I'm just off a month of travel and customer meetings. Same pattern everywhere. AI capability doesn't improve gradually, and work doesn't move to AI gradually. A threshold gets crossed, and the work switches in weeks. Coding was the first one.
Stop paying $20 per month for Claude Code. McDonald’s AI bot is FREE.
Someone asked a McDonald’s support assistant how to reverse a linked list in Python.
It answered correctly. Actual code.
We’re definitely at peak AI now.
The events of the last 6 months in technology are arguable amongst the most important in human history
The tools now increasingly exist for recursive self improvement of models & agents
We are likely in very early lift off & exponential
Largely unnoticed outside of tech
With Codex at 5 million users, they’ve hit about 0.6% of ChatGPT’s roughly 900 million users. We are so, so early. The vast majority of people have no idea what’s already possible to do with AI, while a tiny minority is automating their personal lives and work.
OpenAI and Anthropic are effectively telling the market they can't solve every problem with a generic AI coworker.
You don't pour billions into massive forward-deployed joint ventures if you think the next model release is going to take care of it.
In the cloud supercycle, semis led and software followed (and you didn't need Qualcomm or ARM to tell you the value was migrating up the stack).
In AI, the infra layer itself is telling us the application layer is a separate, massive opportunity they can't fully capture.
a16z's @joeschmidtiv on why the app layer isn't dead: https://t.co/84QN5Mj9T3
A few more notes from Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic's Head of Industries, at SaaStr AI 2026:
- 87% of AEs hit their number on shadow targets
Anthropic doesn't run hard quotas. They run shadow targets, then pay people like they hit hard quotas. The accountability lives in the workflow design, not in the comp plan structure.
- Skills are summoned with / shortcuts from inside the tool where work is already happening. Reps don't context-switch to a "Claude app."
They type /call prep, /morning brief, /follow up, /competitive intel, or /create asset from Slack, Salesforce, or wherever they are. The interface is invisible.
- The 24-hour customer follow-up SLA is enforced by Skill, not by manager
The customer follow-up Skill drafts the responses, drops them in your email, and reminds you in tomorrow's morning brief if you didn't ship them. Accountability moved from 1:1s to the workflow itself.
- "AI slop" is the failure mode Anthropic actively engineers against
Skills are designed to know the brand, the policy, the customer context. Reps are explicitly trained to never ship AI slop to customers. Brand integrity is a first-class design concern in the Skills layer, not an afterthought.
👉Eleanor's line worth tattooing: "Sales leaders are becoming systems thinkers over deal strategists." The job changed. You're now designing the system that produces deal velocity, not the deal itself. The leaders who can't think in this mode will struggle to keep up.