I Haven’t Felt This Kind of Urgency in Years
Hi all 👋
Here's a reflection from the last couple of weeks: this has been one of the most encouraging summers for growth and new business I've seen in a while. I had a call with a company out of Toronto, and another with one in Edmonton, and it's the same story across the country: there's a real sense of urgency.
Normally summer slows down, and everything gets pushed to "we'll get to it in September." Not this year. People seem to understand they need to move now.
Growth like that feels great. But it only pays off if you can actually see what's happening underneath it instead of just riding the wave.
What's Happening in AI
Sam Altman just admitted AI spend has become "a huge issue" for companies that were fine with it six months ago. Cue the usual split online: half call it a bubble, half call it the normal shift from experimenting to optimizing.
Here's what I'm actually seeing day-to-day: most teams don't know how to get value out of what they're already running. One analyst put a number on it: 80% of the value comes from 20% of the tokens spent. The rest is noise nobody's tracking.
That's not a bubble popping to me. That looks more like the bill for skipping the hard part: figuring out where this stuff actually helps, and watching whether it's working, instead of turning it on and hoping.
Spending was never really the problem. Not knowing where it's going is.
This Week's Case Study
Public transport runs on guesswork. Thousands of people move through stations and bus stops every hour. Until recently, nobody could say how many, or where, at any given moment. Fine on a normal day. A real problem the moment there's an incident or a surge.
We built an edge computing system that counts pedestrians in real time: machine vision, infrared for low light, live dashboards.
The result: real-time pedestrian data at 15+ locations. Teams could finally see what was happening across the network, making it easier to plan routine work, respond to incidents, and manage passenger movements.
→ Read the full case study.
A Useful Resource
One question I get quite often is: "How do I know if a process is actually worth automating?"
That's why we built the Administrative Tax Calculator. It shows you how much you're paying premium salaries to do low-value work, chasing updates, manual entry, bridging gaps between systems. Before you hire another person, see how much you're already losing to broken processes.
That's it for this week.
— Robbie
Get the latest tech news in your inbox
Hi all 👋
Here's a reflection from the last couple of weeks: this has been one of the most encouraging summers for growth and new business I've seen in a while. I had a call with a company out of Toronto, and another with one in Edmonton, and it's the same story across the country: there's a real sense of urgency.
Normally summer slows down, and everything gets pushed to "we'll get to it in September." Not this year. People seem to understand they need to move now.
Growth like that feels great. But it only pays off if you can actually see what's happening underneath it instead of just riding the wave.
What's Happening in AI
Sam Altman just admitted AI spend has become "a huge issue" for companies that were fine with it six months ago. Cue the usual split online: half call it a bubble, half call it the normal shift from experimenting to optimizing.
Here's what I'm actually seeing day-to-day: most teams don't know how to get value out of what they're already running. One analyst put a number on it: 80% of the value comes from 20% of the tokens spent. The rest is noise nobody's tracking.
That's not a bubble popping to me. That looks more like the bill for skipping the hard part: figuring out where this stuff actually helps, and watching whether it's working, instead of turning it on and hoping.
Spending was never really the problem. Not knowing where it's going is.
This Week's Case Study
Public transport runs on guesswork. Thousands of people move through stations and bus stops every hour. Until recently, nobody could say how many, or where, at any given moment. Fine on a normal day. A real problem the moment there's an incident or a surge.
We built an edge computing system that counts pedestrians in real time: machine vision, infrared for low light, live dashboards.
The result: real-time pedestrian data at 15+ locations. Teams could finally see what was happening across the network, making it easier to plan routine work, respond to incidents, and manage passenger movements.
→ Read the full case study.
A Useful Resource
One question I get quite often is: "How do I know if a process is actually worth automating?"
That's why we built the Administrative Tax Calculator. It shows you how much you're paying premium salaries to do low-value work, chasing updates, manual entry, bridging gaps between systems. Before you hire another person, see how much you're already losing to broken processes.
That's it for this week.
— Robbie
