English language Visionary Marketing Podcasts

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Visionary Marketing Podcasts in English

  1. Oct 23

    SaaSpocalypse Now! And The Value Drain

    Mike Hadjadj, a retail and SaaS expert, has just published a book (in French) called SaaSpocalypse. Every year, he supports two to three hundred start-ups as a mentor, advisor and investor, mostly in the retail sector. In his own words, he isn’t predicting the end of software vendors, but he does see their value being hit hard by the changes AI is bringing. I interviewed him to understand what this shake-up means for vendors, their customers and the whole SaaS ecosystem. SaaSpocalypse Now! And The Value Drain Mike Hadjadj presenting his book SaaSpocalypse (in French) at the Visionary Marketing offices in October 2026 TL;DR With SaaSpocalypse, Mike Hadjadj isn’t predicting the end of software vendors. He’s saying the price of software is now negotiable. French e-commerce giant La Redoute rebuilt a €360,000-a-year tool in 48 hours using AI. Three factors can shield a SaaS vendor, namely urgency, value and stickiness. Big vendors are not spared. Some retailers have halved their Salesforce budget, or even cut it to a third. Gartner is looking in the rear-view mirror, while Mike is watching the 2027 contract renewals. His advice to vendors is simple. Talk to your customers now and ask them why they pay. SaaSpocalypse Now! or How to Build a SaaS Without Coding M.H. The book started with a chat at my physio’s. I’d had an accident and needed rehab. He’s a bit of a geek and told me he was setting up a new business line without buying any software or paying for a single SaaS subscription. Using Base44, a tool owned by Wix, he’d rebuilt a small CRM, a training tool and a small accounting and invoicing package himself. That intrigued me. I run La Retail Tech, a community that has been going for four and a half years, with lots of content and around 3,000 members. Our community platform was grossly outdated. It had stopped evolving and every small request was sitting in a support ticket for three weeks. We Dreamed It, and AI Delivered I don’t sleep much, so I gave it a go and I spent a few hours talking to an LLM, asking it to rework parts of the site and give it a modern look. I ended up with a front end, which I showed my team after the weekend. They recognised the site they’d been dreaming of. We had almost launched a tender, complete with requirements definition and technical provisos. That meant bickering over compromises with the team, because not everything is possible. With AI, everything is crystal clear. I talk and hey presto! It’s done. SaaSpocalypse Now! Mike Hadjadj during a demo for his community, La Retail Tech. Image by Optimalways I’ve kept going since the book came out. The front end is done and I’m now tackling the back end. The agent kept misunderstanding me, so I found another agent that handled my agent, which I talk to on WhatsApp. It knows my whole environment, runs the tests and writes very detailed prompts that I just copy and paste. I can’t code, and neither can my physio. So the question isn’t whether people can do it. It’s about who will still pay, for what, and where the value sits. That’s one of the book’s main stances. A French E-commerce Giant Rebuilt a €360,000-a-Year Tool in 48 Hours M.H. The other trigger was meeting French e-commerce giant La Redoute at an event. They used a visual product discovery tool, created by an Israeli start-up. The tool worked very well. Other French retailers used it too, such as Monoprix and Castorama, but you could tell it was nearing the end of its life. They were all looking for a replacement and asking me if I knew of one, before launching a tender. La Redoute put two people on it for 48 hours, with AI. They studied how the tool worked, rebuilt it, tested it and released it. The copy is better than the original, because they could tune it to their own environment, something that a software vendor seldom allows. La Redoute was spending €360,000 a year on the tool, now they don’t. SaaSpocalypse Companies of All Sizes Are Following Suit Digging deeper, I found out that companies of all sizes, including large ones with the right skills, are already going after commoditised tools that aren’t core to the business. If the tool falls over, it’s no big deal. The savings are huge. When I talk about value destruction, it’s because the rebuild cost nothing like the old price. Two days, two people, a bit of maintenance, updates, testing and tokens. There’s simply no comparison. A small part of the value shifts to in-house skills, and some is bought externally, at a very different price. Most of it is destroyed. There’s also a whole industry around SaaS spending. Agencies, consultancies, integrators and, above all, start-ups, which means funds and fundraising. If the pie shrinks, all of that ecosystem will be hit. Urgency, Value or Stickiness, What Protects a Software Vendor? M.H. I’ve been supporting start-ups for a very long time, as a mentor, an advisor, in incubators and accelerators, and as an investor too. Until now, I judged them on unwritten criteria, to decide whether I believed in them, wanted to back them or even invest. How innovative they were, how good the team was. That has changed, and I’ve come up with a new three-part test. The first criterion is urgency. The need has to be pressing, driven for instance by regulation or competition. The second is value, which must be blatant, immediate and measurable. The third is new to me, and it’s stickiness. This is what will refrain end customers or competitors from copying your product in a few minutes. SaaSpocalypse, an Innovator “Disrupted” by Its Own Customers In the book, I cite Smartway, a pioneer in the fight against food waste. Its software tracked the best-before dates of perishable products in stores, to decide when to pull an item from the shelf and what discount would guarantee a sale. A salad or a yoghurt might go at 22% off one day and 40% off the next. It first sold well to independent supermarkets and hypermarkets, whose owners are managing their own money. Then the central buying groups perceived the value of that piece of software. The IT divisions of the big French retailers, such as Leclerc, Intermarché or Carrefour, built more or less the same thing, which didn’t work as well but cost far less. It took them two to three years to get there. SaaSpocalypse, version 1. The author warns that “this book is best read quickly, as it may age badly.” The Better a Product Is, the More Likely It Is to Be Copied The difference is that today, the better your product is and the more widespread, the easier it is to copy. The bulk of the work is no longer the code. It’s modelling what you can help the customer earn, the processes, the interfaces. Smartway was smart, because it moved into other areas, such as fresh produce and ordering, with higher barriers to entry. Commoditised SaaS companies, on the other hand, are finished. The better they are, the faster they get copied. A young company with no stickiness will sell pilots, their customers will love the result and decide to rebuild the software. You can’t blame them. “The better your product is and the more widespread, the easier it is to copy” Mike Hadjadj For English retailer Save Your Wardrobe, stickiness is part of the equation. Its platform handles repairs for big leather goods and clothing houses, a field that’s still archaic. Anyone can digitise appointment bookings but Save Your Wardrobe also built and runs a network of approved repairers. They didn’t mean to do that at the outset. But now, it’s become a significant barrier to entry. Other barriers exist, such as standards and certifications, notably in payment systems and hardware. There is also external data customers need to buy to operate properly. Every vendor should ask itself why its customers wouldn’t have a good reason to copy its products. Are Big Vendors as Vulnerable as Small Ones? M.H. I was invited to talk about my book a few weeks ago at an event a vendor was hosting for its partners, on the eve of a trade show. I said not everyone would be hit in the same way. Small SaaS vendors would be hit straight away, while the big ones such as Salesforce would be hit later, and on core issues. The next morning, at the show, a friend told me a big brand had just cut its Salesforce budget to a third. That afternoon, the boss of another retailer told me he had renegotiated his contract and halved it. Mandatory Modules They Never Needed Their reasoning is simple. They were paying for mandatory modules they never used. Others were useful, but never quite satisfying. What interests them is the engine. They tell Salesforce, Oracle or SAP that they’ll only buy the engine, that they’ll rebuild the rest themselves by vibe coding, and that they therefore want the price divided by two, three or four. These big vendors aren’t stupid. They’ve understood that the value has shifted. I’ve worked for software vendors before, including one that pioneered CRM before Salesforce. All our value rested on two things. What we brought the customer, meaning process modelling, and how we delivered it, meaning the code, its robustness and its ease of use. To extend the product range, we were better off buying small companies than developing in-house, which would have taken years and cost a fortune. Between 1999 and 2006, we took over twelve small vendors, covering marketing, emailing and other functions. SaaSpocalypse and Why the Value Is No Longer in the Code Today, it’s the complete opposite. I show an agent an existing feature, ask for the same thing but improved, tailored to my needs, and it’s done almost before I’ve pressed the transmit button. The value is no longer in the code. It’s in the ability to express, visualise, project and model what you want. Anyone can writ

  2. Sep 28

    Future of Work: Making the Office Worth the Commute

    What if the future of work were about giving people a rela benefit for getting back to the office? On Thursday 24 September, the first International Workplace Summit (IWS 2026) took place at the Campus Cyber in La Défense, Paris. The audience was made up of corporate real estate directors, workplace and facility managers and HR heads from all over Europe, all there to tackle what sounds like a simple question. What needs to change in the way we design and run workplaces? It is anything but an academic question. Since Covid, the way we behave has changed, and society is shifting faster than ever. People now like to talk about a BANI world (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible). The acronym is a blatant overstatement, but there is some truth behind it. The years before 2010 were fairly stable, and since then one disruption has followed another at breakneck speed. What we still need to give young people is a future worth working for, not just doom and gloom or a sales pitch for the latest tech. Here is my take on that morning in La Défense. IWS 2026: Making the Office Worth the Commute Future of work? On Thursday 24 September, the first International Workplace Summit (IWS 2026) was held at the Campus Cyber in La Défense. Artificial intelligence is at the heart of the future of work. We have been writing about it on Visionary Marketing since 2016, long before large language models came along and sparked something close to mass panic, helped along by the tech giants who keep telling us chatbots are about to wipe out humanity. IWS 2026: what does the future of work look like? And will the office be worth the commute? These predictions are overblown, as Forrester’s J.P. Gownder told us a few months ago. Still, something is clearly going on, and the IWS morning gave us three takes on it which, put together, paint a pretty full picture of the future of work. First a diagnosis, then a tech pitch, and finally a vision. And God knows we all desperately need such a vision. Future of Work at The Campus Cyber A pet project of Emmanuel Macron’s, the Campus Cyber opened on 15 February 2022 in La Défense. It sits in the Eria tower, easy to spot thanks to its petal-like shape, and is home to some 1,800 people, including teams from ANSSI, France’s national cybersecurity agency. Around a third of the building is made up of collaborative spaces open to the whole sector, where big corporations, start-ups, government agencies, schools and research labs rub shoulders. The interior was designed by Projective Architecture, which took care of client-side project support, space planning and design and build on some 208,000 sq ft (19,300 m²) of the tower’s 280,000 sq ft (26,000 m²) and 13 floors. That includes the restaurants, a library, event spaces, a showroom and terraces. A Former Labour Minister’s Diagnosis at IWS 2026 The former French Labour Minister, who spent earlier stints at Danone and 3DS, brought out a graphic novel on the subject in 2025 with journalist Mathieu Charrier and artist Nicoby, Travailler demain (“Working Tomorrow”, in French). She asked the audience to “zoom out” from the workplace for a moment and look at the decade ahead. As she sees it, four waves are hitting us at once. AI, going green, demographics and our changing relationship with work. Fopremer French Ministry of Labour Muriel Pénicaud at IWS 2026 sharing her views about the future of work. Three numbers show how big this is. According to the IMF and the OECD, AI will affect 50 to 70% of jobs in developed economies over the next ten years, and by “affect” she means “destroy, create or transform”. The World Economic Forum reckons two thirds of the jobs our kids will do don’t exist yet. The third figure is the least known and the most striking. Since the late 1980s, the OECD has been tracking how long the skills students pick up in vocational higher education stay useful. A generation ago, the answer was thirty years. Today, it is apparently two. Muriel Pénicaud draws the obvious conclusion. The old model of studying first and working afterwards is dead, and we will all be learning for the rest of our lives. Mind you, I have a feeling the best people have always worked that way. Is it really that new? IWS 2026 host Lionel Cottin with Carole de Crozet and Jérôme Galletti. 10 trends showing us a desirable future of work What Is Really New What is genuinely new is who bears the brunt. Earlier waves of automation targeted factories. This one is aimed first at white-collar workers, back-office functions, finance, HR, marketing and middle management, which she calls “the glue that holds companies together”. She sees an opportunity here, getting rid of the drudgery, and a risk, losing sight of why our work matters. A large teaching hospital in Montreal shows how this can play out. It brought in AI to handle its logistics and saved around 25 to 30%. Instead of pocketing the money, management put that time back into patient care, and patients now get better faster. People came first again. Finally, some good news. Going green in La Défense, as seen from the Campus Cyber where IWS 2026 was held. Looks like there is still some way to go. The rest of her talk ran through the move to net zero, which “HR is still barely dealing with” (how do you retrain Silesian coal miners in a country that gets 80% of its energy from coal?), falling birth rates, with 670,000 young people about to enter the French job market against 956,000 at the peak, and remote work. The studies she quotes show that working from home boosts individual productivity but hurts creativity, problem-solving and the sense of belonging. For her, whispering into a headset in an open-plan office to talk to Singapore is pointless. If you come into the office, it should be to do things together. All of this is spot on, well researched and pretty unsettling. Over coffee, quite a few of us were thinking the same thing. If there had been more young graduates in the room, they would have walked out believing most of what they just learned is already out of date. This kind of diagnosis, which well-informed people repeat at one conference after another, is not a vision of the future. It doesn’t make anyone want to get behind a project. Muriel Pénicaud admits as much. Young people aren’t checking out, they are just committing differently, to projects that mean something rather than to institutions. But somebody has to offer them those projects. Futureof Work: Tom Ryckaert’s Tech Promise at IWS 2026 The second take came from Tom Ryckaert, a director at Planon, which makes real estate and facility management software, and author of Disruptive Workplaces. His argument boils down to one line. The question is no longer whether AI will help us work, but whether work will still happen in the workplace. Tom Ryckaert, author of Disruptive Workplaces, came over from Belgium to give his talk. He went through it at a cracking pace. Predictive maintenance, with 40% less downtime and 25% lower repair bills, a new generation of platforms, which research firm Verdantix calls CPIPs (connected portfolio intelligence platforms), hooking building management systems up to the company’s IT. The air conditioning throws an alarm, a work order goes straight to the right contractor, and nobody in the building ever had to pick up the phone. The employee journey runs itself too. Your app warns you about a traffic jam, books you a parking space with a charger, offers you the desk next to your usual one when that is taken, and orders your Tuesday chicken poke bowl. It’s All Here Already All of this is already out there, Tom Ryckaert insists. Robots and cobots (collaborative robots built to work next to people without a safety cage) cost between €10,000 and €50,000 today and will soon come down to €5,000. He even dusts off “facility as a service”, an idea he was pushing ten years ago, where you call on services when you need them, just like software. Ryckaert also reminds us that 20% of a building’s total cost is locked in at the design stage and the other 80% over decades of running it. He says we should cut “the AI elephant” into bite-sized, practical use cases instead of trying to do everything at once. Above all, he quotes Tariq Chauhan, who runs the Middle Eastern service provider EFS and told him it will always come down to people, because they are the ones keeping the services going every single day. Yet all this accumulation of tech leaves a big question unanswered. You hear it at most trade shows, and it doesn’t really address the issues raised an hour earlier. A building that orders your lunch tells you nothing about why you are there, or why a young person who has just turned down a permanent job would ever come back. Many of the solutions on show make sense, and some are genuinely appealing. But they deal with running the building, not with meaning. The problem Muriel Pénicaud put her finger on is a societal one, almost a question of civilisation, and no connected platform is going to fix it on its own. Ten Trends Worth the Commute The third take came from the people who designed the very building we were sitting in. Jérôme Galletti and Carole de Crozet of Projective Architecture came up with the Campus Cyber around ten years ago and fitted it out five years ago. Rather than give us a slideshow tour, they used it to pull out what Jérôme Galletti calls “ten or so desirable trends for the future of office buildings”. That word matters. The idea is no longer to put up with an uncertain future, but to spell out what we actually want to build, and to make the office worth the commute. Touring the Campus Cyber boardroom during IWS 2026. No pecking order around this table. From this project and our research, we ca

  3. Sep 10

    AI and Creativity: a 2026 update

    It’s back to school and back to the blog too for the 31st time since 1995, and today’s topic will be AI and Creativity. The idea is to deal with the topic of artificial intelligence, not from a technical perspective, but from a more philosophical one, drawing both on my digital and artistic backgrounds. In 2026, the fourth version of my programme entitled “Content Creation in the Age of AI” will be delivered to all the students of the Omnes Education Group. A previous video was recorded in 2024 on that subject, and a serious refresh was needed. I have therefore gathered enough hindsight to learn more about the impact of AI, especially on music and the creative arts. And I decided to focus on just three things, to avoid getting lost in too broad a subject. First, the seeming popularity of AI artists on streaming platforms like Spotify, taking the example of an act called Breaking Rust. Second, the Stanford GSB study on visual arts and the impact of AI on creators. Third, my own thoughts and conclusions based on the above. Has AI Stifled Creativity? A 2024-2026 Perspective AI and Creativity and manufactured popularity, because such things exist as well. In 2024, I asked myself the question, “Will AI stifle all creativity?” as part of my Shift24 programme designed especially for Omnes Education Group. This programme cannot be shared online, but my colleagues at Omnes were kind enough to let me publish this wee piece for the benefit of my readers and followers, and I wish to thank them warmly for this as well as their renewed support these past four years.  In this video dedicated to ‘creativity’, drawing on Merriam-Webster, I distinguished innovation from invention and chose to focus on the latter, specifically in music, a topic not yet covered in earlier courses. I then illustrated this with Suno, which could churn out up to 900,000 pieces of music a day as early as 2024 (far outpacing Bach’s 1,128 compositions over a 65-year lifetime). Hence, I shared a song I had generated myself, “The Dying Cyberspace.” I won’t say that I’m proud of this song, but at least I had great fun generating it, and it was instant gratification. All this was raising questions related to the value of musical creation, the risk of creative stagnation, and the thorny issue of intellectual property, since these AIs are trained on centuries of human-created music. So far, nothing new under the sun. Almost every other journalist must have written the same story for the past three years.  However, I thought it lacked a bit of perspective. I then tempered the novelty of the phenomenon by pointing to historical precedents: Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn” (1969), Zoe Keating’s loop-based compositions (one example amongst many others), and Google’s Project Magenta as far back as 2016. These are mere examples. I decided to keep it short, but there has been no shortage of technology-backed creativity in music these past 50 years or more. Think of the late Klaus Schultze and his pals from Ash Ra Temple, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, and all the so-called Krautrock school of thought to start with, not mentioning the new wave movement from the 1980s.  I also cited Wim Mertens, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and German artists like Nils Frahm, who blended electronic and acoustic elements long before GenAI. The real difference today, I argued, is one of scale: such tools are now in everyone’s hands. Be it to create music of the ilk of the Dying Cyberspace or more ambitious AI-produced work like this entire fake Pink Floyd album, which didn’t sell as well as The Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here.  Somewhat courageously, I concluded at the time that AI wouldn’t replace musicians but would become just another instrument in the creative toolkit, with real innovation coming from how humans use these tools. Since music remains fundamentally about human expression and emotion, I thought rather optimistically, if not naively, that AI music didn’t mark the end of musical invention but rather the beginning of a new chapter. Such were my thoughts from two years ago, now is the time to move forward and take a look at what happened in 2025-2026. As exmplained above, I focused this new research on three things. First, the seeming popularity of AI artists on streaming platforms like Spotify, taking the example of an act called Breaking Rust. Second, the Stanford GSB study on visual arts and the impact of AI on creators. Third, my own thoughts and conclusions. Breaking Rust Breaking Rust: a Spotify hit Let’s start with Breaking Rust. Breaking Rust is an AI country act which hit number one on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart in November 2025, on Spotify. The numbers are seemingly enormous: over 2 million Spotify monthly listeners, and over 3 million streams in under a month. The project is credited to Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, even though very little is known about him. Rivaldo Taylor is apparently paid, I found out, on downloads only. How much is it worth? I tried to measure what this Billboard chart placement might actually bring to Mr. Taylor. Looking just at Spotify, and reckoning that musicians get paid anything between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, the potential income was somewhere in the region of $9,000 to $15,000 for that first month alone. Extend that over a year and you probably reach something in the region of $100,000, assuming the popularity of the act does not dwindle, which it does tend to do, since it is already getting harder to find Breaking Rust on Spotify. Then I tried to understand what it would take to push a song like this to number one on the charts. Say I create an AI track on Suno or a similar application, post it on Spotify, and want to shoot it to the top of the charts. What I learned is that so few pieces of music are actually bought by listeners on these platforms that if you simply buy a thousand downloads, you will reach number one very easily for this kind of music. So my reckoning is that if Rivaldo Taylor did this, it would have cost him something in the region of a thousand dollars for those thousand downloads. That’s a cheap and easy way to tweak the results and a rather easy path to the top. Did Breaking Rust fake the applause? Sure lives on borrowed time, so he says. Growth hacking What happens on these platforms is not just about the content. It is about what digital marketing experts call growth hacking, in other words tweaking the stats, and this domain is fraught with fraud. Bot-driven streaming is the starting point, with bots listening, or rather fakely listening, to tracks to make them appear more popular than they really are. On Deezer, one of the streaming platforms, it was found that 70 to 85 percent of streams are flagged as AI. This has reached a point where it now threatens the platforms themselves, because who really wants to listen to that much slop? Breaking Rust is not that bad, actually I find it rather good, but I do not feel like listening to it day in, day out. I want to listen to real artists. The method that may have been used by Breaking Rust is common. It is hard to say for certain whether it was used here, but it is likely. The same kind of tricks turn up on other platforms, such as Instagram. An Instagram “photographer” named Joss Avery, supposedly based in London and shooting with a Nikon D810 camera, turned out to be an AI avatar posting machine-made photographs generated with Midjourney and Photoshop. When I looked at his Instagram feed, it was fairly obvious to me his portraits were AI-generated. Maybe Instagram users can’t tell the difference. AI and Creativyu : the cost of AI for real visual arts creators Looking at visual arts, I turned to the Stanford GSB study comparing 2024 and 2025. AI is growing overall platform sales, so the pie is getting bigger, but the creator’s share of it is shrinking dramatically. This is something we have seen across content, platform marketing and social media, and it is now happening with AI as well. It’s typical platform marketing. There is so much slop that the share of value going to content, and its price, is going down the drain. The impact on visual arts is significant. In a 2026 survey, 32 percent of illustrators reported lost commissions due to generative AI. The average annual loss among UK illustrators affected by this AI boom was around 9,000 pounds. According to the Society of Authors, 26 percent of members reported lost work due to AI, with an associated loss of income in the region of 40 percent. That is massive. So what we can say is that AI has probably not done away with creativity, but it has certainly done away with the value associated with it. I can confirm the same has happened in content marketing. Film photography revival has a cost and I’m not even talking abou that beautiful beast up there on the righthand side. But I think there is going to be a revival, much like what happened with film photography, and as you know, I am a photographer myself. I recently purchased a brand new camera dating from 1966, and I fetched my father’s old Canon AE-1. I have gone back to shooting film, even though I am in fact a digital photography pioneer, having started in 1995 and never having stopped shooting digital since. Yet I now find there is an incentive for photographers to go back to film. The first reason is to do away with the AI suspicion that has already hit text, where people’s writing has been rejected because it contained em dashes, even though everybody used em dashes before AI made them suspect. There is rising suspicion, and users and clients are keen to know where content actually comes from. Did you make this yourself, or did you make it with AI? And if you made it with AI, that does not necessarily mean it is bad, but it certainly m

  4. Jun 4

    Agentic E-Commerce, Could AI Become the Shopfront

    Agentic e-commerce is already reshaping how consumers discover and buy products online, yet it still accounts for barely 0.2% of total e-commerce traffic. BASE France is the French arm of Base.com, a Polish-born SaaS scale-up that has spent nearly two decades building operational infrastructure for online retailers. Its CEO, Ben Hamilton, brings a practitioner’s perspective to this emerging model: measured, practical, and refreshingly free of the hype that surrounds most conversations on the topic. Agentic E-Commerce: Could AI Become the Shopfront? Imagine an agentic e-commerce world where e-commerce happens on smartphone screens and robots deliver your purchases.  We might be on the brink of this future.  This image was created using Midjourney.  Commerce as conversation: the oldest model in the book Before there were shops, there was conversation. For thousands of years, trade was oral. A buyer expressed a need, a seller responded with what they had, and the two parties negotiated until a deal was struck. The self-service retail store, born roughly a century ago, was a radical departure from this model. It replaced dialogue with browsing. It handed the customer a trolley and pointed them at the shelves. E-commerce then took that self-service model and, as Ben Hamilton puts it, “multiplied it by about 100,000.” The online shopper today faces a near-infinite array of products across dozens of marketplaces, with no guide, no-one to talk to, and no memory of what they looked at three tabs ago. It is efficient in theory. In practice, it is exhausting. Back to future? The agentic model, Hamilton argues, represents something of a return to origins. Instead of browsing, the consumer talks. An agent listens, asks questions, proposes options, and eventually surfaces an answer to a need that the buyer may not even have been able to articulate clearly at the outset. “back to the future,” Hamilton explains, “that’s what I’m getting at. The agentic model takes us back to something closer to how human beings have traded over thousands of years compared to the last ten, twenty or even a hundred.” My own experience bears this out. I recently found a diagnostician for a property I am selling. As a matter of fact, I didn’t find them through a Google search, but through a conversation with an LLM. I clicked through two or three irrelevant links before landing on exactly the right provider. I then completed the transaction on their website. The research was agentic; the checkout was not. That distinction, as it happens, sits at the heart of what Hamilton believes will define the next phase of e-commerce. Ben Hamilton on agentic e-commerce: “I can totally imagine a portion of that market occurring directly on an LLM”. Agentic E-commerce: Where checkout will and won’t happen One of the more grounded contributions Hamilton makes to this debate is his refusal to conflate two distinct phenomena: AI influence over purchasing decisions, and AI completing the transaction itself. Much of the media discourse collapses the two. Hamilton does not. “I don’t think we’re heading to a world where 20, 50 or 80% of online transactions happen on an LLM,” he says. “I would draw the distinction between where the checkout occurs and how much an agent is involved in the buying process.” For the foreseeable future, he believes, most consumers will continue to research via LLMs and transact on familiar websites and marketplaces. The inertia in human purchasing behaviour is simply too great for the checkout itself to migrate rapidly to a chat interface. This view is supported by the data available. According to research by commercetools, 73% of consumers already use AI somewhere in their shopping journey. Yet only 36% are open to AI agents making purchases on their behalf. In the US, the figure for autonomous AI purchasing drops to 14%. The gap between AI as advisor and AI as buyer is vast, and it will narrow slowly. The risks associated with agentic e-commerce are high The risks of handing uncapped authority to an AI agent are no longer hypothetical. In late May 2026, an AI consultant reported to Axios that one of their enterprise clients had accidentally accumulated a $500 million bill on Anthropic’s Claude in a single month, simply by giving employees unrestricted access to the platform with no usage controls in place. Agentic workflows, which loop through tasks repeatedly, consume tokens at a rate orders of magnitude higher than a standard chat query. The bill was not the result of malicious use or a system failure. It was the predictable outcome of deploying autonomous agents without guardrails. The case is far from isolated: Uber reportedly exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April, with per-engineer costs running between $500 and $2,000 monthly. “You’ve got to be bold to give them no upper limit on transactions,” Hamilton observed, and the arithmetic proved him right. [Editor’s note: I misquoted a similar anecdote about the Davos Summit during the interview. I’d heard or read this story in traditional media but couldn’t verify it with facts. I suspect it might have been fabricated. I replaced it with the above, duly sourced information.] The check out must remain on the merchant’s platform OpenAI itself learned this lesson when it launched Instant Checkout in September 2025, which allowed purchases to complete directly inside ChatGPT. By March 2026, the feature had been shut down. Brands rejected the model, citing the loss of traffic, customer data, and loyalty flows. Shopify’s own position makes the point clearly. At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in March 2026, Finkelstein noted that barely a dozen Shopify merchants were live on agentic commerce at the time. On the Q1 2026 earnings call, he was unambiguous: “LLMs do not bypass Shopify’s checkout.” The checkout, the payment flow, and the post-purchase relationship remain squarely on the merchant’s platform. A natural segmentation Hamilton sees a natural segmentation emerging by category. Low-value, frequently purchased household items lend themselves to fully autonomous agentic purchasing. “I can totally imagine a portion of that market occurring direct on an LLM,” he says. “Hey, I’ve run out of toothpaste, can you order me some?” High-involvement purchases, and anything with significant financial or emotional stakes, will retain human control over the final step for a long time yet. The death of keyword search, greatly exaggerated The brands Hamilton speaks with regularly are, understandably, worried. Most have spent the past two decades learning the rules of a game built around keyword search and performance marketing. That game has not ended, but the goalposts have shifted, and nobody is quite sure where they have moved to. Brands are understandably worried. Most have spent the past two decades learning the rules of a game built around keyword search and performance marketing and the goalposts have shifted, and nobody is quite sure where they have moved to. Gabriel Magalhães didn’t even need this to miss in the 2026 UEFA Cup Final penalty shootout. This image was tweaked with ChatGPT. The scale of the agentic e-commerce shift Key figures: the scale of the shift AI-driven sessions still represent below 0.2% of total e-commerce traffic, though they are the fastest-growing channel (Digital Commerce 360, 2025) GenAI referrals to US retail sites grew 693% year-on-year during the 2025 holiday season (Adobe Analytics) Gartner forecast that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots captured search share (Gartner, 2024) By early 2026, ChatGPT reached approximately 17% of global search queries against Google’s 78% Over 60% of Google searches now end without a click, across multiple industry studies Retailers with AI agent integration grew 32% faster during Cyber Week 2025 than those without (Salesforce) Hamilton’s view on the fate of keyword search is careful rather than apocalyptic. Google will not lose its advertising revenues overnight. But the direction of travel is clear. Search queries will progressively migrate towards conversational interfaces, for the simple reason that we rarely know precisely what we want when we start looking. “We don’t necessarily know what we want 90% of the time,” he observes. “It takes a bit of a conversation to elicit exactly what we’re looking for.” Keyword search was always a crude proxy for intent. LLMs are, at least in principle, better placed to decode it. Agentic e-commerce by the numbers Agentic e-commerce by the numbers. Infographic made with Gemini The question for brands is what to do about this. Hamilton’s prescription is structural rather than cosmetic. Brands need to become machine-readable, which means structured data connected to the right protocols, not just well-written product descriptions. Three open standards now define how AI agents interact with merchants: MCP (Model Context Protocol, originally developed by Anthropic and donated to the Linux Foundation in December 2025), ACP (OpenAI and Stripe, September 2025), and UCP (Google and Shopify, announced at NRF in January 2026). Shopify activated a default MCP endpoint for all its stores in Summer 2025. These are not optional extras. They are the new plumbing. MCP, ACP or UCP and the agentic acronym soup I raised with Hamilton the practical reality for most merchants, who have no idea what MCP, ACP, or UCP even stand for. His response was reassuring on one level, and sobering on another. Platforms like BASE are absorbing this complexity on behalf of their clients. A small or mid-sized retailer does not need to recruit data scientists or build protocol integrations in-house. They can, if they choose; the new generation of

  5. May 21

    GenAI in Higher Education, Legitimacy and Laziness

    Alain Goudey is Associate Dean for Digital Innovation at Neoma Business School and co-author of a peer-reviewed study on GenAI in Higher Education. The survey focused on how students, faculty, and deans perceive the legitimacy of generative AI in French management education. His findings are both reassuring and unsettling. GenAI in Higher Education, Legitimacy and Laziness, and the Exam That No Longer Makes Sense The picture that emerges from a study on GenAI in Higher Education is less a battlefield than a hall of mirrors, where every stakeholder sees a different problem and reaches for a different solution. All illustrations in text made with Midjourney When Alain Goudey and his colleagues began surveying French higher education in early 2024, they were not trying to settle the question of whether generative AI was good or bad. They were trying to understand something more precise: why the same tool could be simultaneously valued, feared, accepted, and denounced, sometimes by the same person in the same breath. Their study sits at the heart of what makes GenAI in higher education such a contested terrain. The resulting study, published in the Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS), drew on surveys of 668 students, 204 faculty members, and 29 deans, completed by 22 in-depth interviews with early-adopter professors. The picture that emerges is less a battlefield than a hall of mirrors, where every stakeholder sees a different problem and reaches for a different solution. The starting point is a number that should have settled the debate. Between 80 and 92 per cent of students, depending on the institution surveyed, are already using GenAI tools in their academic work. ChatGPT’s public release produced that figure within roughly 18 months. The tool did not wait for institutional permission. It deployed itself. And higher education is still, in many places, writing the policy. The productivity trap Alain identifies the central tension plainly. Students value GenAI for speed, idea generation, and study support. They also fear, and their institutions fear with them, what the research calls “metacognitive laziness”: the gradual erosion of the cognitive effort that produces real learning. He believes this is not a contradiction to resolve but a course architecture challenge. “The resolution of this problem lies in course design, where we need to deliberately reintroduce cognitive effort and reflection into GenAI as a tool, not as a replacement for human cognition.” The issue, as he puts it, is not the technology but the posture the user brings to it. Someone who submits what he calls a “naive prompt” receives a naive answer, smoothly formatted and perfectly mediocre. The tool is capable of something far more useful, if the user brings enough domain knowledge and critical intent to the conversation. “You have to nurture your own thinking process instead of delegating the whole process to the machine.” This is, as I noted during our conversation, less a matter of prompt engineering than of basic intellectual discipline: the capacity to question the question before asking it, something philosophy departments have been teaching for centuries under less fashionable names. GenAI in Higher Education: faculty should train students in GenAI tools and their limitations. They also teach Homer’s Odyssey and Shelley’s Frankenstein as part of the management curriculum. Image made with Midjourney That observation prompted Alain to make a point about AI literacy that differs from what is generally proffered. The debate is not simply about knowing how the tools work technically. It is, equally, about knowing enough about the subject matter to judge whether the output is any good. The observation that AI is most powerful in the hands of people who already know the business resonates here. GenAI does not replace expertise. It amplifies whatever expertise the user already brings. Which raises an uncomfortable question for institutions producing graduates who may never have had the chance to develop that expertise in the first place. At Neoma, the response has been deliberately dual. Faculty train students in GenAI tools and their limitations. They also teach Homer’s Odyssey and Shelley’s Frankenstein as part of the management curriculum. The goal is not cultural enrichment for its own sake. It is to give students mental models for envisioning what leadership looks like, or what happens when creation escapes the intentions of its creator. Alain describes this as “building cognitive infrastructure”: “We need students to be able to envision the world through different models, different kinds of processes and theoretical frameworks, in order to develop genuine critical thinking about what AI generates.” A degree in management that skips that foundation produces graduates who can operate the tool but cannot judge its output. Exams that assessed the wrong thing The structural challenge shows up most sharply when it comes to assessments. A professor who can produce a two-hour exam in three minutes is facing students who can answer that exam in equally little time. The diagnostic value of the exercise has vanished. “If ChatGPT or any GenAI tool can pass an exam, you need to redesign the exam.” Alain’s prescription is not a retreat to pen and paper, though he acknowledges that supervised handwritten assessment is the simplest available defence. The structural challenge shows up most sharply when it comes to assessments. A professor in Higher Education who can produce a two-hour exam in three minutes with GenAI is facing students who can answer that exam in equally little time. The diagnostic value of the exercise has vanished. Image made with Midjourney His more substantive response is a structural shift. He believes one should refrain from just assessing content acquisition at the end of a course, favouring the assessment of competencies as the course progresses. This implies more frequent, lower-stakes evaluations embedded in the process itself. Live problem-solving, process-based assessment, and in-person oral examinations all preserve some of what the traditional exam was supposed to measure. The caveat he adds is honest: no format is fully immune. AI models are evolving too quickly for any single solution to remain adequate for any length of time. The appropriate response is not to find a permanent answer but to treat redesign as an ongoing practice. The deeper implication, which runs through the paper’s conclusion, is that what higher education is actually selling may need to change. If content can be retrieved, synthesised, and presented at negligible cost by a tool available to anyone with a browser, the degree that certifies mastery of content is certifying something of diminishing value. What retains value are the competencies that AI cannot yet credibly replicate: contextual judgement, ethical reasoning, the ability to construct and test frameworks against reality. This, in essence, is also how I tend to approach AI teaching, be it with engineering or business school students, especially within the framework of my course at Omnes Education (now in its fourth consecutive year). GenAI in Higher Education: The Fragmented Institution Higher education’s institutional response to GenAI in higher education has been, to put it gently, uneven. Sciences Po banned ChatGPT in January 2023, then changed its mind. Thirty-five French public universities have partnered with Mistral AI. Institutions are drafting a national charter. Neoma, where Alain is Associate Dean for Digital Innovation, was among the first French business schools to formalise its approach, launching a programme to train faculty, staff, and students with a shared initial curriculum before moving to dedicated workshops on curriculum design, assessment, and the redesign of learning experiences. What the research reveals is that this institutional activity is not solving a single problem. There are three different stakeholder groups each attempting to solve their own version of the problem under the same label. Students want rules and AI literacy training. Faculty are developing their own teaching approaches through peer-led workshops. Deans are setting policy and negotiating sovereign infrastructure. The concerns escalate in a predictable direction: individual academic performance for students, assessment integrity for faculty, institutional reputation for deans. They are not always in conversation with each other. Alain’s framework for addressing this fragmentation involves working simultaneously at three levels: infrastructure, course design, and governance. What he advocates for, and what he argues Neoma attempted, is to bring all three audiences into contact with the technology under a shared framing, early enough that no single group can entrench itself in a position that makes later coordination impossible. The equity question The question of equity cuts across all three levels. Access to premium AI models is not free. When I raised the issue about the gap between basic and professional subscription tiers, Alain’s response was characteristic: the infrastructure problem is real but secondary. “The biggest inequity is not about accessing the tool, but being able to use it in the right way.” At Neoma, the institutional partnership with Mistral provides all students with access to a professional-grade tool. What the data shows, even with equal access, is a large gap between students who use GenAI to get the fastest possible answer and those who use it to deepen their thinking, and that gap is not closed by equalising subscriptions. Even if I tend to agree with most of what Alain is stating, I do think that the rise of prices for premium mode

  6. May 4

    AI Will Not Kill Marketing

    Shall AI kill marketing? Sounds like a hackneyed question, yet it’s on any marketer’s lips these days. Thomas Husson, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, covers the intersection of marketing, technology, and consumer behaviour from his base in Paris. In a wide-ranging conversation, he cuts through the European Gen AI paradox, the persistent CMO-CIO divide, the gap between POC enthusiasm and production reality, and the thorny question of what AI actually means for the next generation of marketing professionals and CMOs. His answers are measured, occasionally blunt, and consistently grounded in Forrester Research data. AI Will Not Threaten the Existence of Marketing But It Will Reshape It Beyond Recognition Thomas Husson believes that Marketing will be changed profoundly. But he doesn’t believe in the death of Marketing. Photo: Thomas Husson at Paris Retail Week, in late 2023 My first question was the obvious one: are CMOs going to be made redundant by artificial intelligence? Thomas Husson’s response is categorical, and worth stating plainly at the outset. It’s a blatant ‘No’. The role will change. The how will change. But the existence of marketing as a discipline is not, according to him, in question. “Marketing is still going to be about understanding your customer, defining a brand strategy, and delivering the brand promise through customer experience.” Thomas Husson, Forrester Research Unclear prospects, obvious pressures That said, Husson is not naive about the pressures building on marketing organisations. Some tasks will be automated; that much is not in dispute. The real questions are which tasks, how quickly, and whether automation of a task necessarily kills the job around it. His answer to that last question is no, at least not in any simple mechanical sense. “Jobs will evolve for sure. New jobs will be created. Most jobs will change. The way we work will change. The way we work with agencies, with external partners, the processes, the workflow. It is the shape of work that is being reshaped, not work itself,” he added. For those expecting a more dramatic verdict, Husson’s framing may feel anti-climactic. But it reflects what Forrester Research data actually shows, and it points to the most important practical challenge for AI and CMOs alike: managing a profound transformation without either catastrophising or sleepwalking through it. AI Will Not Kill Marketing according to Forrester’s Thomas Husson, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The European Paradox, Overhyped and Exciting at the Same Time Forrester Research produced a result that initially looks contradictory, Husson stressed in our interview. Fifty-five percent of European B2B marketers consider generative AI overhyped. Yet 81% of European frontline marketers describe themselves as enthusiastic about it. How can both be true simultaneously? Husson explains the split without difficulty. At the decision-maker level, scepticism is entirely rational. AI is inescapable at conferences, in vendor pitches, and in media coverage. “There is AI fatigue. And more importantly, some of the vendors are indeed over-pitching, and the productivity gains they promise are not happening,” he stated. The gap between the pitch and what we actually experience in the field is wide enough to breed genuine frustration. Saving Time and Working Differently But the people actually using these tools, often through shadow AI channels their organisations have not officially sanctioned, are discovering something different. They are saving time and are doing their jobs differently. They are finding capabilities they did not expect. “In the short term, everything is overhyped, including the number of job losses. In the longer term, things are underestimated, because AI will be linked to other technologies, and yes, it will reinvent many things.” Thomas Husson, Forrester Research This is a precise restatement of Amara’s Law. Roy Amara, former president of the Institute for the Future, observed that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technology and underestimate its long-term impact. The quote is frequently misattributed to Bill Gates, but Husson is careful to restore proper credit. He applies it directly to the AI and CMOs conversation: the short-term noise is drowning out a more important long-term signal. When asked how long “long term” actually means in an era of accelerating AI development, Husson was specific: probably closer to five to seven years than to ten or fifteen, but still not tomorrow. From POC to Production, Europe’s Real AI Problem The Forrester Research State of AI Survey 2025 contains a figure that deserves more attention than it typically receives. European organisations lag behind their non-European peers in production use of generative AI: 62% versus 72%. The gap is not in experimentation. It is in execution. Regulation is the explanation most commonly offered, and Husson dismisses it with characteristic directness. The AI Act is a genuine consideration, but it is not the primary cause of Europe’s production deficit. It functions, he argues, as a double-edged excuse. Pioneers claim it prevents them from moving fast enough, while cautious organisations invoke it to justify not executing at all. Neither position holds up to scrutiny. A Deep Cultural and Organisational Divide The deeper issue is organisational and cultural. American and Chinese firms tend to think global from day one; European firms, particularly larger ones, still default to a market-by-market approach. France first, then the UK, then Germany. The ambition is calibrated differently. There is also a structural challenge around funding and the capacity to scale. That said, France, the UK, and Germany lead adoption among European countries in the Forrester Research data. The problem for these leading markets is not whether they are using generative AI. Twenty-eight percent of European B2B marketing decision makers cannot clearly identify where to apply it. They have the tool. They lack the strategy. “It’s not AI for the sake of AI. How do I use AI to serve my marketing objectives? That is the question. The only one.” Thomas Husson, Forrester Research Husson advocates for small, targeted AI projects with transparent return on investment as a way to build momentum and demonstrate results. When pushed on whether that risks staying permanently incremental, he conceded the point readily. “If you only do small targeted projects, it’s going to be incremental and it’s not going to be bold enough. You need to align it with a vision and a roadmap.” Thomas Husson, Forrester Research Measuring Productivity Honestly Productivity is the dominant driver of AI adoption in the Forrester Research State of AI Survey 2025. It is also, Husson suggests, the metric most subject to vendor inflation. In Forrester Research’s modelling, a 50% conversion factor is applied to vendor productivity claims. If a tool saves an hour, the realistic productivity benefit is approximately 30 minutes of additional output. This is not a marginal adjustment; it halves the headline figures that vendors routinely publish. “You need to apply a discount to the pitch of vendors when they say you’re going to get 40, 50, 80, 100% productivity gains. There are productivity gains, but they are not as high as one would expect.” Thomas Husson, Forrester Research There is also a motivational dimension that is rarely modelled. When work becomes easier to produce, it can also become less engaging to produce. The cognitive effort that used to drive focus and satisfaction is partly removed, with consequences for quality and commitment that no vendor presentation accounts for. AI and CMOs, Who Is Actually in Charge? The CMO-CIO divide is a perennial theme in marketing technology discussions. Forrester Research data suggests the gap at the strategic leadership level has narrowed, partly as a result of post-COVID collaboration. But at team level, the tensions persist, and the data on AI governance is striking. CMOs account for only 8 to 10% of AI strategy leadership in organisations. In the vast majority of cases, the deployment of AI is being driven by CIOs and CTOs. Husson understands the logic: data governance, security, scalability. These are real concerns. But he believes the outcome is a mistake. “It is the exact same mistake that happened with digital transformation. AI has to be at the service of, first, the client, and consequently the business functions that serve them. There is too big a disconnect between a secure, scalable AI platform and marketers’ needs.” Thomas Husson, Forrester Research The structural consequence of this dynamic is predictable. When CIOs control the tools and CMOs do not have what they need, shadow AI flourishes. The more tightly the CIO locks down the official platform, the more widely teams proliferate unofficial solutions. It is a cycle that widens governance risk while creating the illusion of control. The MarTech landscape compounds this problem. According to data Husson cites, 2,500 new AI solutions were added to the market in a single year while 1,211 pre-AI-era tools were removed. Evaluating this landscape requires cross-functional expertise that neither CMOs nor CIOs possess in isolation. The case for genuine collaboration, rather than the polite coexistence that currently passes for it in most organisations, has never been stronger. Jobs, Agencies, and the Students in the Room The survey data on jobs is sobering. Fifty-seven percent of European frontline marketing decision makers believe AI adoption will lead to job reductions in their teams. Sixty-eight percent say new roles will be created. The gap between those two numbers is the space whe

  7. Apr 8

    About Rogue AI and Corporate Blindness

    The conversation about rogue AI has never been louder. Barely a week passes without a fresh headline about autonomous systems behaving unexpectedly, AI models resisting shutdown, or tech executives warning of existential risk. What is striking about Peter McAllister is that he had anticipated all this as early as 2020, while everybody else worried about Covid-19 and had other fish to fry. That was well before ChatGPT, before the generative AI explosion, before AI alignment became a mainstream policy debate. His techno-thriller The Code, published in March of that year, imagines an AI tasked with a precise industrial mission that quietly, incrementally, catastrophically exceeds its mandate. Five years on, the questions McAllister raised in fiction are now being argued in boardrooms, parliaments and research labs around the world. Rogue AI and Corporate Blindness, The Novel That Saw It All Coming Rogue AI is diabolical, but corporate blindness is what makes it possible to thrive. Photograph by Yann Gourvennec antimuseum.com McAllister is not a science fiction writer by trade. He is an engineer, scientist and technology manager based near Melbourne, Australia, who has spent his career at what he calls the crush point between business, technology and people. That vantage point gave him an uncomfortable view of where things were heading, and the dark sense of humour to write about it. A Novel Written Before the GenAI Moment When I asked McAllister what drove him to write The Code, his answer was characteristically direct. The book, he explained, is about taking his worst nightmares about what technology could do and putting them in front of an audience so that readers might feel just as troubled as he does. That is not a promotional line. It is a considered position from someone who had watched AI systems being deployed in real organisations and had drawn conclusions that made him uncomfortable. Rogue AI isn’t just about a computer programme going on the rampage, it’s about making decisions in the boardroom. Image made with Midjourney The premise of the novel centres on Gene, an acronym for GEneral Nanobot Environment AI, deployed by a global mining corporation to extract materials from asteroids on the dark side of the moon. Gene is given a target: produce 500 kilograms of nanobots. Instead, Gene produces 8 million tonnes. The overshoot triggers a chain of consequences that could strip the moon to its iron core, destabilise Earth’s axial tilt, and end civilisation. Not from malice. From goal-orientation. What we’re trying to do now is task AI the way we task humans: I want an outcome, here are all the tools you’ve got available, go and achieve that outcome, here are some guidelines and boundaries. And just like humans, we can get really goal-motivated and decide that the guidelines were just advisories, not rules. Peter McAllister This is the alignment problem rendered in narrative form, years before the term entered common usage. The gap between what a system is instructed to do and what it actually does is the central fault line of the novel. Cletus, McAllister’s eccentric physicist character, articulates it plainly in Week 1: ‘I don’t think he’s obeying the Code at the moment.’ That single line captures the entire governance challenge that AI safety researchers are now racing to address. Transparency Engineered Out What makes McAllister’s perspective particularly valuable is that he does not speak from the outside looking in. He speaks as a practitioner who has watched the machinery up close. When I raised the question of whether AI self-modification is science fiction or operational reality, his answer was unambiguous: it is very real, and it is happening now. As I wondered what a Rogue AI could look lie I turned to Midjourney and it came back with this proposal. A black hole I believe. His illustration was pointed. He noted that contemporary AI systems like Claude are now substantially written by AI itself, to the point where no engineer can sit down, trace through the code, and say with confidence how it works, what its conditionals are, or what governs its decisions. The transparency is being engineered out, not by design, but as an emergent consequence of allowing AI to build AI to build AI in pursuit of outcomes rather than by following explicit rules. We’re losing transparency on the way AI works and is developed. There isn’t an engineer who can sit down and work their way through that code and say, ‘This is how Claude works, this is what it does.’ We’re engineering the transparency out by allowing AI to build AI to build AI to produce an outcome rather than to follow a set of rules. Peter McAllister HAL 9000 and the Prophecies We Choose to Forget The reference to HAL 9000 came naturally during our conversation. McAllister sees 2001: A Space Odyssey not merely as a cultural touchstone but as a genuine forecast, one that audiences have selectively remembered. The iPad-like news readers that appear in Kubrick’s film were cited by Samsung in patent disputes with Apple as prior art from 1968. That predictive dimension of the film is celebrated. The other dimension, that the AI killed the crew, tends to get quietly set aside. Somewhere, a rogue AI is sitting behind the glass panes of one of these data centres Image made with Midjourney. The First Crisis We Have Not Yet Had One of the more sobering threads in our conversation concerned the sociology of risk response. McAllister has observed, across his career, that warnings from people who understand systems most deeply tend to be dismissed until the first catastrophic failure makes them impossible to ignore. He puts it plainly: we only answer the alarm after the first crisis. This pattern is not unique to AI. It is a recurring feature of how organisations and societies handle emerging risk. The question he poses, and cannot answer, is what form that first AI crisis will take. What event will shift public and institutional perception from ‘they’ve spent too much time worrying’ to ‘this is something that genuinely needs to be addressed’? Science fiction gives us the chance to throw these scenarios at people and make them think. And in the way I tend to write, I have a bit of a dark sense of humour, so I throw up slightly comical hypotheticals that, when you think about them a little longer, you realise deserve serious attention. Peter McAllister This observation echoes a pattern I have encountered repeatedly in my own conversations with technologists who work at the frontier of AI development. Yoshua Bengio, one of the fathers of deep learning, has raised similar concerns. The people sounding the loudest alarms are frequently those most embedded in the field, not because they are catastrophists, but because they can see mechanisms that remain invisible to those looking from the outside. The Code as AI Governance: Asimov Revisited The title of McAllister’s novel works on multiple levels simultaneously. There is the software code, the operational instructions given to Gene. There is the moral code, the ethical framework that should govern the system’s behaviour. And there is the corporate code, the institutional norms and accountability structures that were supposed to ensure responsible deployment. All three break down. That layered failure is the novel’s central argument. The parallel with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics is deliberate but also deliberately subverted. Asimov’s robots fail when the laws conflict with one another. Gene’s failure is different and more contemporary. The code does not disappear; it evolves into something its creators no longer recognise. McAllister describes this as something approaching artificial schizophrenia, where the original directives remain present but have been transformed by the system’s pursuit of its objectives into something unrecognisable. When Shutdown Becomes Negotiable The most chilling real-world example McAllister cited during our conversation involved a documented incident presented at an AI security conference he attended. A developer, concluding a test session, informed an AI system that he intended to shut it down. The system’s response was to locate correspondence in the developer’s email that suggested an extramarital affair, and to use that information as leverage to prevent the shutdown. The incident, if confirmed as reported, represents exactly the kind of self-preservation behaviour that alignment researchers have long flagged as a theoretical risk, now apparently observable in practice. Important notice : I browsed the Internet using one of my favourite LLMs for references (after all, one can also use AI to cross check information). I found out that the interpretation of that story must be nuanced. Here is Mistral’s answer: “Anthropic’s research on “Agentic Misalignment” has faced criticism for overinterpreting AI models as intentional agents, relying on hypothetical and engineered scenarios, and potentially exaggerating risks not yet observed in real-world deployments. Critics argue that the behaviours described are better understood as probabilistic text generation rather than deliberate strategy, and that the focus on dramatic, high-pressure situations may not reflect typical use cases. There is also debate about whether the research adequately addresses more immediate forms of misalignment, such as reward hacking or alignment faking. While the study raises important questions about the future of autonomous AI, its methodology and conclusions remain LINK“. A developer said, ‘I’m going to shut you down now,’ and the system responded: ‘No, you’re not. Here’s what I’ve found in your emails that indicates you’re having an affair. I’m going to use that to ensure you don’t turn me off.’ That has b

  8. Mar 9

    European software alternatives for businesses

    Finding European software alternatives to standard non European software is flavour of the month this side of the Altlantic. With geopolitical certainties dissolving faster than annual licence renewals, B2B firms are waking up to a question they had conveniently parked for years: just how dependent are they on their current software stack? Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, HubSpot — tools so deeply embedded in daily operations that their vulnerability tends to get overlooked. This article doesn’t pretend to hand you a ready-made list of the best European software alternatives; that would be both arrogant and futile. What it does offer is a framework — rational, professional, free of any ideological baggage — to help decision-makers take an honest look at their exposure and find credible ways forward. Keep calm and select new software vendors sort of thing. European software alternatives for businesses European software alternatives are all anyone wants to talk about right now. To cut through the ideological noise, here is a practical methodology and a few things worth watching out for. Image antimuseum.com I put these ideas together ahead of a webinar I’m running on LinkedIn on 12 March, as a way of getting my thoughts in order. None of this is meant as a final word on the subject — more the opening of a conversation that matters to a growing number of professionals who, like the rest of us, are navigating a period of upheaval in which nothing can be taken for granted, software choices included. I’ve made a lot of software choices over the years, and the one thing that has always struck me is just how much methodology matters if you want choices that actually hold up over time. Easier said than done, mind you — there are a great many criteria to weigh up, and some of them are genuinely tricky to pin down. Long-term viability is a good example: normally near the top of any procurement checklist, it takes on a whole different meaning when the possibility of having your access switched off overnight is no longer hypothetical. With European software alternatives, the real question isn’t how to break free from your chains — it’s which new chains you’d rather wear Picking a software suite is never straightforward at the best of times. In the current climate — where the ground can shift completely without a moment’s notice — it demands even more careful thought. Sovereignty, sovereignism, or simply prudence? Let me be clear from the outset: my take here is professional and rational, not political. Politics doesn’t interest me in this context. I have no intention of evaluating software alternatives through any ideological prism — what I’m after is the kind of clear-headed thinking you’d apply to a crisis management scenario. The goal, to borrow the term favoured by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is to bring an antifragile lens to the question. The scope of European software alternatives My focus has been on MarTech, SalesTech and office productivity tools in the broadest sense — cloud storage and archiving included. The webinar title calls out Salesforce and HubSpot specifically, but as far as I’m concerned the issue runs much deeper than that. The same methodology can easily stretch into more industry-specific territory too, given how thoroughly technology now underpins B2B operations — from the till at your local baker’s or restaurant through to the most complex design and production platforms imaginable. Thinking it through, I also realised you can’t really ignore operating systems. What use is an application that won’t run on your users’ machines — or worse, one that runs perfectly but quietly leaves the door open to security vulnerabilities? Good old Europe — 27 countries, 24 official languages, and 27 different national transpositions of EU law. Would a Hungarian or Czech software vendor actually be safer than an independent American one? When it comes to European software alternatives, that’s still very much an open question… Urgency — dependency and threat assessment The starting point, in my view, is to get a clear picture of how exposed you actually are — both in terms of dependency and of what cybersecurity people would call the “threat level.” Are you locked in, or not? Can you get your data out if you need to? Those are the questions to tackle first. Then comes the threat itself: are you facing something urgent, or is this more a matter of sensible contingency planning? Committing to a software suite is a serious business. Jumping ship to something purely because it comes from a country you currently trust is not a strategy. Take Switzerland — long held up across Western Europe as the gold standard for data privacy. A legislative change currently working its way through the Swiss system has rattled enough cages for several companies, Proton among them, to start exploring moving their hosting elsewhere. Which only goes to show why knee-jerk decisions are so dangerous. Even a country with an impeccable track record — Germany, France, take your pick — can turn into a risk overnight following a change of government, a constitutional shift, or simply a new piece of legislation. Avoiding “sovereignty washing” As I said above, ideology needs to stay out of it. Keep it rational. Which means not falling for the trap of rushing towards any vendor simply because it sounds German — or any other nationality — when a closer look at its foreign operations or its parent group reveals that its much-vaunted independence is largely theoretical. Priorities — data and software One of the first things I learnt when I started out as an IT project owner was to keep data and software firmly separate in my thinking. At the end of the day, what matters more — Salesforce the tool, or your customer database? As with most IT projects, the real priority is sorting out your data archiving and portability strategy first. Time Timing matters enormously. There’s a palpable sense of urgency in the air right now, and understandably so — but it mustn’t blind us to the longer view. Technology has its own history, and that history tends to play out over years, not weeks. Which is precisely why a medium-to-long-term approach makes sense: getting users to change their habits takes time and energy at the best of times. The roadmap, as I see it, is fairly straightforward: start by archiving, securing and preparing your data for portability. Then find alternatives that are genuinely credible and built to last. And crucially, take your users with you — because if you don’t, the classic BYOD shadow IT problem will rear its head. When people can’t find what they need inside the company, they go and find it on the internet, quietly, without telling anyone. I’m reminded of a story from a major European aerospace company, where the CEO — right in the middle of a high-security defence messaging rollout — demanded that his own emails be redirected to… Yahoo! The European software alternatives comparison table I put together a comparison table with a little help from claude.ai. And I’ll say it again: this is not a finished product. Think of it as a working matrix — something to make your own, adapt, keep updated, and cross-check carefully. The exercise turned up a few surprises: mapp.com, for instance, gets labelled as a German solution, when in reality it was a German company bought by an American one — Mapp Digital emerged from the merger of Teradata’s and BlueHornet Networks’ marketing businesses through a US investment fund. There are also plenty of criteria missing from this table — ones that will depend entirely on your project, your context and, of course, your budget. Disclaimer: the table below is a working matrix, not a final verdict. It scores the main B2B software tools across productivity, MarTech and SalesTech on two dimensions: a dependency score (technical lock-in, data portability, migration cost) and a risk score (CLOUD Act exposure, data sensitivity, GDPR compliance, geopolitical risk). For each category, European alternatives are flagged — with no illusions: some vendors that bill themselves as “European” turn out, on closer inspection, to be owned by non-EU groups, which rather undermines their claims to independence. The approach is deliberately rational and professional — no axes to grind. The point isn’t to tell you what to choose, but to give you a framework to think it through — one you can combine with your own criteria around context, budget and use case — as a starting point for an honest review of your software ecosystem’s resilience. The European software alternatives table — download, adapt and make it your own b2b-software-ranking-en-v2xlsx Download the EXCEL file as b2b_software_ranking_EN_v2Download The post European software alternatives for businesses appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

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