{{first_name | Hi}}, your strategic AI update is here.
An AI tool just took down a core Amazon service, smart money is backing industrial AI over chatbots, and China now closes the robotics gap in a single year. The grace period for AI strategy is over. The division between leaders and laggards is no longer measured by pilot projects, but by operational reality.
"Managers light fires under people; leaders light fires within them."
— John Maxwell.
In today's lineup:
Robots
Building your AI roadmap to ROI
Real ROI from Gen AI
Choosing your AI agent framework
People
Kiara Nirghin is building an AI revenue engine for American industry
Love
This will fix your innovation problem
Transformative Reads: Chip War by Chris Miller
ROBOTS 🤖
How are robotics and AI changing industries? We break down the latest news, tools, and innovations for you.
Top Insights
Amazon's outage proves the biggest operational risk is now the AI in your developer tools.
VCs are funding Archimetis to prevent industrial failures, not just another chatbot.
China's hardware cycle is now 12 months from a stumble to deployment.
The tech selloff is Wall Street's new audit for AI revenue, not just hype.
China is shipping AI while the West is still debating its ethics.
Building your AI roadmap to ROI
Nearly 70% of CEOs expect generative AI to boost profits, but a full 41% admit their company has no real plan for it. This creates a massive value gap between financial hopes and operational reality. Leaders are funding a revolution without a roadmap, and the investment will go nowhere without a clear target.
How to close the gap
Tie every dollar of AI spend to a specific business outcome, not a technical capability.
Redesign core workflows first, before you try to automate them.
Let the teams who actually know the problems find the high-value AI uses.
Kill pilot projects that don't show clear value in 90 days.
What is the biggest obstacle to closing the 'AI value gap' in your organization?
Real ROI from Gen AI
How human-centric AI delivers business results
A New Mexico assessor's office used C3 AI to boost property appraisal accuracy by 50%, leading to more equitable tax assessments.
BBVA deployed Google Gemini to 100,000 employees, saving each one nearly 3 hours per week by automating repetitive tasks.
ServiceNow deployed its own Now Assist platform, cutting internal case volume by 14% and unlocking $10M in benefits in just 120 days.
Tool Spotlight
Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage
Choosing your AI agent framework
Best for: Developers who need a versatile and comprehensive open-source framework for building a wide range of LLM applications, including agents.
Choose if you:
Need a modular toolkit for chaining components and creating custom agentic behaviors.
Value a large, active community and the most extensive library of integrations.
Are building complex applications that go beyond simple RAG.
Best for: Teams focused specifically on building powerful, data-centric RAG applications where agents need to reason over private or domain-specific information.
Choose if you:
Need to connect LLMs to your proprietary data sources securely.
Prioritize advanced, fine-grained control over data indexing and retrieval.
Are building sophisticated search, summarization, or question-answering agents.
3 other frameworks to explore
CrewAI, Microsoft Autogen, and SuperAGI offer powerful, open-source frameworks for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents to work together on complex tasks.
PEOPLE 👥
Meet the innovators turning bold ideas into real-world impact.
Transformation Champion
How Kiara Nirghin is building an AI revenue engine for American industry
America's $5 trillion industrial supply chain often runs on manual processes, leaving billions on the table from lost leads and gut-instinct pricing. Kiara Nirghin, founder of Emanate, is tackling this friction head-on. Her company, which emerged from stealth this month, deploys autonomous AI agents as a 24/7 revenue engine for materials distributors and suppliers. Instead of simple chatbots, these agents convert inbound demand, nurture customer relationships, and find new prospects, aiming to increase customer revenue by up to 80%. Nirghin is bringing AI out of Silicon Valley and into the industries that build America. Read more
LOVE ❤️
Practical wisdom, growth tactics, and a must-read book that will challenge the way you think.
This will fix your innovation problem
Your company's success was built on stability and consistency, but those strengths have become barriers to change. This is the innovation paradox, and it’s why most large-scale initiatives fail.
Here is how to break free:
Ditch the million-dollar programs. Real change starts with five people dedicating one hour a week to finding and evaluating actual opportunities.
Focus on compounding returns. Each 13-week cycle should spawn two new innovation teams, naturally scaling your organization's ability to adapt.
Build for persistent evolution, not a dramatic overhaul. The goal is a lightweight system where innovation becomes an inevitable outcome, not a one-time project.
Transformative Reads
One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:
Chip War by Chris Miller tells the story of the microchip and the geopolitical struggle for control over this critical technology. Miller explains how a complex global supply chain became the key to economic and military power. The book provides essential context for understanding today's AI infrastructure race and its high stakes.
Perfect for: Tech leaders and strategists involved in the hardware side of AI.
In Culture
While the board debates geopolitical risk…
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Much Love,
Matt and the Future Works team
