Jan Bosch
☀️ Summer break: The blog is taking a short vacation and will return in the middle of August. Thank you for reading — see you then! I’ve spent the past months writing about how artificial intelligence is reshaping software-intensive businesses. I’ve approached different facets of this transformation: compliance as a competitive moat, the data advantage, … Read more
In my work with early-stage startups, two topics come up in almost every engagement, and they’re rarely the ones founders want to talk about. The first is pricing. The second is sales. Founders, particularly those with a technology background, will happily spend months refining their architecture, their model pipeline and their product roadmap, and then … Read more
Almost every organizational model in widespread use today was designed for a world in which humans do the work and software supports them. Functional hierarchies, matrix structures, Agile teams, the various flavors of squads and tribes that proliferated over the past decade: each was an answer to the question of how to coordinate human effort … Read more
I started this series some months ago by writing about how startups build competitive advantage. I looked at compliance as a competitive weapon, the role of data, two-sided markets and technology as a democratizing force. The implicit framework was familiar from twenty years of writing about software businesses: You identify a market, raise venture capital, … Read more
The dominant conversation about enterprise AI focuses on knowledge work. Chatbots that answer customer questions. Copilots that draft documents. Assistants that summarize meetings. This bias makes sense given who writes about AI for a living, but it distorts the picture of where the technology is actually creating economic value. The largest opportunity for AI in … Read more
For most of the past three years, European AI sovereignty has been discussed primarily as a political aspiration. EU regulators talked about it. National governments funded research programs around it. Industry conferences featured panels on it. But for the vast majority of European enterprises actually deploying AI in production, the operational reality was that the … Read more
For most of the postwar era, defense has been an industry apart. It operated on different procurement timelines, with different incumbents, on different cost structures and with different innovation cycles than the rest of the technology economy. The major defense primes, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Thales and Saab, built complex hardware platforms … Read more
For most of the past decade, the most consequential advances in artificial intelligence have happened in software. Language models, recommendation engines, image classifiers, predictive analytics: the defining products of the AI era have been things you interact with on a screen. The physical world, by contrast, has remained largely resistant to the same transformation. Robots … Read more
For most of the past three years, the conversation about enterprise AI has been dominated by a single assumption: Bigger is better. Each successive generation of frontier models has been larger than the last, more expensive to train, more capable across a wider range of tasks and more central to the strategic positioning of the … Read more
For most of the history of software engineering, we’ve operated under a deceptively simple model. Engineers specify behavior. Systems execute it. When the behavior is wrong, engineers fix it. When requirements change, engineers rewrite it. Between releases, the system is inert. It doesn’t learn from what it observes in production. It doesn’t adapt to how … Read more
