Nowism - Edition 33

The punchiest podcast I've ever done, and what would life look like if we designed it today?

Deeper ones.

1 - Rethinking life.

What happens when tech smashes assumptions?

A few years ago I was on a Greek ferry passing one of the countless dreamy uninhabited islands, and it dawned on me that it’s always been near impossible to live in such a place—but that this could soon change.

Fifteen years ago you’d need to somehow get electricity, cellular or fixed phone service, fresh water, and of course you’d need to build the thing. To get stuff (like yourself) there often, you’d have to fashion some sort of harbor. It would pretty much all be impossible in almost every direction.

Today you could plonk any number of futuristic modular, prefabricated homes from a helicopter onto some piles in seconds.

You’d get insanely fast, cheap internet and comms with Starlink.

Electricity would come cheaply from wind and solar, batteries would smooth out supply shortages, and desalinated water would be simple.

You’d circumvent a harbor by using a drone, and you wouldn’t need to leave so much because school or work could be remote, doctors’ visits could be done via telehealth.

The only thing that would be difficult would be every single part of getting any form of permitting, or a mailing address, or permission to live in the country. Literally every interface with bureaucracy would be as slow, painful, physical, and anachronistic as ever.

We often forget that the future is built on the foundations of the past. And while possibilities may change quickly, and our imagination eagerly works at how technology challenges assumptions, things don’t necessarily become faster. They tend to become more chaotic, more tense, more complex. Entropy increases.

This little daydream on a boat a while ago gets to the heart of many things today. But the one I want to dwell on is the idea that technology has profound implications for changing some of the assumptions that hold us back. My first two books were based on the idea that technology changes how we behave and the rules of business. The tagline was: “What would your business look like if you set it up today?”

I don’t think I ever want to write another book, but if I did, the tagline would be: “What would your life look like if you built it today?” Because many of the core parameters of life are design criteria that we never challenge, despite no longer being especially true.

We retire because we presume our bodies will wear out, but most people reading this will be more able to create value at 80 than they were at almost any earlier time. For most people, learning, socialization, and work are unbundled from location. Most of our life is still shaped by status, privacy, scarcity, proximity, risk avoidance, and a fear of standing out. It’s built around formal education, accumulation, consistency, and stability. But who has asked the question: what does a good life look like in the modern era? Are we automatically designing our lives around the parameters of the past? What if we live a really long time? What if economic growth forever doesn’t happen? Are we optimizing for things that we assume matter, but that perhaps don’t mean as much anymore?

2 - Zuckerbored

I do think Zuck is just bored these days. He just announced plans to spend $50bn on a server farm the size of Manhattan to “do AI things.”

While I do find Zuckerberg and everything he touches to be accidentally misanthropic, what puzzles me most about him is he’s remarkably consistent inability to have a vision or good ideas. Other than “the Portal”, buying instagram and buying WhatsApp, he’s never been shown any ability have or follow good ideas.

Meta is a deeply simple and smart company, it makes money from eyeballs, or more specifically from showing ads to eyeballs, or even more specifically, from using closed loop data signals that showed advertisers their ads worked, and automatically debiting their credit cards.

It’s true that today every company “needs” to be an AI company, just as in 2015 every company “needed” to be “a tech company”. But the real question is: how much of the technology do they actually need to own, invent, or operate?

BMW, Netflix, or P&G didn’t become digital by running the internet; they just had to understand it, and it’s implications, and to use it.

So maybe, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, Apple, Meta, Amazon, SAP, Tesla, Pinduoduo, or Samsung don’t need to build AI from the ground up. Maybe they just need to get extremely good at understanding what it means, and how to use it best and maybe it won’t change consumer behaviors, maybe we like buying things.

3 - My punchiest podcast ever.

I do about 5 Podcasts a monht and much to every hosts annoyance I almost never promote them because can you imagine how insufferable my posts would be. This is an exception because

1. It’s important to me for people to see it. I care.

2. The questions were great, great hosting Jon.

3. I think I was really lucid and clear and articulate for once.

   ---

   The Spark of Discovery – Reigniting The Emotion of E-commerce - Sponsored by Criteo.

   There have always been two types of commerce: shopping vs buying.

   Shopping is about a fun experience, it’s about discovery, persuasion, seduction, surprise. It’s the trip to the mall, the farmers market, it’s something you look forward to.

   And then there is buying, the efficient procurement of a need, the urgent fulfillment of a practical need.
   

   AI won’t change everything immediately but it looks likely to impact both commerce journeys.

   • For shopping it helps us make decisions, it provides guidance, it can make what was overwhelming more fun.

   • But buying could be revolutionized more readily. In theory more logical purchasing could be done in a more automated way. More data, more decisioning also means retailers and buyers can transact in ever more efficient and speedy ways. 
     

   In Criteo's report, “The Spark of Discovery – Reigniting the Emotion of Ecommerce”, the research explores what it takes for brands to stand out when shopping and buying blur across physical and digital spaces.

   For me, the biggest misunderstanding in online marketing is that people don’t want to be helped, remembered, or served. In reality, they expect brands to understand them, to anticipate needs, suggest relevant options, and remove friction. People don’t hate personalization they hate when it's done poorly. 

   The report shows how we can break out of the loop and bring real discovery back to commerce. The companies that succeed won’t be the ones with more data, but the ones that use it thoughtfully alongside AI. 

   Definitely worth a read for anyone rethinking what online shopping and buying could be. 

   ---

   Little ones.

   a) I like these bite-sized ideas. I keep sneaking them into articles, but nobody seems to pick them up—so I’ll just keep hammering on about them.
   

   1. Work expands to fit the technology available.
   We always think new tech will mean shorter working weeks or radical productivity gains. In reality, it usually just enables more pointless work, more bureaucracy, and more distraction.
   

   2. We apply technology where it’s easiest, not where it matters most.
   The first use of any tech is to do the same things faster or cheaper—it has to slot into existing systems, mindsets, and business cases. The next stage is doing the same things better. Only much later do we rethink the system entirely and use it to do new things in new ways.

   
   3. Most predictions are just preferences.
   People imagine the future in ways that suit them, shaped by their worldview and biases.

   
   4. AI finally forces ambition.
   For once, companies see their IT departments as strategic, future-focused functions—not just cost centers.

   
   5. Tech adds entropy.
   It rarely replaces old ways of doing things; it just layers new ones on top. The touchscreen didn’t kill the keyboard. Our wallets have more in them now than ever.
   

   b) A nostalgic history of pizza ordering online , somehow Pizzas and Porn seem to be the harbinger of tech.

   c) It’s great when anyone can make anything, but sometimes maybe they shouldn’t What are people actually “vibe coding” and have a look and see if it’s any good.

   d) Wouldn’t it be great if Amazon could hear everything I ever said

   e) How to rewire your curiosity, just one of 129 tabs open on my laptop, one of which is about oddly short runways.
   
   f) A site full of amazingly useful newsy charts.

   g) I got more drunk than planned with a Norwegian ( Hi Vidar) on a drink that crosses the equator twice and it fascinated me how inefficient logistics can be a powerful product proposition
   

   h) Worst advice ever, the UK government genuinely and seriously tells people to delete emails to conserve water. ( Aren’t most data centers closed loop anyway?)
   

   i) Host makes an Airbnb damage claim using AI generated images, what a funny time to be alive.
   

   j) Cartwheels and somersaults are easy but Robot dexterity is still hard.

Me me me.

I’m doing more “board level advisory” work these days, which is a way of saying helping boards or individuals at the top level, navigate change, challenge assumptions, avoid distractions, bring the world into the room, and ask more naive but powerful questions.

I’ve got a couple of open slots now, so please get in touch if I could be valuable.

That’s it for now.

Thanks,

Tom

( as always, I read all replies, and reply to most )

Nowism - Edition 32

Navigating nuance in the era of mass hype.

Wow, it’s exhausting out there. Every time a new technology emerges, I get genuinely excited about what’s possible. But then the noise kicks in. These days, it pays to be loud and wrong, bold and clueless, to stir panic rather than understanding. Futurists get paid to be interesting more than helpful, so I’m not one of them.
Here’s my latest attempt to bring a little nuance back and be useful.

Deeper ones.

1 - Robots will take your chores.

I don’t know that much about (humanoid) robots but I do think they represent a really interesting tension in today’s world.

These days I see ever more videos of ever more amazing machines, with the promise of performance increases, price decreases and self-learning technology which makes them easy to use, to improve and to adapt and program.

In no particular order, some thoughts.

1. Something about these videos always looks really fake, maybe it’s skepticism born from distrust of a “fake it until you make it” era, or maybe the filming technique is weird.
   

2. They always looks much more like people than makes sense. If you wanted to make a really good robot, you’d start with wheels and low to the ground, making them human seems to freak people out, but it does have the massive bonus of making them MUCH easier to fit into a world that we’ve primarily built around people ( and cars). This is how technology starts, it fits into physical and mental spaces we have already.
   

3. It's quite easy to get excited, just imagine a home robot that does everything you ask for $20,000. No more ironing, cleaning, trips to get milk, no more changing the bed. Just imagine what this can do for people who need carers, the elderly, just imagine busy people with kids working 3 jobs, now able to rest a little. Imagine what this can do for productivity. One of the big questions of the current AI era is “what are we going to do with all this free time”, a question that always seems hilarious in retrospect.

4. At the same time, like most technology of this era, it makes me wonder if we’re being led by techno-optimizers, the sort of people who think food should be a tablet, friendship is more efficient if done online, that alcohol is illogical, the sort of people who want to live long, narrow, optimized lives, devoid of the inefficiencies that many call “living”.
   
   Increasingly I tend to think that very little of life is something to outsource. It’s quite nice to fix the garbage disposal unit, it gives me a sense of mini progress to make the bed, cleaning is my meditation, cooking is my therapy.
   

   

   
   

2- The Ambient Internet.

For the first time in 8 years, I went on Facebook the other day. I got absolutely addicted to Facebook Marketplace, but also mindlessly scrolling. Here I was with a new baby, new puppy, a great wife, and I was mesmerized by videos of snooker, boats going through choppy water, courses on how to make $50k a month using AI, literal car crashes, soccer technique, and AI-generated women with fake fake breasts.

Technology people have decided the phone is the issue. It would be better if we wore the Internet on our face, or if cameras were on glasses, or that something could overhear everything we said and interrupted us. It's almost like no one remembered the complete failure of the Humane Pin.

Alas, here we are again, a new “smartphone killer”. I wish people would realize that the problem isn't the form factor of the phone, the problem is the incentives that drive software and services or at least the stupid KPIs.

The only thing Netflix should really care about is how happy people are with the service. Instead, they take time spent on Netflix as an easy-to-measure proxy for happiness, and then do everything they can to increase time spent, by automatically suggesting incredibly bad shows. But because they autostart, we become transfixed by the mundane cheap crap that algos know we can’t stop watching.

If we want to fix the screen addiction problem, we need to rewire the industry, not the device. And we also need some discipline.

3- The Agentic Era is probably nonsense

The world is really complex, with old software, technical debt, data is all over the place, databases that can't talk to each other, and complex security, permissioning, and governance.

When Web3 came along, it was driven by the hope that new plumbing would change all of this, but it turned out life was more complicated than that. Now we have AI agents; the dream is that they provide a new interface onto the old web.

Rather than my using Condé Nast Traveller to fall in love with Montenegro, Kayak to find a flight, and BA.com to buy a ticket, I’ll just say to a bot, “Take me somewhere nice,” and it will handle everything.

A couple of things hit me about this.

• Most people quite like shopping for most things.

• The rationale that people use to choose things is often quite unexplainable; Zurich or Madrid airport makes me happier for transfers than Heathrow.

• The BA website is almost impossible to use and always down. Why would a robot be luckier than me?

• Most companies have spent years keeping bots off (CAPTCHAs, anyone?). Why would they now let the most powerful bots ever have free reign

• Every demo of an agentic flow didn’t really work.

• Everything online is always changing; the moment anyone in the chain changes anything, the system could fail.

So I was very unsurprised to hear that Cloudflare is blocking bot access this week

Podcast of the month

Cybersecurity used to be a technical backroom topic, but in the age of AI, it becomes a topic for everyone in the boardroom.

It’s great to “move fast and break things”, but security risks are existential.

As AI accelerates threat complexity and the attack surface grows by the second, staying ahead isn’t optional.

That’s why I’ve been tuning into Threat Vector, a podcast from Palo Alto Networks that goes beyond the headlines, and into depth with a rare thing, deep experts with clear advice.

It’s sharp, fast, insightful with real perspectives from industry leaders tackling real problems.

If you care about the future of security, trust, AI, or the future survival of your company, this is well worth your time.

Check it out at https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/podcasts/threat-vector

Shallower Ones

1 - Magical to Mundane in seconds- I’ve been slow to try Waymo. It happened this week in San Francisco; it was both the most magical (the first 90 seconds) and the most boring (the next 13 minutes) experience I’ve ever had.

It felt quite lonely and sad, and it was precisely the same as any Uber I’ve ever had, just without the feeling someone who deserved it was getting paid. As with many technologies, the initial impact isn’t huge; it just fills the same gap. The real change will come when robotaxis thrive in rural areas where Uber makes no sense, when cities turn car parks into thriving spaces, when cars communicate to reduce congestion, and when buses become intelligent and dynamic. It’s the second- and third-order impacts that will be enormous.

2- Gene editing will probably be one of the biggest issues of this generation, we've been saying that for a long time, but you can just see it happening now. Turbocharging and entrenching privilege forever?

3- The Internet made the cost of distributing stuff tend towards zero, AI has made the cost of producing stuff tend towards zero, an algorithm spread content far and wide. Content creation has basically become a casino, where every spin of the reel is free, and people have been making a fortune making endless videos for YouTube, or images for Pinterest, or fake news for Facebook, and nobody seemed to care, until now. I’m so happy YouTube is banning slop

Wider Ones

Why shops make a city great

Economic miracles stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed

We have no idea how to value companies.

Calm down, why FOMO isn’t a strategy

A raspberry pi, but for robots. Good work Hugging Face

UI Trends Mood Board for 2025

The rise of the Japanese toilet

The world's first Hydrogen economy?

Why is modern commerce corrosive?

Half the money I spend on bureaucracy is wasted

How does United Airlines pick weird places to fly to?

Older Ones

A deck I made about Trends in 2015, I’m mega proud of it.

Me me me

Right now I’m focusing on a new Workshop offering with Chris Johns of Bttr.

It's designed to help companies really understand what AI means for their business, and what to do about it.

I'll be talking more about it in the future, for anyone interested, get in touch.

That’s all for now.

Nowism - Edition 31

So where is AI in the hype cycle, nobody knows, but some questions arise. Arlo says hello.

It all feels a bit overwhelming these days. My attempts to keep up to date with the daily developments in AI have been exhausting, which explains the irregular nature of this newsletter.

“Nobody knows anything" was coined by William Goldman, a screenwriter and novelist, as a way to explain how Hollywood “worked”, and it always seems like a perfect description of the current AI world, the more you read, the more you experiment, listen, talk, learn, the more it seems to make less and more sense.

I’ve learned to take a step back and try to see things in context, over a longer period, then some patterns but also questions emerge.

Big Ones

Where are we on the AI hype curve?

Is it the law of diminishing returns or exponential growth, Zeno’s paradox or the runaway effect? Where are we?

It’s easy to get swept up in the wave that is AI. I returned to Facebook to buy rare plants from locals on Marketplace, but my entire feed was flooded with ads for AI courses from prestigious institutions or tips on how to make money as an “AI transformation specialist.” It felt rather scammy—very web3 or metaverse. My Twitter feed is an endless stream of proclamations: vibe coding means anyone can do anything, universities are dead, or AI-first startups will eat the world, despite employing just two people—one of whom might be an enthusiastic 8-year-old.

There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, too. Klarna rode the PR wave of replacing humans before almost entirely walking it back. Models that once seemed to improve dramatically are no longer doing so—or is this a classic case of our expectations of technology advancing faster than the technology itself? What’s magical becomes ordinary, then disappointing, in about 43 hours.

Three questions in my head:

1. Not so fast, the world is messy.
   There’s a certain Gell-Mann Amnesia effect with AI: the less you know about a field, the more impressive AI seems to be at it. It’s easy to think it can replace a lawyer, architect, or copywriter if you have no idea what these jobs actually involve. The only exception seems to be coding, where many software engineers are the most impressed by what “it” can do. Regardless of its ability to handle specific tasks, we often forget that most jobs aren’t just tasks—they’re far messier. The role of a receptionist, for instance, probably involves 24 different things, of which an iPad can replace only one.

2. We know how the movie ends……or do we?
   If there were one chart I could make go viral, it’s this: technology has always progressed in three stages—(1) cheaper and/or faster, (2) better, and then (3) different.

   
   First, it’s used to make the same things, but cheaper: the plastic button, the steam engine, the computer—all were initially used to do the same things, just more cheaply.
   
   Then, it’s used to do the same things in a slightly different but better way: the electric lightbulb, the electric iron, synthetic dyes, steel.
   
   Finally, it’s used to create something radically different: film, microwaves, lasers, the TV set.

So, we kind of know how AI will go:

• 2025: Automate customer service

• 2027: Improve customer service

• 2030: Reimagine customer service
  

• 2025: Automate ads

• 2027: Create much better forms of advertising

• 2030: Redefine what ads should be

  
  etc

  

  3. There are really three types of companies when it comes to AI adoption
     

  Simply sprinkling AI onto a legacy process won’t work as well as redesigning that process from the ground up with AI at its core.
  
  The differences between these three types of companies are stark:

  • A large, traditional multinational trying to adopt AI.

  • A large, digital-first firm aiming to integrate AI.

  • An AI-first startup built to leverage it from day one.
    

  AI can be deeply transformative, but it’s incredibly hard to get big, established organizations to change. Even famously nimble, entrepreneurial companies in the second category will struggle with challenges like security, data governance, and new workflows.

  So, yes, AI-first startups (type 3) will likely harness AI’s power first. But then the question becomes: you’ve mastered AI—do you know how to make money in your sector? Will an AI-first retailer, bank, insurance company, energy firm, or marketplace automatically dominate? Probably not. Most winning companies succeed by understanding their sector deeply, not just by mastering the tech.

Non -AI things.

Make Advertising Great Again.

I got a column in the drum, in my second post I swore about how shit ads are now and how we can Make Advertising Great Again.

”To be advertised at today is to be insulted, the promise of adtech is a lie, we don’t offer one on one conversations at scale, we offer random precise guesses as to who you are, that result in it thinking you’re an old, pregnant male suffering from poor health. It will engage you in conversational Cantonese to stoke your passions for luxury handbags and industrial rivets.

Take a few seconds to unblock those ads, and then take a look and see what you get. Did a human see this? Did anyone care? Did anyone expect me, a human, to click?

I don’t think we realize how deeply nasty it all is; between the lies, the fraud, the scams, the bots, the targeting, the following, the harassment, the automated ways to spank budgets on fake clicks, faster than ever. It all makes pig butchering or 419 scams look rather sophisticated and above board” - Read more here.

Sponsored post ( but still good) - Spinnaker technology

Nokia. Kodak. Blockbuster. Borders.

Remember the relentless tech disruption narrative from 2010?

These companies were cautionary tales, and the question on everyone’s mind was who’s next?

Surely Walmart & Target were doomed, Airbnb would crush Marriott, & Toyota would fall to Tesla, Uber, Waymo, or all three.

Who needed a Gym in the age of Peloton, or Bank when we've got an neoBank.

But then… nothing much happened.

For all the talk of “Disrupt or Die,” “Digital Darwinism,” and “Creative Destruction,” reality turned out far less dramatic.

Carry on reading the post here.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomfgoodwin_nokia-kodak-blockbuster-borders-remember-activity-7287526658012565504-D1fU

Little ones

• An interesting piece on various companies completing changing how things are made.

• Love this piece on Cognitive debt. It’s when you skip deep thinking to get quick answers, but you don’t understand why those answers are correct. It’s like borrowing knowledge without paying the “interest” of truly grasping it

• Robots flopped at a half marathon, proving they need wheels, not legs. Human-like robots are pointless unless deception’s the goal. Why do people keep forgetting this?

• Quite a useful case on how a Legacy Financial Institution Went All In on Gen AI. HBR is often nothing like as good as it used to be, but this is decent.

• A lot of the time it seems like the jobs the US wants to bring back don’t really exist any more and that’s prob a good thing, coal mining anyone, but sometimes it’s not that simple. Turns out robots making shoes isn’t that easy.

• I love how you can art from the weather in real time with this , just wish people made Digital Art Screens for this stuff.

• I’m always fascinated by bulky, large, outdated infrastructure. Sometimes I do think that deep transformation is essential, but there's never a business case to be made for it. Things like Covid showed sometimes urgency, desperation and disruption is a good combo. Doge’s work is quite interesting to show the chaos that ensues. Sometimes you have to Take steps back to go forward

• People seem to think startups like this will threaten management consulting, I think it’s nonsense, people don’t choose McKinsey for ideas or work done, they choose it for career insurance and to show you tried , and to get existing work sold in by outsiders.

Thought for now.

What are we saving all this time to do?
The more technology I have in my life, the most determined I am to be bored.
I’m cooking more than ever, doing more things slowly, I’m getting surprisingly obsessed with house plants and watching them grow. I also have a puppy and watching him attempt attack a tennis ball gives me a rush that no notification can currently compete with. So much of live isn’t to be automated or streamlined, it’s to be entranced by. Miami is about to enter the season of the very best clouds, it’s exiting.

All about me.

I’m speaking at AntiCon 2025 in London this week about AI and Advertising.
Then some private events in Paris before another talk in London for Mailchimp on June 12th.

Currently planning a bit of a global tour to Australia, maybe Cape Town and somewhere else on the way in August 2025, and prob the Middle East in November, if you want to add me en route.

This is my puppy. He owns me now. He’s called Arlo. He’s tiring but magnificent. Everyone should have a dog.

Nowism - Edition 30

Living in the Year 2030, AI Companies Don’t Actually Like You Using AI, Amazon is a Mess, TV Ads Are About to Get Worse, and Trump Wants to Sell Everything.

Big Ones

Separating the silly from the sinister.

I’ve totally redone this newsletter 8 times now; things keep on changing, or at least it feels that way.

It’s all a bit of a blur these days because it’s designed that way:

1. The Trump-induced swirl, the shock and awe, the lack of coherence, and the randomness provide a cover to allow sinister things to hide behind the silly distractions and allow wild lapses in judgment to seem like a cunning strategy.

2. The media has no interest in covering what matters, only what’s likely to get clicked on.

So to kick things off, here’s a way to keep your sanity in 2025 and beyond.

Your job or your role as a good human being is not dependent on knowing everything in real time; a certain level of ignorance is a good thing these days.

Historically, for better or worse, almost all of Trump’s policies have faded away under pressure, judicial scrutiny, or the complexities of the real world. The media seems to forget this.

The big thing to worry about is that the media environment makes it hard to know what’s actually important. It’s hard to distinguish the impossible from the likely, the trivial from the existential, the silly from the sinister, and the mistakes from the misdirections.

We probably need to step back more and see the news in a slower, calmer, broader way.

Stargate — A portal to something, somewhere, someday.

Part of Trump’s attempt to grab all headlines was the announcement of a concept of a plan to build a lot of AI stuff. Literally, everything about this was vague. What is it, wasn’t this already happening, who was doing this, why, and where? It was at the most extreme end of declarations of intent vs. actually anything happening. It seemed like a great chance for people to talk about big numbers, knowing that they would never ever be held accountable.

One of the funny parts is that the only clear detail we have is that ‘it’ will be built in Abilene, Texas. A place made famous for the Abilene paradox, a story about a group of people who drive for hours to visit a town that nobody actually wants to go to but because they each think each other wants to go to it. A lot of AGI talk seems like this, there is a presumption that somebody wants this.

Tarif’fic News

Under Trump, the world suddenly seems to have shifted to a business, or more precisely, the property business.

Suddenly everything is for sale—Greenland, canals, the Gaza Riviera. Everything is treated as a transaction; religion, politics, history, and basic morality need not impede the flow of money.

On the one hand, the everyday changes in policy seem erratic, unpredictable, volatile, and random. If you take a step back, there is some consistency to an ambitious, clear, long-term vision, MAGA, and all that; the only problem is that everyday tactics seem erratic.

If there’s one thing businesses don’t like, it’s uncertainty. If there’s one thing they dislike even more, it’s uncertainty without reason.

We’re now in an environment where threats seem so ever-present, but empty, and people will stop bothering to take them seriously. One wonders how companies can prepare for an age where extremely significant policy changes can be enacted extremely quickly with so little thought.

Why is Digital Transformation So Slow? (Sponsored by Spinnaker Support)

It’s a question I can’t stop thinking about.

Why do so many companies still use bad software? Why aren’t airlines competing with world-class apps? Why don’t banks dominate the digital landscape and showcase their brilliance?

For years, I chalked it up to resistance to change, apathy, and a lack of ambition. Three big culprits seemed obvious:

1️⃣ The End-User Problem: CEOs often don’t see how clunky tools hurt employees.

2️⃣ The Business Case for Change: Overhauls are costly, and better apps don’t always feel “core” to the business.

3️⃣ Lack of Talent: Many organizations simply don’t have access to the expertise needed.

But recently, I’ve uncovered a deeper, less-discussed factor: the fear of software license audits.

To read more, click here.

Amazon GOne

I’ve said this before, but Amazon is an incredible logistics company, but a truly lousy retailer. Shutting even more stores this week is more proof.

It can be explained by an uncomfortable truth: retail is largely about people. It's about why we buy things, how we buy things, and when we buy things. People are weird: They are unpredictable, irrational, and whimsical. For me, genius in retail is something like Aldi’s/Lidl’s middle aisle. It’s the idea that people like surprises; they get excited by a combination of 95% predictability and the temptation of something unexpected. Retail is TJMaxx ; it’s the maze of Flying Tiger; it’s the store design of Zara.

Tech people are incredible at tech, but they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t want to know it and don’t value it. They think data is more powerful than empathy or imagination. Every Amazon store I’ve been to, and I’ve been to many for years, was painfully soulless.

To be fair, amazon.com is quickly turning into a joke. We live in an age of abundance; one of the strongest needs that people have is to be able to navigate decisions with confidence quickly. The most powerful way to do this is via brands; the other is through curation or filtering. Try buying almost anything from Amazon these days, and you get 60 identical products with the same photography, different random brands, at different prices with different delivery speeds, arranged in order of how much they bribed Amazon. It’s a mess.

TV advertising is about to get awful, but will look effective.

It's no secret that TV viewing has been destroyed by digital streaming. I spent years telling TV channels their competitors weren't other TV channels but instead YouTube and social media, and they genuinely laughed at me. I think now they're about to make another massive mistake.

Finally waking up to the idea that TV is now largely streamed, and streamed content doesn’t need advertising and content to be welded together and instead can be “inserted” locally, TV companies are about to foolishly try to copy the same mistakes that digital media companies did and open up ads to all. First, it was Comcast; now it’s Disney.

A big theme for today is that technology always democratizes access. This means you get more customers, but it also tends to lower quality. One of the defining features of TV advertising has been its quality. The signal of running TV ads always added to the impact of the ad. The quality of other advertisements ensured we paid a modicum of attention. Opening up TV to everyone will, without a doubt, spoil it for everyone. The promise of personalization, of real-time placement, of interactivity, will end up with precisely incorrectly targeted ads rather than wonderful, seductive broadcast ads with weight and class.

De minimis me

In 2024 1.36 billion parcels under $800 were shipped to the USA, in 2020 it was 637 million.

I'm guessing most of this was complete crap, bought on a whim from China, via impulse from ads served on Instagram and TikTok.

The $5 light that broke on first use, the oddly slow Apple Watch charger, the “dupe” designer dress that fell apart just before being washed for the first time. A business model I believe was predicated on the idea that anything under $25 is not worth bothering to send back, and anything under $9 isn’t worth moaning about.

Well, finally, the de minimis exception, a loophole that allowed these products to enter the US without inspection, or import duty is now being closed.

Boom or Bust

The year is 2030; we will fly at 3000 mph to wait for a bus to take us to a long immigration line.

Boom flew at supersonic speed a prototype, of a prototype, of a prototype of a plane that probably won't ever fly, but everyone got very enthusiastic. 99% of me wants to be incredibly bullish on what Boom will mean. I love the audacity, I love the ambition; it's the Elon-like channeling of “We can do it, the incumbents are lazy, it’s not THAT hard.”.

But two things hold it back.

1. The huge challenge is to design and develop an engine that can be unbelievably powerful, extremely reliable, and ultra-efficient. No large engine maker agreed to be involved. The engine development is currently led by Florida Turbine Technologies, a company that looks like it’s operating from the back of a hospital in a strip mall, with a website barely updated in the last eight years. I guess they've been busy.

2. The idea seems quite stupid.

Supersonic speeds can only be maintained over water, and the plane only fits 60 people, making staffing costs, landing slot costs, capital costs, and fuel costs enormous when amortized over such a small load and with no cargo.

One of the strange consequences of a post-pandemic working environment is that time and space take on a new meaning. Even if you're one of those hyper-stressed, productivity-obsessed, hustle culture types, it's much better to work with good Wi-Fi on a plane than to rush yourself. Frequent planes are less important than flights that are less likely to be delayed. Everything becomes about how well you can work more than time.

Podcast of the week.

Lukas Böni tells me how Meat alternatives will dominate the food market.

Little ones. 

1. “The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to upsell you 3 times”. I absolutely love this rant on getting people to care.

2. Really annoying ads on fridge doors are on the way out, an idea that never seemed remotely smart, and sold on the idea that all data must be useful because it just is.

3. Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has. Depends if absolute or relative.

4. At this rate, we’re going to be teaching coders how to mine.

5. Loved this new deck from Zoe Scaman. Looking at growth from quantity vs quality, shifting to better, not more, superb stuff.

6. You’d never guess how much of GDP growth in the US is down to just more people, not more productivity. Some immigration stats.

7. Big companies never seem to be able to do startups, HSBC in with example #1032, and another weird attempt to copy a competitor with a massive head start with something identical.

8. I’m trying to understand agentic workflows; to me, they still seem like an automatic button pusher. But I'm going to get stuck into some of these new products and report back one day, or my AI will.

9. “What breakfast can I make with the ingredients in my fridge?” I ask. The use case for every lost technology, this time it's face computers.

10. Check this out. We’re quick to assume computers or robots will take our jobs, but it’s far more complex. Look at this piece on the pretty slow take-off of self-checkouts. Part of the reason is that where technology meets psychology and business and logistics, the math gets fussy.

11. The best tweet I think I did all month, but not many people read it. What a book or the news was a conversation?

12. Lessons from Zepto, Rebel Foods, and the Dabbawalas: a superb view of the world from India, where innovation is everywhere, as is labor.

13. What would the world look like if we started it today, well, for one education would be very different. Here we see chatbots impact on schooling. It's always interesting to look at what happens in the developing world because they have to destroy to change.

14. 650 Slides on the state of internet and media consumption. I don’t find the format very useful personally, but people love data. I’d prefer to know what’s interesting. I'm still confused by many things; why do such reports so rarely feature OnlyFans or Twitch as social networks? In fact, what is a social media network? Is it YouTube? Is Pinterest? Why is TV still considered different from streaming, which is considered different from social media? It’s all just video from the internet.

    This is my favorite chart from the slide deck. I do wonder why Anglocentric markets spend so much more than other nations.

    

15. ARK Invest, a company obsessed with the idea that everything is always changing, launched its 2025 trends deck. Never before have so many very smart people drunk so much tech; it will change everything, Kool-Aid. Their work is always batshit crazy and utterly wrong and thus useful to look at. Do the opposite? Like these people.

16. Super smart piece about China and industrial coevolution.

17. Was the Metaverse a legendary misadventure? I think it’s always been obvious it was a deeply odd fantasy pursued by some of the world's most out-of-touch people.

18. It’s funny that AI companies are asking applicants to not use AI when applying for jobs there. I guess it’s not good enough for them.

Me now.

After spending an enormous amount of time working with a large car company on how to rethink the entire customer experience in almost every single way, I’m now focusing on starting a company that can entirely rethink how advertising is done. That’s all!

After clearing things out a bit, I’m also open to new consulting opportunities and advisory roles. My consulting website is here. I’m dialing up the degree to which I help companies navigate what generative and other forms of AI actually, truly, and pragmatically mean to their business and what to do about it.

That’s it for now.
Thanks

Tom

Nowism - Edition 29

Saudi's Skyline Dreams, More Time for TikTok, Excel will outlive us all, and The Future of Work

Big One’s

Thoughts from Saudi Arabia

A lot of things hit you visiting Saudi Arabia, one is the huge degree of social change that’s happening at lightning speed, another is the palpable sense of youth (over 60% of the population is under 30) and, most strikingly, the overwhelming sense of ambition.

It’s my third visit this year, and this time I emceed (a horrible verb) the main stage of the world’s largest property show for four exhausting but brilliant days.

Saudi Arabia possesses something few other countries seem to have, but which we rarely notice when it’s missing: vision. It has drive, it has optimism. It’s not heaven on earth, nor is it without problems, but it’s moving forward with clarity and conviction.

Most companies or countries lack a vision, let alone one that is clearly articulated. What does the UK want to be? What direction is it heading? What is its role in the world? What does success look like? The same questions could be asked of Germany, the USA, and Japan. In fact, almost all countries have no clear or articulated sense of what they want to become.

After time in Riyadh, these places seem like gerontocracies with elderly leaders hanging on, not building. Everything seems to be nostalgic or frozen, as if dreaming let alone making a bolder future is something to feel guilty about. That being optimistic isn’t reading the room right.  

A property show in Saudi Arabia shows images of a future I thought we’d given up on. 

Floating Octagonal cities, beachfront communities that look from another planet (see below), subterranean habitats, organic splayed ski resorts, and of course, the rather infamous Line. There are also vast cubical city centers, and assumptions of what is impossible are challenged everywhere. 

At times this stuff looks a bit like Bond Villain x DALL·E 3, and we wonder how much of it will ever get built and about environmental impacts, but generally speaking, I absolutely love seeing this. It’s hopeful, ambitious, imaginative, human-centered, future-focused and we need more of that.

And for all those who think this stuff is vapor and shrouded in mystery, they also featured webcams showing live views of ongoing contraction and the goal to have most elements (not the Line) finished by 2030, just in time for the UK to not build another runway or another bridge.

This show asked the question, If we had no idea, what a city should look like and the answers were spectacular. 

Mindless Media is the New Fast Food

In the age of social media, the editor is quickly replaced by the algorithm; curation and distribution come from our friends, not newsstands; and our opinions are further reinforced and entrenched by bias and then software. 

Entrenched ignorance becomes likely, not just possible when in a world of connected billions there will always be people and data to support any thesis. Read the rest of this piece I wrote 8 years ago here, it’s as true as ever.  It’s really not hard to predict the future, only the timing.

Will AI eat our meals for us too?

AI is doing weird things with our relationship with time. What is now just life, and what is now something to speed up or automate?

Take for example this new idea YouTube is testing, it can “watch” and summarize a YouTube video in short form text. On the one hand, I loathe watching a slow 11min long video each time I need to clear an error on a dishwasher or descale my Nespresso, ‘don’t forget to subscribe to my channel” is the soundtrack of 2024, but at the same time, a nice 7 min video on the best way to cheer up a houseplant can be rather nice. 

At some point we need to ask what in life deserves to be sped up, what deserves never to exist, what should be automatically viewed for us, and what are we actually saving time for?  The way I see 2024 is lots of people buying crap food from Uber Eats, having AI wish people a Happy Birthday, auto-suggesting replies to your mum, so we can save time to moronically waste our life away on TikTok with our brains poked on the envy and outrage buttons. 

What will we do with all our saved time becomes the most profound and quite scary question of 2025.

Podcast of the week.

Bruce Daisley and I had a brilliant chat about all things regarding the future of work.

Video of the week

This SNL clip about the Filter bubble looks as of the moment as ever.

Little ones. 

1. A good deep dive on rethinking eCommerce returns/reverse logistics, especially loved how it talked about the psychological approaches to improve.

2. Desperate to chase unprofitable growth at all costs, especially to the planet, Amazon launched  Haul, a site where nothing, even a sofa, will cost more than $20 or last more than 20 days. It’s mobile only, ‘cos that’s what the cool kids use.

3. The Rising Importance of Older Workers - some work from Bain

4. TV advertising is taking a long time to realize that ads can be inserted locally, The Trade Desk is building a CTV operating system to help do this (to compete with Roku/Google, etc). I am still not quite sure what problem this solves other than TTD’s 

5. A Ridesharing startup decided Google’s maps were good enough, so made their own.

6. Techniques used to generate random gradient images are rather beautiful. 

7. We probably don’t talk enough about the rise of gambling across the world and how our dopamine-fixed brains and mobile phones have come together to create problems across the world. 

8. The CEO of KFC and Taco Bell China sat for hours and watched customers eat and then invented new meals, I don’t understand why this is considered unusual. I’m fascinated by what customers do.

9. A good read on why Excel won’t die. Adoption my dear Watson, Adoption.

10. I’ve been saying for a while that more automated driving isn’t really that helpful as 1) It’s more tiring than just driving yourself and 2) It leads to far more avoidable crashes. This piece backs me up. 

11. My favorite business transformation tip, stop doing dumb stuff.

12. Huawei to launch its own phone software - a sign of the east/west future?

13. A link to every trend deck for 2025 you can imagine. One day I’ll get mine done.  Thanks to Amy for compiling and sharing.

A big thought on AI and how we adopt technology, Sponsored by Intel

I've been thinking about how we embrace AI, we are making some mistakes. 

It dawned on me that we were following the classic path of disruption and the three phases of technology, where we first apply how we've always done things, before an enormous pivot, and then the third phase where we rethink the world around new parameters.

Because the past always seems more logical, more calmer in retrospect than at the time, we forget how even the most incredible innovations are largely misunderstood, miss-applied, and fumbled.

For years many people thought that electricity was a fad. It took a long time to get people enthusiastic about computers. The steam engine was first used to lift water to drive waterwheels, The Internet for many seemed like something only for Geeks. 

The pivot point happens when a couple of things come together

• The installed base of the technology has to be large enough

• People need to have used the technology enough to understand its meaning

• We need new entrants, with new business models and new ideas to challenge the existing assumptions.

• But the biggest shift becomes when people use the new tools to create a new future.

It turns out electricity didn’t mean better toasters, it meant the telegram, the radio, the TV set, the microwave, the TV dinner. 

Computer chips didn’t mean the calculator, but the internet and connecting the entire planet with everything ever known.

It wasn’t the smartphone that changed the world but the app store.

It’s the turning point that matters most. What goes from impossible to imagine, becomes obvious in hindsight.

This turning point allows us to see a brand new future we couldn’t see before. New possibilities, new futures, new human potential.

AI is nearing its turning point. So far, we’ve used AI to enhance what we already know—adding features to software, improving User Experience, and automating tasks. But now is the time to reimagine everything: how we work, build, and create.

Intel is leading this transformation, building AI-powered PCs from the ground up—running locally, securely, and seamlessly. These AI PCs are more than tools—they’re gateways to new possibilities, designed to help individuals and businesses thrive.

Here’s how AI PCs unlock the future:

1. Productivity on Autopilot: AI takes on repetitive tasks—summarizing notes, drafting emails, or generating code—so you can focus on what matters. Real-time translation and enhanced video calls improve collaboration effortlessly.

2. Creative Power Unleashed: AI allows you to dive deeper into creativity, from instant video editing to on-the-fly image generation. AI works in the background, freeing time and energy to focus on the spark that matters.

3. Seamless, Secure Performance: From AI-powered video upscaling to voice-to-text transcription and document summarization, these PCs bring the power of AI directly to your device, ensuring your data stays private. Enjoy advanced AI capabilities without compromising on intellectual property security. With instant threat detection and Intel’s vPro technology, you can count on smarter, safer business decisions.

4. Effortless Collaboration Anywhere: Smart features like real-time translation and noise suppression enable smooth teamwork, with AI managing performance to maximize battery life on the go.

5. A Platform for Innovation: Just as the app store transformed the smartphone, Intel’s developer ecosystem opens the door for limitless possibilities. With hundreds of developers building on this new platform, the future is ripe for breakthroughs.

The AI PC isn’t just a glimpse of what’s possible—it’s already here, redefining how we live, work, and create.  An era where imagination, not tools, sets the limits

To find out more https://intel.ly/3AncSvp

That’s it for now.
Thanks

Tom