I have some important news!

At Future Works, our rates are increasing by 20% for 2026. As a thank you for being part of the Lighthouse community, I'm giving you the chance to lock in our current pricing for all of next year.

Over the last year, we re-engineered our delivery model into a proprietary AI execution engine. The result is that we now ship critical digital initiatives 2x faster than the market standard. This means we can execute your 2026 roadmap in half the time.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to build something transformational, this is it.

In today's lineup: 

Robots

• The $45 billion agentic AI shift

• Real ROI from Gen AI

• Choose your AI's long-term memory

People

• Rick Cohen's warehouse revolution

Love

• How to escape the AI efficiency trap

• Transformative Reads: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Reading time: 3 min. 

Top Insights

• The workforce debate has shifted from reskilling employees to restructuring the economy.

• The key to enterprise AI is bringing the model to where data already lives.

• AI is less an application to buy and more a platform to build on.

• The new AI empires are being built in months, not decades.

• AI's true threat lies in leadership's failure to adapt.

The $45 billion agentic AI shift

A massive shift in AI economics unfolds. Deloitte’s 2026 Predictions report forecasts inference will comprise two-thirds of all AI compute by 2026. The market moves from building models to using them at scale. With the Agentic AI market hitting $45 billion, competitive advantage relies on efficiency rather than model size. Leaders must drive daily decisions through optimized execution.

What leaders can do

• Optimize for inference costs: Audit cloud spend now because usage scales fast.

• Focus on orchestration: Build middleware allowing agents to coordinate tasks.

• Prioritize specialized models: Replace massive LLMs with smaller versions tuned for business tasks.

• Embed governance as code: Insert safety checks directly into pipelines to maintain security at speed.

Real ROI from Gen AI

How human-centric AI delivers business results

• Unilever deploys generative AI to create marketing copy and product descriptions, accelerating content creation and ensuring brand consistency across its global portfolio.

• H&R Block equips its tax professionals with a custom AI tool that surfaces answers and insights from complex tax codes, boosting accuracy and efficiency.

• Mattel uses generative AI to accelerate its creative pipeline, allowing designers to generate and visualize new toy concepts much faster.

Together with The AI Entrepreneurs

Stay one step ahead with AI

The AI Entrepreneurs is the executive briefing with the critical intelligence and tools you need to stay ahead. Get:

• Access to 73,000+ AI leaders and innovators.

• A private community for strategic partnerships.

• Actionable playbooks to deploy high-ROI AI initiatives.

• A full execution toolkit: 100 ChatGPT prompts, a free AI writer, and two courses, "Minimum Viable Business" and "4-Hour AI Workweek."

No loans. No fluff. Just ROI.

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Tool Spotlight

Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage

Choose your AI's long-term memory

Pinecone

Best for: Enterprise teams needing a highly scalable, fully managed vector database to power production AI applications without the overhead of infrastructure management.

Choose if you:

• Need to handle billions of embeddings with low-latency retrieval.

• Prioritize reliability, security, and dedicated support for mission-critical apps.

• Want to focus on application development, not database administration.

Chroma

Best for: Developers and teams needing a flexible, open-source vector database for rapid prototyping, self-hosting, and building AI applications with full control over the stack.

Choose if you:

• Want to get started quickly on your local machine at no cost.

• Need full control over your data and infrastructure for privacy or customization.

• Are building applications where developer experience is a key priority.

3 more platforms to explore...

• Weaviate: An open-source vector database with a GraphQL API that excels at representing data relationships.

• Qdrant: A vector database focused on performance and reliability, written in the Rust programming language.

• Milvus: A highly scalable, popular open-source vector database designed for large-scale production environments.

Transformation Champion

Rick Cohen is turning a family business into an AI robotics powerhouse

Rick Cohen didn't just inherit his family's multi-billion-dollar grocery distribution business; he reinvented it. Facing massive logistical friction, he built his own AI-powered robotics system to automate his warehouses from the ground up. He then spun out the technology into Symbotic, which is now revolutionizing the supply chain for giants like Walmart. This success has turned Symbotic into an AI powerhouse, reporting stellar earnings and expanding into new sectors. His work is a powerful lesson in solving your own problems first, proving that profound innovation often comes from necessity.

How to escape the AI efficiency trap

We think waiting for AI to get cheaper is the safe move. It’s a trap.

As AI becomes more efficient, we don’t just do the same things for less. The entire standard for what’s possible rises. While you wait, the gap between you and your competitors becomes exponential.

Every day you wait, you pay a hidden tax:

• Data debt: your competitors are compounding their data advantage.

• Cultural lag: AI execution is a muscle. you can't buy it in two years; you have to build it now.

• A rising quality floor: as AI makes "good enough" easy, the only way to stand out is to operate at a level manual work can't match.

Learn more in my latest article.

Transformative Reads

One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:

In The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Eliyahu M. Goldratt uses a gripping narrative to introduce the Theory of Constraints, revealing how to eliminate the single biggest bottleneck stifling growth. The book reframes complex operational challenges into a singular focus, making systems thinking tangible and immediately applicable to any process.

Perfect for: Ops leaders, process engineers, and tech innovators.

In Culture

The promise of vibe coding is a unicorn in two minutes. The reality is a raw chicken.

What's your take? Join the debate on LinkedIn.

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