Pete Responds to Breaking Inflation News, Live on Squawk Box YouTube video by Pete Buttigieg

Pete you made my day! youtu.be/Ptk5pcHy1ms?... keep after em, tiger!

Uber's price window closed. The businesses that thrived were the ones that built during it.

AI's window is open right now.

Are you building dependency — or capability?

One will age well.

pathpractical.com/thoughts/thi...

You don't need an engineering team for this.

Audit your AI spend. Classify each workflow into 3 layers. Ask vendors where pricing is going. Pick one thing to build and own.

78% of IT leaders report surprise AI charges. Don't be the statistic.

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Routing simple tasks to lighter models cut AI costs 39% and improved latency 32–38%.

Open-source models now hit 85–90% of frontier quality on routine tasks.

Not every task needs the smartest AI in the room.

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Two ways to use AI:

Consumption: ask, use, repeat. Bill recurs forever.

Production: use AI to build something you own and run. Pay once.

Ask this about every workflow: "Is the output something I keep — or something I repeat?"

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Three layers every business needs for AI:

1. Build & own — generate code you keep
2. Route & right-size — cheapest capable model wins
3. Invest in frontier — only where quality differentiates

Most operators haven't sorted their workloads this way.

pathpractical.com/thoughts/thi...

AI API costs dropped 300x since 2023. Enterprise AI spend rose 36% in one year.

Both are true. And Microsoft already raised M365 prices 13–17% citing AI.

The floor drops faster than the ceiling.

pathpractical.com/thoughts/thi...

In 2014, Uber lost money on every ride.

$1.50 trips. $4 to deliver. Not transportation — dependency.

AI is your $1.50 ride right now. What are you building on top of it?

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All of it — canonical fields, semantic layers, access controls — serves one goal:

A room that trusts the numbers.

Trust breaks in one meeting. Rebuilding it takes months.

pathpractical.com/thoughts/thr...

BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift Serverless all charge by data scanned.

An analyst who doesn't know this can take your bill from $400 to $4,000 in a month.

Nobody told them.

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Two ways data access fails. Both are damaging.

Over-access: compliance risk.
Over-restriction: analysts can't work.

The second causes more business damage. Quietly. Over months.

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Looker. Tableau. Power BI.

None of them fix your data problem.

They're mirrors. If your semantic layer is a mess, they'll show the mess clearly.

Fix what's underneath first.

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The fix most teams skip: canonical fields.

A formally designated version of each metric, enforced in the semantic layer.

The tools exist. The organizational agreement doesn't.

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Your warehouse has 8–15 versions of revenue.

gross_revenue. net_revenue. revenue_usd. amount_paid.

Not one is labeled "use this one." Your analysts have to guess.

pathpractical.com/thoughts/thr...

Three analysts. Same warehouse. Three different revenue numbers.

Nobody made a mistake. The system failed them.

Five things breaking your data governance — and how to fix each one.

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AI isn't following your instructions. It's reflecting your judgment.
Custom skills built around your methodology. Output formats that enforce your standards automatically. A system that knows what "good" looks like.
→ Full breakdown of all 7 levels: pathpractical.com/thoughts/the...

At some point, you stop prompting AI and start running processes.
Build workflows where structured data flows in, AI works on it, and a finished output comes out — without you touching it in the middle.

→ Full breakdown of all 7 levels: pathpractical.com/thoughts/the...

The problem with Levels 1–3: every session is a performance.
You're improvising. Every time. Your output quality depends on how much time you have. How sharp you are that day.
That's not a system. That's luck.
→ Full breakdown of all 7 levels: pathpractical.com/thoughts/the...

The AI that knows your project is a different thing entirely.
At Levels 1–2, every session starts cold. You re-explain who you are, what you're working on, and what you need. Every time.

→ Full breakdown of all 7 levels: pathpractical.com/thoughts/the...

How many versions of “revenue” are in your data warehouse?

If you have a data warehouse the honest answer is: probably a lot.
gross_revenue. net_revenue. total_revenue. revenue_usd. amount_paid.
None of them have a label that says “the official one.”

pathpractical.com/thoughts/the...

The moment you edit the numbers directly, you’ve broken something important.

Finance asks you to move 30% of last quarter’s campaign spend from one category to another. You open the reporting system and adjust.. But you've just broken your data.
pathpractical.com/thoughts/the...

Quick question: what happens to your data warehouse when you switch CRMs?
If your first instinct is “the vendor handles it” or “nothing, it’s just software”—you might be setting yourself up for a rough few months after the go-live date.
pathpractical.com/thoughts/you...

Those Canadian wolves are tricky... cheknews.ca/b-c-wolves-u...

Honestly it's the gondola that's the most amazing part of this photo

Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa Or: How Africa is building the future by skipping the past

While US companies are obsessed with AI, other companies are creating radical positive improvements just deploying existing tech, smarter climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarp...

Parent companies have a lot of influence, especially when they're paying for advertising to halo their social marketing...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Reportedly Holding "Going Out of Business Sale" for Satellites NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab is reportedly holding a "going out of business sale" for its satellites, NASA Watch reports.

Awhh man this is a bummer... On the heals of the terrible flooding in Texas, and PBS funding cut news, I just saw this: futurism.com/the-byte/nas... . Those satellites include earth weather sensing platforms. =(

Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Benjamin Netanyahu

The Nytimes Investigation Into Benjamin Netanyahu outlines a bleak picture of someone choosing power over morality again and again and again... www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/m...

I wrote an article describing my process for organizational change management around technology. Check it out if you're curious! pathpractical.com/thoughts/man...

Damn I am getting killed on my 2025 media pundits bingo card. I missed first on Tucker and then Tulsi being the voices of reason. In other news, this timeline sucks.