On June 3, 2026, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, posted a number from his own network’s live data. For the first time in the history of the internet, more than half of all web traffic was not human. Bots, crawlers, and AI agents made up about 57 percent of the requests. People made up the rest. Prince said he’d figured the crossover would come at the end of 2027. Agentic traffic got there a year and a half early. ...
A seller calls a few days after the auction closes. The line of equipment they bought new in 2021 came back at 40 cents on the dollar, and they’re sore. They paid top money for it. They expected more than this. So you do the thing the business trained you to do. You send the marketing report. Look at the reach. Look at the registered bidders, the ad spend, the page views, the email opens. We ran the play. We found the market. ...
I’ve been wrestling with how easily we slide into convenience. When AI makes writing effortless, our natural gravity is to accept the first thing the machine spits out. This default drift is a human law of decline. If you choose convenience, you’ll gain weight, you’ll stop reading, your brain will go soft. You’ll decline. The only way to survive this is active resistance. For myself, I’ve built custom agentic tools to force Socratic friction into my writing. But as a leader, the question is broader. I can’t build custom vaults and code-level friction for everyone in the company. Most people just want the frictionless path to get the task off their plate. ...
When AI commoditizes text generation, the natural gravity of human behavior is “normal drift,” gravitating toward low defaults and “easy peasy chat” while expecting a “silver magic bullet.” To survive this without losing my own original thinking, I’ve realized I cannot rely on self-discipline or raw willpower alone. I need a triple-layered cognitive defense system: The Tactical Defense (The Code Layer): Encoding Socratic pushback, friction, and accountability directly into the custom agentic skills I build. I don’t just open a ChatGPT tab; I build systems designed to actively resist my own laziness. The Contextual Defense (The Data Layer): Operating under the law of reciprocity. Deep sparring requires deep context. If I don’t build a dense, custom vault of actual thinking, the system has no leverage to push back, and the dialogue collapses back to generic out-of-the-box templates. The Meta-Cognitive Defense (The Mindset Layer): Active self-awareness of my own blindness and non-original thinking. Recognizing that I am naturally prone to low-effort defaults, and deliberately hunting for those defaults inside my daily work. Without these layers, I am just defaulting to convenience and calling it innovation. ...
In August 2025 I wrote a thought card about structured data. The argument was simple. Treat your data as a long-lived asset that should be findable by any system, and you build infrastructure that compounds. The card said nothing about agents. I had no idea WebMCP was coming. Six months later, Google announced WebMCP and the agentic web, the standard protocol for AI agents to act on structured web data. A protocol I’d never heard of, designed for a use case I hadn’t predicted. And the platform I’d been building already fit it. Not because I saw the future. Because the principle didn’t depend on seeing the future. ...
Grafe Auction runs about 290 auctions a year across 48 states. Each campaign takes 10 to 14 days from start to finish. That’s roughly one new marketing campaign going live every business day. Ad copy, search keywords, geographic targeting, photo selection, platform-specific formatting. Every time. For years, each campaign started the same way: a blank page. Someone opens the lot catalog, scans through it, figures out what’s worth highlighting, writes the ad copy, picks the photos, formats everything for Facebook and Google, selects the target markets. Then does it again tomorrow. And the day after that. ...
Definition The agentic shift is not an upgrade to existing infrastructure. It replaces the assumptions that infrastructure was built on. “Each level isn’t defined by what the AI starts doing. It’s defined by what the human stops doing.” – Five Levels of Agentic Commerce “The cost of modern convenience is an involuntary autobiography that someone else owns.” – Digital Exhaust “The agentic web is the marketplace trap with different actors.” – Two Trust Systems ...
The Observation In January I stood in front of 100 auctioneers at a state convention and told them “AI assists. You decide.” Three hours of live demos, chaining tools together, a 7-day challenge. I showed them 200 hours of reclaimed marketing time. The room bought in. The closing line about the train leaving the station landed. In February I started one-on-one coaching with a colleague, walking her through the same tools at a slower pace. In March I did it again for 20 community leaders on a Zoom call. And now I’m building a 3.5-hour continuing education course that’s basically the same material refined a fourth time. ...
The Idea This came up while fixing a bug where stale cached data was silently injecting garbage into every outbound email for a full day. The cache never questioned itself. It just kept serving bad data. Human memory has a built-in half-life for each memory. The things you use stay strong. The things you don’t fade. That’s not a bug, it’s what keeps the signal-to-noise ratio manageable. You naturally surface what’s relevant because relevance reinforces the memory. ...
I told someone last week that his business couldn’t survive him. He’d called to pick my brain. Decades in the auction industry, multiple divisions, good revenue. But every decision in the company routed through him. Sales, operations, finance, client relationships. He’d spent his career being the best person on the microphone, and the rest of the business just happened around that skill. There were no documented processes. No decision-making frameworks anyone else could follow. If his potential successor took over tomorrow, they’d fail. Not because they’re incapable, but because the architecture underneath was never built for anyone else to run. ...