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The Root Cause

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Practitioner writing on technical marketing, enterprise AI narrative, and competitive positioning. Published when there is something worth saying.

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08
Published
June 2026

The Layer They All Skipped

Every demo platform built the production layer, the distribution layer, and the analytics layer. Reprise clones your product. Walnut captures your front end. Every analytics layer tracks engagement. Not one of them built a quality layer, because the framework for what quality means did not exist. The gap between what is performed and what is true always costs you something. AI just made that cost impossible to defer. A field note for anyone who builds demos, buys demo platforms, or sells enterprise software for a living.

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07
Published
June 2026

The Literal Reader

A machine reads your demo before a person does, and it reads nothing the way a person does. It does not feel your production value or grant the capability you implied. It extracts what it can verify and discards the rest. Coherence was always the standard. The literal reader is simply the first reader honest enough to enforce it. A field note for anyone whose demo will be read by a machine before it reaches a buyer.

Read Issue 07
06
Published
May 2026

Demo is the Diagnosis

Every vendor has a governance story now. Almost none have given buyers a way to test it. Agentwashing is what vendors do. Agent-shaped is what they ship. Three questions for the demo pod floor that test what the demo actually reveals about the agent underneath. The break was never the problem. The recovery was the diagnosis. A field note for anyone evaluating an agentic AI demo in the next thirty days.

Read Issue 06
05
Published
May 2026

The Carriage and the Engine

On Friday April 24, an AI coding agent deleted a production database and every backup in nine seconds. Plan Mode was on. The marketed guardrails were on. The architecture as designed is what failed. Governance as a feature next to the agent does not hold. It has to be fabric the agent cannot escape. A field note for anyone walking K26, AWS Summit, or any vendor floor this quarter.

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04
Published
April 2026

The Horseless Carriage Problem

The best AI automation framework making the rounds right now is measuring capability in the wrong unit. Not wrong in intent. Wrong in the same way early automobile engineers measured engine output in horsepower. When something genuinely new arrives, we reach for the nearest familiar frame. What changes with AI is not how workflows are structured. It is the requirement for human cognitive presence at each decision point. And that is a different question entirely.

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03
Published
April 2026

The Three-Phase AI Arc

From foundational ML through the GenAI wave to agentic automation. What enterprise AI actually looked like from inside the team building the narrative in real time across all three phases.

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02
Published
March 2026

Your New Teammate Is an AI Agent.

You are a technical marketer. You have a positioning deck due in six weeks. One question before you hit send on that brief: do you know where that prompt goes? Most people in this role have never seriously asked. In 2026, with agentic AI inside nearly every enterprise marketing workflow, that unanswered question is not a minor gap. It is a liability.

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01
Published
March 2026

The Narrative Diagnosis Problem

There is a meeting that happens inside almost every enterprise technology company. The product team has built something real. Marketing turns features into a story. The product goes to market. And the market does not respond the way anyone expected. Not a product problem. A diagnosis problem. And it is the most expensive mistake in technical marketing.

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