Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Arete Coach 7/22

Book Smart, Street Smart, and the Machines We Now Work With

Most of us grew up hearing about two kinds of intelligence. Book smarts belong to the person who masters the material, remembers the research, and can explain a concept cleanly on demand. Street smarts belong to the person who reads a situation quickly, notices what is going unsaid, and knows which rules can bend and which will break something if touched. The distinction has endured because it captures something most of us have seen firsthand: knowing a great deal and knowing

2 days ago4 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

How to Remain Irreplaceable in the Age of AI

AI is turning coaching from a novelty into a utility. For Chairs and executive coaches, the market is bifurcating: the commodity vs. the craft. To stay relevant, we must hand over the routine tasks to the algorithms and double down on the distinctly human "craft" that no machine can replicate. What AI is Absorbing AI has already reached a level of competency that threatens the traditional "junior coach" or the facilitator who relies solely on structured processes. These eleme

Feb 235 min read

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

Feb 135 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 exi

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

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