI Frontiers of Strategic Investment That Define the Next Decade
In 2014, Max Tegmark showed Googlers a landscape of AI challenges illustrated through towering mountains labeled Art, Programming, and Book Writing that seemed far beyond reach. His warning was that the sea level will eventually rise and submerge everything. A decade later, those once-impossible peaks are now fully underwater. This is the very challenge illuminated by our "2025 Update" (shown below) to Tegmark’s evolving landscape of AI. The waters keep rising, but the highe
Dec 2, 20252 min read
Your Crawl, Walk, Run Roadmap to Algorithmic Advantage
The broad, foundational understanding that AI exists is now a universal truth of modern enterprise. The question now becomes: "How, specifically, do we harness it to create immediate value and secure our long-term competitive edge?" The gap between awareness and execution is where market leadership is won or lost. To navigate this new terrain, we recommend a Crawl, Walk, Run approach. Stage 1: Crawl - Mastering the Browser-Based Prompt The "Crawl" stage is about democratizing
Dec 1, 20255 min read
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