The Zenteck Blog
Operator-grade perspectives on turning AI into measurable EBITDA — not hype.
The China Shock Was the Rehearsal
Globalization didn’t collapse the U.S. economy, but it didn’t solve its demand problem either. It covered it with debt: households’ until 2008, the government’s since, while near-zero interest rates lifted the value of everything owners held. Drawing on two decades of China-shock research and the first hard data on AI and jobs, this piece argues that AI is unlikely to leave us short of things to produce. The real risk is that it leaves people short of ways to claim them: labor’s share of output is at a record low, stock ownership is highly concentrated, and this transition is moving faster than any before it. The China shock was the rehearsal.
Don't Outsource Your Reasoning
Agentic AI moves a company's dependence on technology from process to reasoning. Leaders should be very careful about who they let own that.
Who cleans up?
Every major technology shift produces slop. The question that matters was never how much — it's who pays, and whether anyone writes it down. ERP disasters were expensive and concentrated: one company, one contract, one lawsuit. Concentrated pain funds a cleanup market, which is why a consulting industry grew up around fixing ERP. Dot-com wreckage got cleared by price — Global Crossing's $47 billion peak sold for $250 million. The AI era breaks the pattern twice. Enterprise AI failure looks exactly like ERP, yet no company has disclosed a charge for a failed AI program. And beneath it sits a category with no owner at all.
The Most Important Role in AI Development May Not Be the AI Engineer
AI-engineering of software applications is clearly a game changer, but as the system being built gets more complex, it is easy to create a massive amount of "slop". A new breed of architects with equal comfort in technology and business design has become essential.
Welcome to the Zenteck Blog
A brief introduction to our Zenteck blog and what you can expect to find here as we build up momentum and help client solve real operational problems with the right use of AI.