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Moative Blog
Insights, research, and product thinking from Moative.
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Jun 21, 2026
Moative Essay: Hello CEO! Own Your Data. Own Your AI. Own Your Destiny.
Last week I wrote about how AI companies in verticals treat their customer base as fuel rods to build their nuclear power. This week I am going to expand on it and make a case for working with a systems integrator (one who puts tools and processes together) instead of working directly with an AI company. To understand why you are a feed into a hungry machine, you need to understand how AI products are built. There are foundation layers: The foundation: Data and context of everything you do as
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Jun 14, 2026
Moative Essay: The AI Trap Door
I have been on the road for three weeks now. Pensacola was pleasant. Memphis was muggy. Buffalo was chill. But the mood in the small business is one of nervous anticipation. It's like welcoming back a long-lost sibling, not knowing if she will be a delight or a piece of work. Only that this sibling is AI and she will stay with the owner, warts and all. Contrast this mood with headlines touting gazillion dollar funding for AI companies solving problems in the pesky corners of healthcare, retail,
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Jun 7, 2026
Moative Essay: The Pause Is a Tell
Earlier this week, Anthropic asked the rest of the industry to slow down. A coordinated pause, before AI gets good enough to improve itself without us. This is the lab that has always sold itself as the careful one, and here it was asking everyone to step back from the edge together. DeepSeek had already answered, six weeks before the question was asked. Its newest model is built end to end in China, runs at a tenth of what the American labs charge, and gets better every few months no matter wh
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May 31, 2026
Moative Essay: The Mess Just Got Cheap
Power transmission companies often do not know what to charge carriers for tower access. No software tells them, and no vendor sells the answer. The work does not live cleanly inside one system. It sits across contracts, tower assets, field constraints, carrier precedent, and the judgment of someone who has seen enough bad deals to know where the trap is. A model can read the documents. It cannot know, on its own, what this industry has learned to fear. Every traditional industry has work like
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May 24, 2026
Moative Essay: The Two Million Dollar Shrug
One conversation keeps coming up with mid-market CEOs. Roughly two million dollars on AI over the last eighteen months. Four vendors. Two pilots. A consultant retainer. A small team hired off LinkedIn to run the program. Asked what has changed in the business, a shrug. Not cynicism. They cannot point to anything. Set this against the operator we described in last week's essay: a regulated public company, half a billion in revenue, putting $250,000 toward a collections agent. The work began with
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May 18, 2026
Moative Essay: The Two-Week Test
A physician owns seven clinics across two states. Revenue is up. Patients are growing. The newest location opened in March. On paper, the business is exactly what a founder hopes to build. She is also fifty-nine. Her children have their own careers and do not want to take over the clinics. Her husband has been waiting since 2018 for the trip to Portugal they keep rescheduling. She cannot disappear for two weeks. Every escalation still finds her. Payer disputes. Front-desk hires. Vendor issues
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May 17, 2026
Moative Essay: The Doers, The Watchers and a Two-Week Milestone
Depending on whom you talk to you get one of the three immutable truths about AI implementations: 1. The tooling is unstable, observability is difficult, and security is a nightmare 2. Whatever works is magical, but when the job depends on not trusting it, it's hard to implement 3. Frontier models are great but their economics are bad. Open models are decent but their attention is as wayward as a toddler's. The beauty of the current wave of AI at work is that all of these are true and AI is
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May 3, 2026
Moative Essay: The Brownfield Tax
Anthropic acknowledged late April what Claude Code users had been complaining about for weeks. The product had been silently degrading. Product-layer changes around reasoning, caching, and prompt behavior had drifted in ways the people running it did not catch in time. That is the everyday condition of every system old enough to have its meaning live off-disk. Claude Code is young. The system around it is young. But both are now old enough to have a brownfield problem of their own. If the peop
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Apr 26, 2026
Moative Essay: Earl, Tom, and The Guild
Tom is a firefighter. Years ago, we built him what was basically an Excel-spreadsheet version of AI. No agents. No copilots. No white paper about the future of work. Just a thing that helped him make better decisions under pressure. Every three months, Tom still pings us with a question. We spend a couple of hours with him. He gets what he needs. Then he disappears back into the field. That is how AI will reach most of small-business America. Not as transformation. As a recurring favor that s
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Apr 19, 2026
Moative Essay: Systems of Interia
Two of us write this newsletter, alternating Sundays. Every now and then, the shape is call and response: one week someone lays down a theme, the following week the other tries to answer. When that happens, most weeks the response is modest, because most weeks the news does not hand you a gift. This week was generous. Salesforce and Anthropic, forty-eight hours apart, shipped announcements that could have been written inside last week's essay. Last week we called enterprise complexity what it i
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Apr 12, 2026
Moative Essay: Enterprise Grade is Dried Spit With A Budget
For most of business history, we have built organizations the way ants build apartment blocks. An ant does not have a design philosophy. It does not sit around wondering whether the plumbing stack should be elsewhere, or whether a load-bearing wall has now become an obstacle to future growth. It spits. That is the move. It has one material, one instinct, and a lot of repetition. Over time, the colony hardens into structure. A lot of enterprises are not meaningfully different. One team adds a
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Apr 5, 2026
Your AI readiness blindspot
Last week we talked about why users resist AI. An underwriter who has spent 20 years eyeballing equipment across categories, spotting label problems, cross-referencing auction data against economic signals, all while copying data into a spreadsheet, will push back when you tell them a model can do it better. You will hear that pushback. It shows up in meetings. It slows rollouts. You can plan around it. There is another kind of resistance that never shows up in a meeting. A product manager buil