Venkat Mangudi

Writing on cybersecurity, AI, resilience, leadership, and risk.

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Latest writing

  • Who Owns the Interface?

    Who Owns the Interface?

    AI assistants are starting to decide which companies a customer ever considers. For the business being chosen, that is a different problem from search ranking.

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  • The Price of Cheap Intelligence

    The Price of Cheap Intelligence

    The cost of capable machine intelligence has collapsed in under three years. Businesses are now being designed around the assumption that it keeps falling.

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  • The Intelligence Supply Chain

    The Intelligence Supply Chain

    An AI answer arrives on a screen with no visible machinery behind it. It is the final product of one of the most concentrated industrial supply chains ever built.

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  • The Closed Loop

    The Closed Loop

    In the AI economy, investment, supply, demand and financing keep appearing inside the same set of transactions. That makes one ordinary question surprisingly hard to answer.

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  • The New Machinery of Persuasion

    The New Machinery of Persuasion

    Persuasion used to have a visible speaker. The AI answer arrives with the machinery hidden and the confidence intact.

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  • The Productivity Mirage

    The Productivity Mirage

    AI is supposed to save time. The harder question is where the saved time actually goes.

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  • Bad Deployment

    Bad Deployment

    Some problems deserve AI. That does not mean every AI system built for them deserves trust.

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  • The AI Misnomer

    The AI Misnomer

    The word AI is doing too much work, and the label has started to matter more than the capability.

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  • Replacing Thinking

    Replacing Thinking

    The easiest question about AI is whether it will replace people. It also hides the more important one.

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  • The Agent Fantasy

    The Agent Fantasy

    The word has changed from copilot to agent. The risk changes with it.

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