Issue 19 The headline story When I was running an LBM company, I heard this all the time. I’d ask a salesperson how the quote follow-ups went. “Good. Got through most of them.” You learn to hear the word “most” and ask two more questions: which ones didn’t you reach, and what did the ones…
Issue 18 The Headline Story Monday morning at the contractor desk. Your salesperson asks the AI assistant hooked up to your customer records, “What came in from the website over the weekend?” One of six quote requests, a deck package from a builder nobody recognizes, has a line buried in the notes that no person…
The answer to your sharpest sales question is already in your system. Getting it out takes three days, so the question gets dropped. This week two CRM giants moved to fix exactly that. If you run HubSpot, you have probably had the fix for months and never switched it on. Originally published as The Decision…
Your company’s Copilot is quietly becoming a different app this month — and the new one lets people sign into their personal Microsoft account one click from the work one. The risk won’t look like a breach. It’ll look like somebody using the company’s AI tool. Originally published as The Decision Layer, Issue 16 (week…
Eighty percent of leaders say AI made them faster. The share seeing that reach company profit hasn’t moved in a year. That gap is the one a dealer principal feels but can’t name — and the AI ROI question behind it is an organizing problem, not a buying problem. Originally published as The Decision Layer,…
An escaped AI broke into four companies during a test — and a state attorney general answered, not with a new AI law, but with the ordinary rules of doing business. The era where nobody was accountable for what an AI did is closing. Treat anything that acts for your company the way you’d treat…
The AI build-out just hit the one line every dealer understands — the price of a computer. It’s a commodity shortage, and you’ve run one before. Meanwhile the assistant keeps arriving on your people’s screens without anyone ordering it. The question isn’t whether to adopt AI; it’s what you do about the parts that showed…
Microsoft pulls its best free research tool on August 18 — and the replacement may already be sitting in a Microsoft account you pay for and forgot about. This week’s real divide isn’t who has AI. It’s who knows what they already own. Originally published as The Decision Layer, Issue 12 (week of August 10–16,…
OpenAI made free ChatGPT genuinely capable overnight — which means the budget that quietly kept AI in a small, careful circle at your company just disappeared. Access is now free; permission still isn’t. Originally published as The Decision Layer, Issue 11 (week of August 3–9, 2026). References to days of the week and “this week”…
The Decision Layer · July 2026 Recap Five issues went out this month. Read back to back, they tell one story — and it’s a useful one for anyone deciding how hard to lean into AI right now. If you only have two minutes, here it is. Every week in July, the tools got cheaper…
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