Insights
What we've learned running this from the inside.
Not thought leadership for its own sake — the arguments we make to operators, written down and backed by the research.
When your customer sends an AI agent to do the shopping
Agent-mediated buying is arriving fast. For most retailers it is a discoverability problem. For direct selling it lands directly on attribution — the link the whole channel is paid through.
Read the paper →The AI pilots are not failing because AI was overstated
MIT found 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots produced no measurable P&L impact. Its own diagnosis — a learning gap, not a technology gap — is the part almost nobody quotes.
Read → ~5,000 engineers in DORA 2025: throughput up, instability up tooAI is not making engineering teams bigger. It is making them smaller and more senior.
DORA's 2025 research found AI raises delivery throughput and instability at the same time. The variable in between is judgement — and it is reshaping what a technology organization looks like.
Read → 40→98% AI answer accuracy: raw tables vs grounded in business definitionsYour BI investment is fine. The queue in front of it is not.
Years went into the warehouse and the dashboards, and leaders still wait days for answers. AI removes the waiting — if it is grounded in what your numbers actually mean.
Read → 55% of distribution businesses invested in core systems they have not integratedThe field needs answers, not reports
Distributor tools still assume someone will read a report and work out what to do. LLMs over live data invert that — and the "live" part is not optional.
Read → 700k US distributors lost in a single year — almost none to a competitorYour distributors are not comparing you to other direct sales companies
The US channel lost roughly 700,000 distributors in a year. Almost none of them went to a competitor.
Read → 30/44/26 of 900 transformations: hit targets / partial value / little or noneTransformation is 20% technology. Budgets usually say the opposite.
BCG studied 900 transformations. The technology hardly separated winners from losers — the people and process work did.
Read → 0 banned words in the income claims that create the most exposureThe compliance gap in modern direct sales
Keyword monitoring fails in both directions at once — it floods your team with false positives and misses everything phrased carefully. Enforcement, meanwhile, is accelerating.
Read → 2–3x reported cost of big-bang composable rebuilds vs the original buildFrom monolith to modular — without the regret
"Composable regret" is now a named phenomenon, and a major vendor has publicly walked away from MACH. Both failures repeat the same mistake the monolith made.
Read → 60% of Figma files last year were created by non-designersProduct management after Figma
60% of design files are now created by non-designers, and the PRD is quietly being replaced by something you can click. That changes who product decisions belong to.
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