Points of view
POV
Short, opinionated takes from the forward-deployed seat. Three streams — retail and CPG for the C-suite, B2B GTM for operators, AI and Agentic for builders shipping production agents.
The retail board memo every CIO should write this quarter
Capital markets reward AI announcements, but the P&L lags. Here is the CODN-framed board memo retail CIOs should write before the 2026 budget locks.
Demand forecasting has a signal problem, not a model problem
Retailers keep buying smarter forecasting models to compensate for dirty inputs. The bottleneck is signal quality, not algorithms.
AI governance is a logging problem before it's a policy problem
Enterprises write AI policy before they can observe what their agents do. You cannot govern what you do not log. Instrumentation comes first.
Your seven-tool GTM stack is one tool too many
Most GTM stacks carry one redundant tool that quietly drains budget, attention, and data quality. Finding and cutting it is the highest-leverage RevOps move of 2026.
CPG trade promotion is retail's most underused AI workload
CPGs spend up to a quarter of revenue on trade promotion and 72 percent of it loses money. That is the AI workload nobody is prioritizing.
Context engineering is the job prompt engineering pretended to be
Prompt wording barely moves the needle in production. Context assembly does. Here is what actually breaks when you treat the window as a scarce resource.
Intent data without orchestration is expensive noise
Most B2B teams buy intent data, park it on a dashboard, and miss the conversion window. The value was never the signal. It is the orchestration that acts on it.
The omnichannel measurement stack that actually closes the loop
Most omnichannel measurement stacks report but never act. Closing the loop needs identity, incrementality, and an action layer that moves spend.
Your agent doesn't need more tools. It needs fewer.
Tool sprawl is the silent killer of agent reliability. Cutting tools, not adding them, is what makes agents production-grade.
The agentic outbound stack that beats the agency model
Agencies bill 15K to 30K a month for outbound a 2K agentic stack now runs. The math flipped. Here is what the stack contains and where agencies still matter.
Personalization is back, and worse than before
The personalization vendors that died in 2023 are reborn as agentic. Most of it is the same broken assumptions in a better wrapper.
The CFO's AI question every CDO is failing
There's one question retail CFOs are starting to ask their CDOs about AI investment. Most CDOs aren't ready for it — and the ones who are change the conversation from ROI to CODN.
Your scoring model is the wrong fight
Every GTM team is debating signals, weights, fit vs intent, predictive vs explainable. They're fighting the wrong fight. The model rarely matters. The orchestration around it does.
The $40M data lake nobody asks about anymore
Three years ago every Tier 1 retailer built a data lake. The AI conversation moved on and the lake went quiet. Here's the retrofit the winning retailers are quietly running.
MCP is the protocol the agent conversation needed
Most 'AI agents' fail not because the model is wrong but because the agent has no way to read your data and act on your systems. MCP is the missing layer. Here's why it's the unlock.
RevOps is becoming a build job, not a tools job
Five years ago RevOps was a tools-admin role. In 2026 it's a build role. Leaders are hiring engineers who happen to know GTM — and the middle market is one cycle behind.
Why Claude Code is the RevOps hire of 2026
RevOps is becoming a build job. Most teams can't hire fast enough at the new bar. Claude Code closes the gap — if you treat it like a junior engineer, not a chatbot.