Welcome to The Briefing. Once a week we will try to do one useful thing: cut through the noise around AI and technology and tell you what actually changed and what it means for the people who build and buy software. No hype, no doom, no filler.
We are starting with the phrase you cannot escape right now: "AI-native". It is on every landing page and in every pitch. Most of the time it means a feature was added. Sometimes it means the product genuinely works in a way it could not before. Telling the two apart is worth learning.
A three-question test
- Does it fail differently? Real AI capability changes how a product behaves when it is wrong, not just when it is right. If the failure modes are identical to last year, so is the product.
- Would it break without the model? If you could switch the AI off and barely notice, the AI is decoration.
- Who carries the risk? Genuine products own their mistakes with review, limits and evidence. Reskins quietly hand the risk to you.
The question is never whether there is AI in the box. It is whether the box does something it could not do before.
Where we're headed
Each week we will take one shift like this and make it legible: what happened, why it matters, and what a team that ships software should actually do about it. If that sounds useful, we would be glad to have you along.
Worth your time
- Our fourth-quarter reading list, for the books behind a lot of this thinking.
- Subscribe to The Briefing if someone forwarded you this.