Finding talent is a key job
Finding talent is not a side task to delegate. Leaders need to learn how to spot great people before the obvious signals appear.
Companies
Teams, hiring, leadership, incentives, company-building, and AI adoption.
What to automate, what to keep human
In May 2026 I sat on a panel at Latitude59 in Tallinn called "AI in Your Org: What to Automate, What to Keep Human", with the chief of staff at Hostinger and a co-founder of Sera Leads. Three very different company sizes: 900 people, 150, and 10. Below are my answers, pulled out of the discussion and
Week 1: the gap is inside your company
I committed to sharing something every day in March about our AI transformation at Pactum. The pace is high, not just internally but in the entire world, so there's a lot that happens and a lot to share. This is the week 1 recap, pulling together what I've learned across the posts, the meetings, and the
Nobody gets fired for buying Anthropic
"Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" used to mean: pick the vendor nobody will question. It was a decision driven by fear, not conviction. I think Anthropic is becoming the equivalent for AI, but for a better reason. At Pactum, we didn't choose Anthropic through structured evaluation. We started with Gemini because we're on
Your AI employees need a handbook
I've seen people try Claude or ChatGPT, get mediocre answers, and conclude AI is overhyped. But the power of agents doing real work for every employee comes from the agent knowing your company, your team, your processes. If you use the vanilla version and expect it to be mind-blowing, you're testing the wrong thing. Exceptional
Anchor on what won't change
When things are stable, you make plans by anchoring to the question "what will change?". With your customers, your company, technology, regulation or anything else about the world. This does not work when things are changing fast. If best-in-class tech changes every 6 months, or if your product strategy is up in the air, or customers
The complements to AI will increase in value
Here's a model I use to think about how AI will change work. Some parts of every activity will cost 1,000x less than they do when a human does it. For engineers it might mean reading and typing code, for radiologists reading X-ray images, etc. But it's not 100% of the time a human
Shaping is high-leverage work for leaders
I've recently seen several engineers struggle when moving to the role of leading a small product team and managing a couple engineers. There are so many newly important meetings and Slack messages (that you could ignore as an individual contributor) and they take up most of your time, but don't feel like "real work"
Are software jobs set to grow or shrink?
There seem to be two views of what will happen with engineers' jobs given the new efficiencies from using advanced AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc). The first view is partial rebound. Fewer engineers will be needed in total: if engineers are 20% more effective per hour, there will be some downsizing of the total engineering bill. Perhaps
Hiring as the marriage problem
At one point in my career, our company was hiring for role of a Head of Marketing. I got a strong referral from a friend, reached out, the match was great, and she passed the interview process with ease. And then we just... sat on it. The hiring manager said he wanted to consider three candidates and then pick the