The ledger
6 entries. Every figure carries its source and the date it was fielded. Anything that is my own operating data says so.
On why the AI question in emerging markets isn't about AI
A World Development Report background paper, published at the end of July, went looking at 1,563 companies across 83 countries, all of them drawn from IFC's private-equity and venture portfolio — the kind of firm…
Why the same technology is worth more here than there
Nobody has a line item called trust. Everybody pays for it.
What a spreadsheet actually costs
There was a file. It was an Excel model, it was about eighteen megabytes, and it produced the rent and renovation report for a US residential property portfolio worth a couple of hundred million dollars.
I expected agentic AI to kill the broker. Here's the number that corrected me.
Going into last year's launch I had a view, and I held it fairly confidently. If the AI could handle discovery, eligibility, availability, documentation and follow-up — which it could — then the channel partner was…
The economists say they're flying blind. Operators don't get that option.
In July, more than two hundred economists put their names to a public statement about artificial intelligence. Sixteen of them were Nobel laureates. The chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic signed it. So did…
A method for finding what your business does only because attention used to be expensive
Most AI strategy starts with the wrong question. "Where can we use AI" produces a list of use cases, and a list of use cases produces pilots, and pilots produce the 89-37-6 funnel McKinsey reported in August —…