Audience

Primary

Founders, VCs, CEOs, and senior operators who own meaningful assets (proprietary data, distribution, capital, infrastructure) but lack a deep technical mental model of where AI is heading. They need a 24–60 month allocation map and they don’t trust the noise.

Secondary

Technical operators who already understand the stack but want a crisp economic frame to align teams and boards.

Post-read user job

A reader should be able to:

1. Place their company on the agentic AI stack (whatever shape that stack ends up taking in the paper).
2. Identify which moves are accessible to them given the assets they already control.
3. Recognize the traps — positions that look attractive but get compressed between commoditizing layers above and below.

What this is not

• Not for the general public — assumes business literacy and patience for a long read.
• Not for ML researchers — no novel technical contribution.
• Not neutral. Opinionated synthesis, with skeptic voices included for tension.

Tone calibration

Peer-to-peer with smart operators. Plain English, no hype, no hedging. Strong claims welcomed if they carry a citation or are explicitly labeled as bets.