How we think about the work.

Essays - not posts. Briefs from inside engagements, written when the market gives us a reason.

SCORED ASSESSMENT

Twenty questions, about three minutes, and a 0-100 readiness score with the three things to fix first.

Take the AI Readiness Assessment →

MPS BRIEF

SEPTEMBER 2026

LATEST

We built C-Suite Agents. The hard question is what they’re worth.

Time saved is easy to promise and difficult to value. A CEO’s calendar doesn’t get shorter - so the real return may be the questions that finally get asked.

By Jeff Culliton

6 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

AUGUST 2026

Your dashboard isn’t wrong. It’s finished.

68% of enterprises have watched their AI hand them a confident, wrong answer - up from 57% two months earlier. The failure isn’t the tool. It’s the order things got built in.

5 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

AUGUST 2026

AI isn’t the teammate. It’s another teammate.

I sat there and watched ChatGPT work its way through HubSpot - opening screens, building fields, following the guardrails we’d worked out together. What made it work wasn’t the tool.

4 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

AUGUST 2026

You can’t rent an owner.

Palantir grew 93% in a year by sending engineers inside the building to make the AI decisions nobody there owned. Renting the deciding works - it also has a lease.

3 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

AUGUST 2026

65% isn’t a tooling stat. It’s an org-chart stat.

A 400-person radio company in Milwaukee got 65% of its people using AI every day, starting from scratch a year ago. They bought the same tools you could buy this afternoon - so the tools were never the variable.

3 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

JULY 2026

An agent only knows what you give it.

Your CRM will happily build you a team of AI agents this week. But “shared context” means the data already in the CRM - and your margins, costs and contracts live somewhere else.

3 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

JUNE 2026

Three reports. The same gap.

88% of companies use AI regularly. Only 32% report tangible impact. Three reports this spring - WEF, Accenture, HBR - all land in the same place. It was never a capability problem.

3 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

JUNE 2026

The operator gap.

Everyone’s hiring builders. But the AI stall happens one layer up - where someone has to decide what to build, and that person almost never exists.

3 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

JUNE 2026

43% will fail. Nobody prepped the people.

HCLTech says 43% of enterprise AI initiatives will fail. The read is right - and incomplete. The gap isn’t enablement. It’s that no one owns the outcome by name.

3 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

JUNE 2026

Going headless. Mostly, we’re guessing.

“Headless” is the term every mid-market CEO is using and almost nobody is defining. What executives actually want, where it breaks, and the unglamorous on-ramp.

6 MIN

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MPS BRIEF

MAY 2026

What $5.5 billion just bet on - and what it missed.

OpenAI and Anthropic raised $5.5B to embed engineers inside PE portcos and rebuild workflows around AI. The structural read is correct - and incomplete.

5 MIN

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ESSAY

THE METHOD

The Core Four.

Four questions, one per stage of the method - the order matters. A reading piece for the leadership team. For a scored assessment, take the AI Readiness Assessment.

4 MIN

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