Mark Fidelman

As you go to work today and settle into the week, please study the form below. You will soon need to fill this out EVERY year and tell the government what you own and then allow them to tell you how much its worth. That is the framework that is enabled by the Trojan Horse "Billionaire Tax" that is trying to get passed. Give them credit: they cleverly use Billionaires as the hook, but build in the language and the framework that will allow the Legislature to simply extend the tax to everyone and make it yearly. And this is where the form below comes in... In this case, ask yourself, will it be you or the Billionaires that will be able to fill this out properly and avoid penalties. As much as Billionaires can be pushed to do more for society, we all know that they have the infrastructure to manage these kinds of disclosures...middle class Californians do not and they will be the ones that get penalized in the end.

One corollary to the fact that AI agents take real work to setup in company at scale, is that the role of the forward deployed engineer -or whatever it gets called in the future- isn’t going away any time soon. When a vendor sells any kind of agents into an organization, you’re no longer just selling a software tool that gets implemented and you’re done. You’re fundamentally selling some form of the actual workflow being done by your technology. This is far closer to a customer buying from a professional services firm than implementing traditional technology. This will almost always require a deep understanding of the domain that the customer operates in, the ability to help a customer wire up their systems to support the agents, make sure all the context is setup in the right way, and help provide change management to actually get the company to adapt its business processes. The ability to do this across customers, figure out best practices in a specific industry and customer segment, take new features back to go build in the product, and so on is going to be key. There’s no shortcut to getting this work done by the enterprise, and the vendors are going to have to do a lot of this or risk low adoption. Finally, this is a big opportunity for existing and next gen professional services companies. There are all new practice areas emerging in every system integrator and consulting firm just to do this kind of work, and this is going to continue to be in demand for quite some time. Yet another example of jobs that aren’t actually going away.