Intelligent Systems Blog

AI Made Everything Look Real. Now Nothing Feels Real.
It wasn't that long ago that AI-generated images were a party trick. You'd type a few words into a box, wait a few seconds, and out popped a picture. Sure, the person in it might have six fingers, the sign in the background might be written in something resembling an...

Remember When Custom GPTs Were Going to Make Everyone Rich?
For a brief moment back in late 2023, it felt like we were all about to become app developers, and the best part was that nobody needed to know how to code. When OpenAI introduced Custom GPTs that November, the idea sounded almost too good to be true. Anyone could...

Your Clients Are Already Replacing You. You Just Haven’t Felt It Yet.
Here is the moment you should be afraid of, and it has probably already happened without your knowing. A client of yours had a problem last Tuesday night, the kind they used to bring to you, and instead of writing your name in their calendar they opened an app on...

Does Anybody Really Care If AI Helped Write It?
Back in 1969, Chicago released a song built around a wonderfully simple question: "Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?" More than half a century later, I find myself asking essentially the same question about artificial intelligence....

What 30 Years of Writing Taught Me About Being an Influencer
I recently pulled out a bunch of the books I've written over the years, spread them across the floor, and took a picture. I already knew there were a lot of them, but seeing everything together was still a little surprising. There were books about ecommerce,...

The Compliment That Kept You Broke
Somewhere in the first few years of your coaching career, somebody told you that what you do can't be taught out of a book. They probably meant it kindly. Maybe it was a mentor, maybe a client, maybe you arrived at it yourself watching a certification course try to...

Are We Almost at AGI, or Are We Still Missing the Big Breakthrough?
Every few weeks somebody announces that artificial general intelligence is already here, just around the corner, or still decades away. The trouble is that almost nobody is using the same definition, so most of these arguments are really just people talking past one...

Every Big Technology Looked Stupid First. This One Does Too.
Why Quantum Computing Has My Attention The first computer I ever used printed on paper instead of a screen. My dad brought home a teletype machine from the university in 1974, and I can still hear it clattering away one line at a time. It was slow and noisy, and most...

The Robot Uprising Will Be Delayed: It Can’t Open the Fridge
“Hey Alexa, bring me a beer.” It sounds like the simplest request in the world, and that is exactly why it makes such a good example of how far we still have to go. We already have voice assistants that can answer questions, dim the lights, play music, and remind us...

What Google Is Really Looking for in 2026
A buddy of mine called me the other day and said, "Let's grab happy hour and work on our websites with AI." Now there's a sentence I never expected to hear twenty years ago. But that's where we are. We sat down with our laptops, ordered a couple of beers, and spent...
