In today's lineup: 

Robots

• Your new moat is a private AI factory

• Real ROI from Gen AI

• NotebookLM or Perplexity for your research workflow?

People

• Tim Latimer engineers the power for the AI age

Love

• The antidote to slow execution

• Transformative Reads: Measure What Matters

Top Insights

• The AI arms race has moved from building better tools to building autonomous teammates.

• The cost of entry to the AI infrastructure race is so high, it's straining even the largest enterprise tech companies.

• Generative AI is moving from a line item in the R&D budget to the cornerstone of corporate strategy.

• The new competitive advantage in AI isn't just the model, but owning the silicon it runs on.

• The biggest debate in AI is no longer about ethics, but about who gets to enforce them.

Your new moat is a private AI factory

Trust defines the ultimate currency in the AI race. Forrester’s Predictions 2026 report anticipates 20% of enterprises will build "Private AI factories" next year. Leaders move sensitive workloads off public clouds to secure sovereign environments. Companies shifting to worker-centric agent workflows need to protect proprietary data. This demand forces a return to owned infrastructure.

What leaders can do

• Audit data sovereignty: Classify assets immediately to determine what stays private.

• Build a digital HR strategy: Plan how to manage and evaluate AI agents alongside humans.

• Leverage phased approaches: Start private AI builds with one high-value use case like R&D.

• Secure the supply chain: Ensure hardware vendors align with long-term privacy requirements.

Building your own AI factory is a critical move. If you're planning the build, let's talk.

Real ROI from Gen AI

How human-centric AI delivers business results

• 123RF uses AWS Bedrock and Claude 3 to automate content screening, cutting translation costs by 95% and speeding up reviews by 100x.

• Millennium BCP uses Google Vertex AI to personalize client offers, boosting digital sales conversion rates by 2.6x.

• Exati deploys Meta Llama 3 to answer technical queries for its smart city platform, resolving support tickets 39% faster.

Tool Spotlight

Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage

NotebookLM or Perplexity for your research workflow?

NotebookLM

Best for: Ops and Tech leaders synthesizing insights strictly from internal documentation (SOPs, manuals).

• Choose if you need to ground AI in your files to eliminate hallucinations.

• Choose if you want to turn dense reports into audio briefings for rapid alignment. News: Google recently removed the "Experimental" label, signaling enterprise readiness, and added the ability to steer audio conversations.

Perplexity Enterprise

Best for: Innovation teams replacing search engines with precise, cited answers from real-time market data.

• Choose if you require immediate competitive intelligence backed by verifiable sources.

• Choose if you need to toggle between leading models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5) in one interface. News: Perplexity launched "Spaces," a new collaborative hub allowing teams to organize threads and share research libraries securely.

3 more research assistants to explore

• Hebbia: AI analyst for massive document sets; ideal for legal ops and due diligence.

• Consensus: Search engine for R&D that extracts findings from peer-reviewed papers.

• Glean: Enterprise search connecting internal apps (Slack, Drive) to find institutional knowledge.

Transformation Champion

Tim Latimer engineers the power for the AI age

Tim Latimer saw that wind and solar cannot meet the constant energy demands of AI data centers. He adapted horizontal drilling technology from the oil industry to unlock enhanced geothermal energy. Fervo Energy now delivers firm, carbon-free electricity to Google. This operational milestone earned the company a spot on the 2025 TIME100 Most Influential Companies list. Latimer uses legacy tools to build the necessary infrastructure for a digital future.

The antidote to slow execution

Companies audit financial budgets but treat time as infinite. In an exponential market, shipping six months late makes your product obsolete.

Three shifts to accelerate:

1. Price the delay. Calculate the daily cost of inaction. When you put a dollar figure on waiting, "safe" delays look expensive.

2. Rent velocity. Don't hire permanent staff for temporary surges. Plug into an external execution engine that is already up to speed.

3. Buy infrastructure, build IP. If a component falls outside your core differentiator, partner with someone who has already solved it.

Have a critical project in mind? Let's talk before our 2026 rates kick in.

Transformative Reads

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

Measure What Matters details the goal-setting system of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that helped Google scale. Doerr's framework creates focus and alignment, ensuring teams are accountable for ambitious goals. It provides a masterclass in making sure the entire organization is pushing toward the same outcome.

Perfect for: Ops, Inno, and Tech leaders who need to align different teams on complex projects.

In Culture

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