Moats and Moonshots
Essays from Moative on how AI changes the economics of regulated, asset-heavy industries
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Oct 4, 2026
The Department Is the Last Legacy System
We're replacing workers with AI, but the AI is doing work whose boundaries were drawn by the limits of the department it sits in. A century of management science asked how to make the worker productive. Nobody has asked what makes the department redundant.
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Sep 20, 2026
AI for Complicated is not AI for Complex
Healthcare billing is miserable. It is also finite. Ten thousand codes, four hundred payers, all of it learnable by a smart enough brain. Yet every vendor calls it complex, because complex supports a premium and complicated supports a statement of work.
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Sep 13, 2026
FDX: The executive that FDEs need to meet
AI adoption needs more than Forward Deployed Engineers. It needs Forward Deployed Executives: industry veterans with the scars, judgment, and institutional memory to know not just how to automate a workflow, but why it exists in the first place.
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Sep 12, 2026
The Dawn of Enterprise Agency Engineering
The next challenge for enterprise AI isn't intelligence, but agency: deciding what AI can see, remember, decide and do, and who is accountable. As models grow smarter, enterprises must engineer how machines safely act within the company without giving away control.
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Aug 23, 2026
Your IT Department should not be in the IT room anymore
Your IT department should not be in the IT room anymore. IT departments have to be replaced wholesale by AI departments. They have to be managing intelligence and maintaining it, sitting on the shopfloor, not in the IT rooms.
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Aug 16, 2026
Don't shortsell your know-how to AI vendors
An FDE's deliverable is a working outcome inside the customer's environment. An FDE's byproduct is a product. If the byproduct is not a product, you do not have an FDE. You have a contractor.
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Aug 2, 2026
A poem on the half-life of AI
Judgment is where the moat is. Judgment is commodity. There is no moat. There is only cash flow. Every rung was a real claim, defended by real people, funded at a real premium, correct for a few months to a few years. Then the half-life shortened again.
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Jul 26, 2026
Software is becoming malleable
Software is becoming malleable. The future isn't SaaS or services, but software users can extend themselves. Every product will become a platform with building blocks and guardrails, putting the roadmap in the hands of its customers.
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Jul 19, 2026
After Intelligence, Craft
The fashionable answer to abundance in AI is taste. When anyone can generate an interface, write a campaign, design a product or produce a strategy, the argument goes, the advantage will belong to those who can distinguish the excellent from
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Jul 5, 2026
Forward Deployed Engineers. Embrace with Caution.
Forward-deployed engineers can accelerate your AI journey, but whose interests are they serving? The biggest AI decision isn't the model you choose. It's who owns your architecture, your data, and the freedom to change course.
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Jun 28, 2026
Reliable AI vs. Coin Flip
Ask the same AI the same question twice and you may get two different answers. The difference isn't always the model. It's often how much guessing your data forces it to do. Better data doesn't just improve AI. It makes it reliable.
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Jun 21, 2026
Hello CEO! Own Your Data. Own Your AI. Own Your Destiny.
Last week I wrote about how AI companies in verticals treat their customer base as fuel rods to build their nuclear power. This week I am going to expand on it and make a case for working with a systems