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

Edition 28

Scott Galloway talks about Brexit, Are AI Influencers really the future of marketing, Nobody Cares, and is AI really impacting Art?

Big One’s

Elections on Dial-Up:

It’s always apparent to me that innovation and transformation is almost never about technology, it’s about the interface between humans and technology, it’s about regulations, and it’s about how organizations actually change. 

This means that it's inherently messy, the rollout of technology is particularly prone to being held hostage by power, ego, and “that’s not how things are done around here” or “we tried it before”

One would imagine the promise of technology is a better solution, and better solutions rapidly take foot. But in reality, it's so much more messy, one of the best examples of this is voting technology. It appears across the USA, depending on the district, the state, the county, almost everything about the voting process can be completely different, for seemingly very few good reasons.  US voting today is a hybrid of Paper ballots marked and counted by hand, mechanical lever based machines, to optical scanners and 6 other entire GROUPS of technologies.

We live in an age where technology rarely kills the old, we merely augment the past, where we live in the paper age, the industrial age, the digital age and the AI age at the same time. And often is newer countries, that end up having much better systems, my Brazilian friends were incredulous as to how the vote couldn't be counted in seconds!

This piece is a fascinating guide on all elections technology from MIT lab, a bit old.

Innovation is like catching a wave.  Sponsored by Spinnaker Support.

Uber may be the world’s largest ride-sharing company, but it was far from the first.......Zimride launched three years earlier. 

Books .com was the first online bookstore, three years before Amazon. 

VRBO started Ten years before Airbnb. 

Electric cars like the Electrobat preceded Tesla by more than a century. 

We love to think the world moves fast. 

We're obsessed with this idea of first-mover advantage

But time and time again- from Facebook vs. Friendster, Spotify vs. Napster, NVidia vs. AMD, Instagram vs. Hipstamatic, we learn that being first isn't everything

Read the post of Linkedin, where you can see how First mover advantage is a bit of a myth, and how to maintain core systems with Spinnaker in order to be ready to pounce at the right time.

The fakery of AI’Influence

Like web3, Blockchain and Crypto, AI seems to be reaching the point in the hype curve where scammers take over. You can always tell when this happens, because websites become more purple and black, fonts become more futuristic, and because it looks like everyone's selling shovels for the gold rush.

There is a current obsession with the idea the AI generated influencers will be the big thing.

After all, they are easy to work with, they can make thousands of pieces of content in seconds, the content is free to make, and people can look as beautiful or as accessible, or as weird, or a sexy, as you wish. The only limit to your imagination is your ability to prompt.

So these days we see endless reports of AI “people” making $10,000 per month from brands, followed by hundreds of thousands of people, and lots of people claim this to be “the future of marketing”. And now the internet is ablaze with people offering to help you “make” an AI influencer for a few hundred dollars per month.

What has not been widely reported, is there anyone who takes a couple of minutes to look at these profiles, can see a fairly standard playbook.

These AI influencers are followed entirely by fake accounts or other AI influencers 

The reports of earnings are always without proof and use caveats like “up to”

But more than anything else, we need to look at what influencer marketing is really about.

To some extent it's about a media play, and buying reach.

To some extent, it's about a human being who offers their endorsement

But what it's really about is taste, you're saying that you want be part of the tribe, you associate yourself with this humans characteristics, does this mean anything if the person is AI generated? 

Drinking your own coffee 

The new Starbucks CEO did something crazy, they went to their stores, had to look around, bought some coffee, and came up with some common sense ideas. This follows the extraordinary behavior of the Ford CEO, who actually bought a competitor’s vehicle, and drove it.  Perhaps this can be the start of a crazy move towards thinking, and empathy, and eating our own dogfood, rather than paying consultants to press find and replace on 120 slides of nonsense they did for their rivals. 

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Fyxer AI saves me about an hour a day by organizing my inbox and drafting email responses automatically. Fyxer also listens to your video calls and sends a meeting summary with clear next steps. The key is knowing when to lean on AI and when a personal touch matters most. For example, my book demands my full attention, and this tool gives me the space to focus on what truly matters. 

If you're curious, you can get started for free with FyxerAI.

Podcast of the week.

The second series of my podcast with Euronews launch this week, the guest this week is none other than Scott Galloway. Look out for more videos. 

Ad of the week

I love this ad, that’s all.

Little ones. 

A deep dive on whether China will threaten the duopoly of Boeing and Airbus.

AI generated Fake news invents a Halloween parade, thousands sent home, fact checking remains an ever more vital skill

Generative AI and Search continue to morph together, a key question is if we want to generate answers or find them, which is more useful, and which is more profitable for the tech provider. 

A study on how AI will impact Art, what I like most about this is the presentation format. 

Time’s best inventions of 2024 

Can someone tell me why it’s so hard to find people who are heavy returners and stop over serving them? The wastage is insane 

People are buying face computers, so long as they look normal 

That’s it for now.
Thanks

Tom

Edition 27

The Ghost of Twitter's Past haunts me, What is Zuckerberg doing, and will "Made In China" cars be no more in the US?

Big One’s

Wrong on China.

I was in Guangzhou in March 2023 and I did what it turns out was a very dumb tweet. 

Nearly 20 miles out of the city, I was still to reach the new Guangzhou high-speed train station, and speeding along in a silent Taxi, I remarked “how stupid it was that they built the station so far outside the city”

The first comment set me straight, “not for long, in a few years it will be the center”, it’s at times like this that the pace of change, the scale of ambition, and the endless development hits you.

I was back in the city last month, even after Tokyo its scale shocks you, the skyscrapers feel like a forest, innumerable, endless, when you land in London afterward, you look out over West London and it seems like a quaint village. China is the only place you see newly built motorways, being built on top of slightly less newly built motorways. 

China is without doubt the best place to see a future. I don’t mean “the” future, I mean a version of it. It’s the future that can happen with absolute determination, an iron rule, a clear vision, and a crushing sense that the individual is irrelevant. There is competence on a scale that bewilders anyone from Europe or the US.  

What makes it truly special is none of this; it’s that this country never had to transform for the digital/social/mobile age- it was constructed for it.

There is no eCommerce, there is just commerce built for a digital world.

There are automated ports because there are no workers or unions to replace.

EVs exist as a first car, not a better car, it’s the ultimate demonstration of my long-held belief that the only way to really digitally transform is to build what you should have, not change. It’s a country that leapfrogged from being underbanked to digital money, from no landlines to smartphones, from no celebrities to countless social media influencers.

What felt different this time?

1. I saw the sunshine for the first time ever in 12 visits to China, I saw roads with greenery planted around them, China is always impressive, but for the first time ever, at times it seemed pleasant. 

2. Chinese brands seemed on the rise. The ability of Chinese companies to replicate perfectly what’s been designed elsewhere has always been admirable, but now for the first time, you see local brands in Fashion, or electronics, vehicles, or even Luxury being chosen above Global counterparts. 

3. Quality of manufacturing. I was there to source a few things, and “Made in China” has quite quickly moved from “made there because it’s cheap” to “perhaps this is the very best version of this I’ve ever seen”, be it furniture, vehicles, clothing or raw materials.

The death of the smartphone?

It seems like everyone is launching face computers, We had the Apple Vision Pro, then Snap Spectacles v9?? And now Zuckerberg showed off the AR proof of concept Orion with one of the worst Marketing images ever made. 

Zuckerberg wants these to take off more than anything, He’s spanked $20bn on the metaverse with little to show, he’s not once had a good idea in his life except buying Instagram or WhatsApp, and he's annoyed because Apple and Google effectively own the end distribution point for all of his software.

His need doesn’t make a gap in the market or a market in the gap, and I think all face computing is a path of nowhere significant, or fast.

A lot of technology analysts don't agree, they have this narrative that we are at peak smartphone, and the question: what is the next platform and when?

This makes no sense to me, just because phones are becoming more identical and innovation is slowing means little. It’s usage that dictates if things are fading or growing, and there is (sadly) no evidence at all that any demographic on the planet is weaning themselves off the amphetamines for the eyes feeling of staring at a phone.

There are a couple of things about the smartphone form factor, which make them perfect for humans.

1. People know I'm using it (they can see I'm distracted, and privacy concerns diminish)

2. I can look away from it and leave it behind.

3. I carry it with me, not ON me

4. This makes ME in control, not the tech

I hope at some point people realize that if you're going to spend $30 billion chasing a dream, you should probably buy 10 even vaguely normal people a beer, and ask them what they think.

Little ones

You can’t touch this. Finally, Touchscreens are getting out of fashion. Something almost everyone who ever picked up a new rental car in 2018 onwards has been praying for.

Office surveillance is growing, have we ever thought about the powerful combination of 1. Hiring people we trust to be good, 2. Looking at outputs rather than and 3. Measuring dump stuff in ways that kill any remnant of culture? 

Prediction, by 2026, I think most Chinese cars will be effectively banned from being sold in the US or EU.

MasterCard bought a service that allows you to manage and cancel subscription plans. Really great to see a payment company offer more imaginative value than lounge access and points, I love companies that try to help people navigate the modern world and save time and their sanity. 

A thriving underground economy is clogging the Internet with AI garbage, and it seems likely to be getting worse, at some point, we may have to start paying for the Internet with money and not our attention. 

Lots of people seem to say Google is losing its share of “search” and search advertising, but for the moment these charts are more of a reflection of the growth of new forms of search, and the shift towards placing media money ever closer to the point of sale to claim success. Search on Amazon is more akin to Trade marketing spend on placements. 

Private nuclear power is becoming a big thing and from nowhere. 

We forget this, but there was a period of time in the 1960’s, where most people thought that we solved energy, that we would just have abundant, cheap, reliable, everlasting power.

Oddly, one of the unexpected positive outcomes of the search for generative AI, maybe that it provides the necessity for Nuclear power 

Obesity could have peaked in the USA, because it’s likely happening with Injections, a lot of people seem to have quite emotional responses. It's going to be fascinating to track how attitudes towards unhealthiness change in our lifetimes. 

Regrets, Gen Z has a few. A lot of people regret spending time on social media at the same time almost nobody seems to be doing anything about it. I've long felt that the algorithmic newsfeed was the worst thing to ever happen to us.

Bite-Sized Pieces

1. Stop referring to people as eyeballs.

2. Time to move on from “50% of my advertising is wasted” from 2013

3. The scandal of wastage in clothing. I do wonder if we need to make fashion unfashionable. 

4. A good AMA by the founder of Boom, a potential Supersonic airline maker.

5. A good deep dive on pig Butchering, aka Scams 

6. We probably stopped thinking about Crypto just when we should have started.

7. A Chatbot to help people escape the pull of Conspiracy theories, it’s a conspiracy 

8. A nice deep dive on Automation in restaurants 

9. Maybe attention doesn’t impact advertising effectiveness?

10. Paint you can peel off looks amazing.

That’s it for now.
Thanks

Tom