In early 2024, McDonald's made a quiet announcement: after three years of testing AI-powered drive-through ordering across more than 100 U.S. restaurants, the company was pulling the plug on its partnership with IBM. The technology would be removed by July 26. The official explanation was polished corporate-speak about "exploring voice ordering solutions more broadly."...
Category: Business
The Agentic Loop, Explained: What Every PM Should Know About How AI Agents Actually Work
If you've heard the term "agentic AI" in the past year, you're not alone. It's become the buzzword of choice for everything from coding assistants to customer service bots to—inevitably—project management tools. Vendors promise agents that will "autonomously manage your workflows" and "proactively handle tasks." Before dismissing this as hype (tempting) or buying in...
The Enterprise AI Shift: How Chinese Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley’s Dominance
When Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Bloomberg in October that his company relies heavily on Alibaba's Qwen model for AI-powered customer service, calling it "very good, fast, and cheap," he offered a rare glimpse into a trend that's quietly reshaping enterprise AI adoption. While Silicon Valley giants battle over who can build the most powerful—and...
The AI slop bucket overflow: “Workslop” is the hidden productivity drain no one’s measuring
There's a new term making the rounds in corporate America, and it perfectly captures a frustration that's been building since ChatGPT entered the workplace: workslop. It's the AI-generated equivalent of that colleague who forwards you a 47-slide PowerPoint deck that somehow says nothing at all, except now it's happening at machine speed, in every department,...
AI Can Write Cost Sheets in Minutes. Accurate Ones? That’s Harder.
The promise is clear: Feed an AI your project description, employee data, and supplier catalog, and it will generate a detailed cost sheet in minutes instead of weeks. No more spreadsheet archaeology. No more chasing down procurement for vendor quotes. In theory. Several research teams and startups are already building this future. Early results suggest...
The Web’s Old Guard Isn’t Chasing AGI—They’re Building the New Infrastructure
Christina Wodtke, veteran product designer and Stanford lecturer, captured something profound recently: "The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995. They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto. NFTs got a collective eye roll. But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while...
The AI Job Apocalypse Is Already Here—But It’s Not What You Think
Simon Willison has a problem. As co-creator of Django and a veteran software engineer with 25 years of experience, he's watching his own profession get disrupted by the very technology he's helping to advance. However, in his recent conversation with journalist Natasha Zubes, what emerges isn't the typical doom-and-gloom narrative about AI replacing everyone. Instead,...
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on the Future of Programming: Why Kids Should Still Learn to Code
In a world where AI can generate entire applications with a simple prompt, the question of whether learning to code is still relevant has become increasingly urgent. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, speaking at Microsoft Build 2025, offered a nuanced perspective on how programming will evolve—and why traditional coding skills remain crucial even as AI agents...
The Great Rewiring: Nadella and Zuckerberg on How AI is Reshaping Tech’s Foundation
AI isn’t just upgrading our tools—it’s redefining the tech foundation. In a compelling fireside chat, Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg reveal how artificial intelligence is reshaping the very foundations of software development. From multi-model orchestration to AI-powered coding agents, they paint a future where the boundaries between documents, applications, and human input dissolve into a...
Duolingo’s AI-First Pivot Isn’t Just Smart. It’s Survival.
When Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, told his team they were going “AI-first,” it wasn’t framed as an option. It was framed as survival. In an all-hands email, von Ahn doesn’t mince words. AI isn’t coming. It’s here. And companies that wait for permission, or perfection, are already too late. If that sounds dramatic,...
