The 80/20 Blind Spot
Salesforce bets the farm on AI, survey bots poison research, coding agents demand new skills, and Ford can’t find mechanics who can do math – welcome to the future nobody planned for
Dear Friend,
“Inside Salesforce’s Big Bet on AI Agents” – My dear friend and colleague Jeffrey Rogers shared this article a few weeks ago here in the radical Briefing. Aside from the craziness that seems to be Salesforce these days, the following quote stood out to me:
It’s not that Salesforce is necessarily behind competitors when it comes to agents, says Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. It’s that the company “bet the farm” on an early and unproven technology and neglected their core business. “Salesforce became so focused on their AI product while the rest of their business … was decelerating very sharply,” he says. “They were paying too much attention to this new thing and not enough to what got them there.” A Salesforce spokesperson said Agentforce is part of its core business and “enhances every Salesforce application by making it agentic.”
A good reminder to follow Nassim Taleb’s advice in his seminal book Antifragile: Invest 80+% of your resources into extreme safety, and less than 20% into extreme risk – which also means you have to actually pay attention to the 80% of your portfolio which generates steady cash flow and allows you to hedge your bets.
P.S. Our friends from EY have just released the first part of their 2026 Megatrends report. Take a look!
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
Can’t Trust That Survey Anymore. Who knows, maybe our inaugural radical Pulse survey (you can still participate!) will be our last? Researchers at Dartmouth just published a paper demonstrating an AI-based tool that defeats all safeguards in online surveys to suss out bots – and thus can flood online surveys (the backbone of many research efforts) with false data.
“We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people,” Westwood said in a press release. “With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem.”
As my statistics professor quipped some 30 years ago: “Never trust a statistic which you haven’t made up yourself.” Apparently, that sentence is based on a German proverb: “Traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast.” Who knew?!
↗ A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On
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The Agent Will See You Now. Take it with a grain of salt, as the study comes from one of the leading AI coding tools, Cursor, but the insights paint a compelling picture for the use of AI coding agents:
Autonomous systems are driving a 39% increase in organizational software output while fundamentally shifting the cognitive nature of programming. Contrary to previous trends where junior workers benefited most from AI assistance, this study reveals that experienced developers have significantly higher acceptance rates for agent-generated code, primarily because they leverage the technology for higher-order “semantic” tasks, such as planning workflows and explaining architecture, rather than just syntactic implementation.
The research highlights a transition from manual coding to a new paradigm of instruction and evaluation, noting that agents not only empower non-engineering roles (like designers and product managers) to contribute code but also disproportionately reward workers who possess the clarity and abstraction skills necessary to effectively direct AI behavior.
That last point warrants repeating: You will need (new) skills to effectively direct AI behavior, which begets the question: Where are we teaching these skills? Certainly not in schools and colleges these days…
↗ AI Agents, Productivity, and Higher-Order Thinking: Early Evidence From Software Development
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The Jobs AI (And Robotics) Won’t Replace Anytime Soon. Despite car manufacturer Ford offering mechanics a whopping $120,000 per year, the company has thousands of open jobs it can’t fill. And it’s not just Ford – talk to any company which relies on skilled labor, and you will hear the same story. The culprit: education. And not the type of education you might think of, as in: lack of trade schools, etc. No, it’s much simpler: kids can’t do math anymore!
“Workers who struggle to read grade-level text cannot read complicated technical manuals or diagnostic instructions. If they can’t handle middle-school math they can’t program high-tech machines or robotics, or operate the automated equipment found in modern factories and repair shops.” […] America has good jobs, writes Pondiscio. “It lacks a K–12 system capable of preparing students to seize them.”
↗ Ford can’t find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade
What We Are Reading
🚀 AI Means You Don’t Need a Minimum Viable Product The MVP is dead. While you’re debating features, AI has already built, launched, and scaled the real thing. @Jane
🤦 Founder Admits His “AI Transcription” Startup Was Just Him Joining People’s Meetings and Taking Notes by Hand Emphasizing the human in the “human in the loop,” these founders kicked off their AI notetaking app by quietly sitting in meetings and sending notes 10 minutes later. @Mafe
🏁 Why AI Research Labs Became the New High-Stakes Global Arms Race AI research labs are quickly becoming geopolitical power centers. The real competitive advantage now lies in how nations (and companies!) build the ecosystems around them, not just the models inside them. @Kacee
🪞 Why Nietzsche Matters in the Age of Artificial Intelligence While you’re debating whether AI destroys meaning, Nietzsche already diagnosed the crisis – your job, relationships, and moral frameworks aren’t being disrupted; they’re revealing you never built values from within. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🪑 Public Service Announcement: Sitting too much increases your risk of death, especially in middle and lower income countries
👨🏼💻 What was old will be new again: Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back
⏰ Let an AI coding assistant build a world clock and marvel at how bad the results are: AI World Clocks
⌨️ Nerd-Fun: A 1961 Relay Computer Running in Your Browser
🏦 ‘Buy now, pay later’ is expanding fast, and that should worry everyone
🤑 How to not get kidnapped for your Bitcoin
🧸 Jeez… AI-Powered Teddy Bear Caught Talking About Sexual Fetishes and Instructing Kids How to Find Knives
Pascal just finished revamping the radical website. It’s nice and shiny.