Do mention the war!
War – or the threat of war – is always with us, sadly, and it’s the duty of every nation to support the men and women who serve. Technological innovations have always been fuelled in large part by military requirements and today AI is playing its part in supporting the Armed Services around the world, as Stuart and Katy explored in a triptych of articles under the banner of Don’t mention the war!
Stuart opens up with a look at how the competitive positioning among traditional defense contractors, Big Tech, and AI newcomers to tap into the booming market in How traditional defense firms, Big Tech and frontier newcomers alike are fighting to service the new AI military complex. He quotes the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:
The military AI industry is not only diverse but also fast-changing. Military AI is big business, and many (new and old) firms want a slice of the pie. Consequently, the industrial landscape has evolved significantly over the last few years. New commercial relationships are being formed as new actors enter the ecosystem and more traditional arms companies, eager to secure a share of this lucrative market, acquire AI start-ups and develop AI-enabled products.
Katy meanwhile looked at the appetite among Aerospace and Defense (A&D) clients for augmented engineering, citing new Capgemini studies in Capgemini research reveals the good, the bad and the ugly of Aerospace and Defense AI adoption, which finds that only six percent of A&D firms are achieving digital continuity despite organizations having been talking about the need for this for a decade or more.
Finally Stuart looked at the first year successes of Salesforce’s dedicated Missionforce agnetic AI platform in How Salesforce’s new IL5 accreditation makes servicing the tech-hungry AI military complex Missionforce possible, quoting the firm’s CEO of Government Cloud, Kendall Collins:
The goal is simple: to help our warfighters and the organizations that support them operate smarter, faster, and more efficiently. There’s never been a more important time to serve those who serve.
Indeed – we thank them for their service.
Tokenomics ongoing
The list of tokenomics-inspired articles continues to add up.
In Tokenomics – a Danish perspective as Netcompany’s CEO argues that enterprises need to understand the real value prop of LLMs, Stuart highlights a European IT leader whose company is trying to tackle the pricing/budgeting issue head on and has some solid advice to impart on the way:
I think right now customers really don’t care about what LLM it is, they care about the effect of it and how it’s embedded into their systems. And again using open source, open weight LLMs on own infrastructure, you can accommodate those demands in a very particular way.
Meanwhile in Tokenomics – can ‘a new math’ from Globant shake up legacy Professional Services practices to get clients to a more beneficial outcomes-based pricing model?, a new way of counting is on offer. Does it add up? The pitch, per CEO Martín Migoya, is compelling enough:
The original model was headcount, either fixed price or time and materials. This model carries tokens plus token supervision in a single price, either per million token or per output. That creates a totally whole different math, right? And this new math is a place in which you can optimize margins, you can improve supervision. You can do more with less.
On a related topic Alyx talks to Ensono execs about governing AI spend in “There’s no perfect way to forecast AI spend” – Ensono’s CFO on governing costs when vendors keep changing the unit.
Also tied to the question of AI and perceived value, Stuart cites Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Index in Agents are getting more skilful and more numerous, according to Salesforce data, but is the value there to survive AI skepticism?
Also on diginomica this week
Cath delivered an interesting double-header on the gender wars in The digital glass ceiling (1/2) – why AI stands accused of actually amplifying workplace gender bias, in which she cites:
A study of 133 generative AI systems revealed consistent gender bias, with more than a quarter showing both gender and racial bias. One in five responses were sexist or misogynistic.
Don’t want to fall into that trap? Check out: The digital glass ceiling (2/2) – how employers can best tackle the risk of AI-based gender discrimination. The choice is yours…
Stuart looked at AI and Search in a two-parter, the second of which had the novelty of a Palantir reference in the context of a positive use case. No, really – see for yourself in How USA Today is looking to a Palantir use case to prove quality content wins out. See also – The agentic revolution in commerce with LLMs, Product Intelligence and, er, Feedonomics! – and no, I’m not going to tell you what Feedonomics is, you’ll have to read the article.
Use cases
Stuart hit the dating apps in How Grindr overhauled its back end while ‘terraforming’ a future as an AI-native, with no engineering constraints to hold it back. A no-strings-attached set of wins, according to CEO George Arison:
Our conservative estimate is that engineering output increased approximately 2.5x from July 2025 to April 2026 with roughly the same size team…Before gen AI, we estimate that producing that much output would have required roughly 200 additional engineers and about $60 million in annual cost.
In CIO Fabio Agostini adds quantum encryption to luxury travel, Mark Chillingworth highlights infrastructure modernization at A&K Travel Group.
AI is highly fashionable at Brunello Cucinelli as Salesforce dips its venture finger into the retailer’s innovative e-commerce platform in Stuart’s Buon progresso as Salesforce invests in Italian retail giant’s e-commerce innovation.
Another Salesforce use case, this time in Financial Services, as Stuart flags up PenFed’s ace encounter with AI – how one Financial Services organization is powering ahead with its agentic ambitions.
And Mark Samuels taps into Tech for Good with How Young Lives vs. Cancer uses integration tech to provide better social care for its customers.
AI’s organizational impact
In ‘Have I done my job away?’ – Celonis’ Kerry Brown on trust, work and AI, Derek picks up on some leading questions that AI adoption brings in its wake, citing Brown:
If I look at the human piece of it, I think about myself. I know we’re looking at how to use AI in jobs, and I think: what can I do more of, what can I do less of? What matters is what I bring that is uniquely me. If I’m an optimist, I think where we really matter – where we make a difference – becomes our special sauce, our superpower.
Phil finds that AI is adding to employment prospects at Box in AI isn’t replacing staff at Box – it’s bringing on new roles as the company expands.
Mark Chillingworth asks Will AI threaten digital leadership? in his latest digital careers report, which carries the warning:
Threats create friction. Leaders who feel threatened will opt for self-protection and not lead those who need the most leadership; this, in turn, fails all
Meanwhile Chris reminded us of the need not to allow AI to take over from individual thinking in Something for the weekend – who needs experts when you have AI? Something to think about…while we still can, citing a new research paper with an urgent warning for HR and Training execs everywhere:
Put simply, if organizations merely pursue the promised transactional gains of AI and fail to consider the loss of professional expertise in their teams, they will be on a dangerous path of over-reliance on systems that have been trained on scraped data.
A new spin on the eternal take of the skills gap – and this one could be self-inflicted.
One more – last? – time for luck
Finally a return to a diginomica ‘favorite’ with the long-running saga of the well-known omni-channel transformation of US retail stalwart Bed, Bath and Beyond, only recently revived from the grave, now about to lose its identity once again and be replaced by what looks awfully like a data aggregation platform aimed at the US homeowner market. Check out the final death throes of a hardy perennial in Everybody needs good neighbors, but does everyone need Neighborhood Intelligence? Bed, Bath & Beyond ditched again in another omni-channel makeover. As Stuart notes, with a tinge of sadness:
Such is the tortured tale of Bed, Bath & Beyond’s fall from grace that it feels more like an end-of-episode twist in the tale of a TV show that has, critics might suggest, jumped the proverbial shark once too often.
No whiffs this week – only menthol and eucalyptus for the nasal passages! Normal service will be resumed next week, minus sun burn and snot.