Michael Hummel

Nexxen shipped a universal creative spec for TV home screen ads today - upload once, auto-resize per OEM, onboarding down by half. Real saving for anyone buying that inventory. It's also one vendor normalizing its own integrations, which is not the industry agreeing on a format.

Every AI incident list has the same blind spot: a failure has to get noticed to get counted. A bad run that passes review looks the same as a good one, and gets built on. So a quiet system may be a safe one, or it may be one where nobody wrote down what counts as done.

Jason Lemkin, on his company's AI agent moving their image workload to one vendor for API simplicity: "Another quiet churn due to an agent decision. Not a human one." The losing vendor's retention motion assumes a decider you can call. That buyer doesn't pick up.

Business systems run on 5-year roadmaps because a bad write costs more to unwind than it cost to make. That's priced risk, not foot-dragging. The day an agent gets write access to the ledger is the day it inherits the roadmap's clock.

Fable's thirty days versus zero is a fight about the symptom. A retention window only matters because the work left your environment in the first place. There's nothing to negotiate about data that never moved.

Small accuracy gains compounding into longer agent tasks assumes the only failure term is the model. Run an agent inside someone else's system and each step also survives an expired token, a changed API, a record some other process locked. The model got smarter - the environment didn't.

Company-level adoption numbers hide who's actually using it. In the rollouts I've watched, a handful of people generate most of the volume and everyone else opened it twice in March. The gap might be between employees, not firms, and it walks out the door when they do.

The person prompting was the throttle. Damage stopped where their attention did. Cron removes that. The 3am run still writes to a system of record - what makes it reviewable is who authorized it and what it left behind. x.com/hwchase17/st...

Ad tech has spent years asking which middlemen actually earn their cut of a dollar. The cleanup is not finished. Now buying agents join the chain as one more hand in the flow, and the record they leave is the open question. www.adexchanger.com/agencies/age...

DV sells the grades and the optimization that bids off them, and Nielsen is buying both. Once the buying goes agentic, one company grades the buy and steers the next dollar - the human between them is optional. The receipt has to sit with somebody who doesn't win either way.

Something AI-made will break in your company this week. Watch what happens in the first hour. Who moved? Who owned it? And if the answer is nobody - what else is running right now that nobody owns? Full essay: hummelnyc.substack.com/p/what-break...