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There Is No AI Bubble — Just a Delusion Bubble
I just got back from a data conference in Chicago, and I left honestly stunned. Not by the technology — by the people. Panel after panel, supposedly “leaders” in data science, logistics, and analytics — all of them dancing around the same idea: “We’re being cautious about AI.” Cautious. That word kept coming up like a reflex, a corporate mantra. “We’re waiting for regulation.” “We’re concerned about bias.” “We don’t trust the outputs.” It was like watching a room full of data

Rich Washburn
15 hours ago4 min read


The Most Dangerous Person in the Room Now Runs on Operational Power
It used to be the one with the title. The corner office. The authority. Not anymore. Today, the most dangerous person in any room isn’t chasing applause, approval, or perception. They’re the one sitting quietly in the back — calm, confident, and completely underestimated — because they’re running a system in their head no one else can see. That’s operational power — and it’s rewriting everything you think you know about hierarchy, influence, and control. The Old Game: Power T

Rich Washburn
5 days ago4 min read


From Solder Smoke to Silicon Clouds
This all started with a phone call. An old friend of mine, Boris — a fellow IBM alum and one of the few people who still remembers what IRQ conflicts felt like — called me out of the blue a few weeks back. He had a question about AI. Simple enough. But if you’ve ever talked to two lifelong tech guys, you know how that goes. Five minutes in, we were no longer talking about AI — we were talking about everything that led to AI . We fell straight down the nostalgia rabbit hole: A

Rich Washburn
Nov 87 min read


Skills-as-a-Service: The Next Great Gold Rush (And Why You Can’t Sit This One Out)
Let’s start with a truth that’s equal parts uncomfortable and undeniable: If you’ve got deep expertise in anything — consulting, medicine, engineering, marketing, welding, whatever — you’re training your replacement right now. And no, not the human one. The AI one. Projects like Argentum (Bloomberg’s scoop about hundreds of ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants training AI to do entry-level consulting) and Project Mercury (ex-bankers teaching financial modeling to models)

Rich Washburn
Nov 63 min read


Process Mapping in the Age of AI: Why Skipping It Now Is Inexcusable
Let’s be honest—process mapping used to suck. It was the equivalent of eating your vegetables before you could touch the steak. Necessary? Sure. Fun? Not remotely. Whether it was defining database structures before writing a single line of code, or sketching out user journeys before building an app, process mapping always felt like the preamble to the “real” work. But here’s the thing: it was always the most important part. If you've ever written a business plan, mapped out a

Rich Washburn
Oct 273 min read


The Inevitable Obsolescence of Consulting Firms
Let me tell you something strange: We don’t know how to build the Space Shuttle anymore. NASA had the plans. The blueprints. The specs.What they didn’t have was the team —the network of minds, habits, and shared mental models that made it all work. That knowledge didn’t live in one document. It lived in hallway conversations. In hand gestures. In intuition built through repetition and failure. When those engineers retired or moved on, the Shuttle didn’t just become obsolete.

Rich Washburn
Oct 263 min read


Adapt or Die: The Brutal Truth About the Modern Tech Divide
There’s a hard truth nobody wants to say out loud: if you’re not adapting to modern tools — if you’re not using AI, automating your workflows, or streamlining with the tech that’s already freely available — you are the problem. Not the market. Not the system. You. We’re living in an adapt or die era. Technology isn’t creeping forward anymore — it’s sprinting. AI has hit escape velocity. What used to take teams of people and days of work can now be done in minutes. For free.

Rich Washburn
Oct 242 min read


Macrohard: The Schrödinger’s Startup That Might Build the Future (or Be the Ultimate Musk Troll)
If you’ve been on the internet in the last 48 hours, you’ve probably seen that photo — a massive white-roofed facility in Memphis with MACROHARD painted across it in letters so huge you can literally see them from space. And of course, it came straight from Elon Musk’s X account. Classic Elon: half-joke, half-omen, and somehow both at the same time. This is the same man who named a car line “S3XY,” sent a sports car into orbit, and made flamethrowers a consumer product. So

Rich Washburn
Oct 223 min read


The Beginning of the End of the Cloud Empire
Let’s be clear: the cloud isn’t dying. But the age of unquestioned cloud supremacy — that decade-long reign where every ounce of intelligence had to pass through someone else’s API — that’s beginning to crack. We’re entering the post-imperial phase of compute. The Great Inversion For twenty years, the cloud has been the empire of cognition: centralized, industrial, and rented by the teraflop. It made sense. The economics of scale were brutal. Training frontier models requir

Rich Washburn
Oct 202 min read


The Mirror of Us: Welcome to the Era of Intent
There’s a strange kind of silence that comes right before a revolution—not the loud kind filled with slogans and sirens, but the quiet...

Rich Washburn
Oct 64 min read


The AI Boom Heard ’Round the World
I keep coming back to this: my whole life, I’ve heard people throw around the term “paradigm shift.” The internet was a paradigm shift....

Rich Washburn
Sep 54 min read


Rocket Ships Without Pilots Are Missiles: The AI Literacy Crisis
In Q2 of 2025, the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants spent over $100 billion on AI infrastructure . One quarter. Three months. That’s $1.1...

Rich Washburn
Aug 254 min read


Sir Jony Ive Is Joining OpenAI: Is the iPhone of AI Devices Coming Next?
Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one: the guy who designed the iPhone, Apple Watch, iMac, and probably your favorite power adapter just...

Rich Washburn
May 233 min read


Welcome to LifeOS: How a Generation is Reprogramming Reality with AI
In the span of 24 hours, I had two conversations that made this whole thing snap into focus. First: a younger guy—maybe ten years my...

Rich Washburn
May 234 min read


Distributed Cognition: The Real AI Revolution You’re Missing
Let me tell you a weird story: we don’t know how to build the Space Shuttle anymore. Seriously. NASA built the Shuttle with some of the...

Rich Washburn
Apr 123 min read


Welcome to the Great AI Efficiency Era: Why Your Skills Matter More Than Ever
It’s the best of times—and the worst of times. AI is accelerating faster than ever. Models are getting better, smarter, and cheaper by...

Rich Washburn
Apr 123 min read


From If-Then to Figure It Out: The Rise of Autonomous, Collaborative AI
Almost two years ago, I wrote about a future where our operating systems wouldn’t just sit there waiting for input—they’d morph . They’d...

Rich Washburn
Apr 103 min read


NVIDIA’s Rubin Ultra & Feynman Architectures: A Defining Moment for the Future of AI Infrastructure
Let’s set the scene: you're not just building an AI system anymore—you're designing infrastructure for a new kind of intelligence...

Rich Washburn
Apr 34 min read


MANUS AI: China’s AGI Contender That’s Forcing OpenAI to Look Over Its Shoulder
Let’s get right to it: Manus AI is the latest agent out of China that’s stirring up serious noise in the AI world. Launched in March...

Rich Washburn
Mar 214 min read


From Busy Work to Breakthroughs: How Small AI Wins Sparked a Culture Shift at XYZ Insurance
In today’s workplace, it’s often the hidden inefficiencies—what I like to call “loose screws”—that quietly eat away at productivity....

Rich Washburn
Jan 244 min read
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