Tag: Automation
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The Implied Zero
Photo by Frank R on Unsplash Author’s Note: The opening example is a composite, paraphrased from several professional conversations over many years. Details have been generalized, and no specific organization, analysis, or business decision is being described. The concern examined here is the analytical pattern itself. ~Dom The conversation that removed it probably took about…
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The Decision Inside the Delay
Photo by James Peacock on Unsplash Most of my recent writing has made some version of the same argument. Organizations repeatedly pay for things they declined to define once. An undocumented exception becomes maintenance work for everyone who inherits it. A policy outlives the conditions that made it correct because the rule was preserved and…
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Aligned to the Quarter
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash I build the instruments organizations use to watch themselves. Dashboards, databases, pipelines, semantic models, reports, and the row-level security rules that quietly decide who sees which version of the truth. The first thing that work teaches you is how easily a number stays green while the thing beneath it…
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The Meter is a Map
Photo by Tyler on Unsplash Author’s Note When I published The Token Tax three weeks ago, I expected the cost conversation around enterprise AI to keep growing. I did not expect it to accelerate this quickly. In the time since, the same pattern has surfaced across the industry in plain view: companies exhausting an entire…
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The Token Tax
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash Beginning in late 2022, during the preview conversations for the first iteration of Copilot, through its launch and at intervals ever since, I told Microsoft’s product team that speed to launch was a short-term advantage. It mattered, of course. In a market defined by attention, fear, and executive urgency,…
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Frozen Market
Photo by Hugo Jehanne on Unsplash Each time my own company has posted a role even loosely related to data systems, reporting, or BI architecture in the last couple of years, I know about it. Not because I receive an internal announcement, and not because someone forwards me the listing. I know because, within a…
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The Work We Couldn’t See
Photo by Olek Buzunov on Unsplash Author’s Note This is not an argument against AI, nor is it an argument that organizations are broadly incapable of making sound decisions. AI, when applied to well-understood domains with clearly defined inputs and outputs, works. It scales execution, improves throughput, and reduces the burden of routine work. I…
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The Space Between Slop and Solutions
Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash In early 2026, a meme started making the rounds with surprising traction: Microslop. It began as a riff on “AI slop”; Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year, coined to describe the deluge of low-effort, AI-generated content saturating digital platforms. Within days, Microslop had become shorthand for growing public frustration…
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Building Aria: Part 4 – The Alignment Mirror
Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash Over the previous three entries, Project Aria has crossed three clear thresholds, though none of them felt clear while I was in the middle of them. In Part 1, she found her voice: more than a demo, she became a partner in conversation that carried beyond a single reply.…
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Building Aria: Part 2 – From Voice to Agency
Picking Up the Thread In Part 1, Aria reached her first milestone: she was live in a practical sense. Running locally in Docker, serving models through Ollama, and speaking through Discord, she could already respond in conversation. Messages flowed into Postgres, the last ten entries recalled with each new exchange, giving her a baseline of…
