Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Arete Coach 5/20

The Business Model Canvas: A One-Page Guide to Seeing Your Business Whole

Most executives can describe their product in a sentence and their org chart in a paragraph, yet struggle to explain how the pieces of their business actually connect to create and capture value. That gap is exactly what the Business Model Canvas was built to close. Developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur out of Osterwalder's earlier doctoral research (Osterwalder, 2004) and popularized in their 2010 book Business Model Generation (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010), th

3 days ago6 min read

When AI Outpaces Governance, Leadership Becomes the Risk

Enterprise AI has reached an inflection point. Organizations are deploying increasingly capable systems—autonomous agents that execute multi-step tasks, make decisions, and interact across enterprise systems—without a comparable investment in governance infrastructure. The dynamic resembles what one executive once described as “a Ferrari engine with Tweety Bird brakes”—extraordinary acceleration paired with insufficient control. A widening asymmetry has emerged: capability is

Mar 234 min read

The MacGyver Principle: How AI Can Turn Every Leader into a Builder

Earlier this month, I sat down with Claude (Opus 4.6), Anthropic's AI, and described a tool I needed. Two hours and twenty-six minutes later, I had a working macOS application, a GitHub repository with 15 commits, a one-command installer, a 16-chapter user manual, a security audit, and an MIT-licensed open-source project ready for public distribution. I personally wrote zero lines of code. Not one. The application is called Claudia Chatterley (voice-to-text). It's a voice-to-

Mar 127 min read

Are You Operating in the Wrong Era of AI?

January 2026 marked another structural inflection point in the AI revolution: the emergence of autonomous agentic AI, now rapidly reconfiguring how solopreneurs and enterprises adopt and deploy AI systems. Like a lobster molting its shell, the technology has undergone another fundamental transformation. And looking back through this lens, three distinct, evidence-supported eras come into focus, each with its own defining vibe, its own core capabilities, and its own strategic

Mar 106 min read

The 10 AI Moments That Reshaped Everything

The pace of AI improvements is breathtaking. We are living through another "temporal compression event" where generational technological change is condensed into months rather than years. Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT to the public on November 30, 2022, I have tracked AI's evolution as both a practitioner and author. And periodically, I've found it useful to step back and identify the inflection points that actually bent the trajectory of the industry, the economy, an

Mar 47 min read

Your 6-Week Workout Plan for Claude

One of the most frequent requests I get from executives and business owners sounds like this: "Severin, just give me an exercise plan. A workout plan. Something I can follow day by day to actually get good at this AI thing." I love that framing. Because most people miss this: getting value from AI isn't about one magical prompt. It's about building a practice in the same way you'd build physical fitness. Nobody walks into a gym on Day 1 and deadlifts 400 pounds. You follow a

Mar 14 min read

Why Markdown is the Operating System for Your Executive AI

In the early days of the AI boom, we were told that "prompting" was about talking to a machine like a human. But as business leaders and executive coaches, we’ve learned that "just talking" to AI often leads to inconsistent results, "hallucinations," and a lack of brand voice. If you want an AI that doesn’t just respond, but actually executes like a member of your senior staff, you need to move beyond the chat box and toward Markdown Prompt Architecture. What is a Markdown D

Feb 254 min read

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