#norocketships July 2026
A new model for a Jargon-free Account Based Value Exchange
Clinging on the our critical thinking here, although with Meta deciding to sell their unused compute and the U.S. govt being offered 5% of OpenAI (’cos they’re running out of money?) - all bets are off once again...
So this issue... think about the bubbles.
Vile Rumour & Gossip
The rise of the outage - This last few months have been interesting for the outages that have occured for seemingly no reason. No peak demand curves, just.... normal. Shopify was totally down for 15mins everywhere. Vercel went down and denied it, then admitted it, then... whatevs. Cloudflare gets the blame all the time we know, but they got the blame for a few more that may or may not have been their fault. What’s going on? We’ve got masses of infrastructure right now!!
Charitable Speed dating - Vague Fierce, our anonymous Commerce Futures CTO - offered up 15 minute speed dating sessions in return for a £250 donation to the company’s chosen charity. He was mobbed. Clearly a sarcy response to Shoptalk’s rabbit hutches, but we love this idea. As we struggle to get any vendors to give us access to their Tech teams to explain their LLM feeds - maybe we could do the same there?
Are the European regulators waking up? - two things in June have made us think there are some regulators “growing a pair”. Last week it was announced that Klarna have won a $2bn payout from an case dating back to 2008 - where Google listed its ownnprice comparison services higher than pricerunner. Added to this is the $4.1bn Android fine from the EU court of Justice. And in the UK our mates over at the register have done a great piece on the CMA’s attempt to injext transparency into the new AI search features from Google. This is complex shizzle, but we wonder if the pressure is starting to tell.
AI’s conundrum - Adoption v Payback
The huge valuations of our friends OpenAI and Anthropic will fall away, I think we can all be sure of that - it’s what happens in tech to small investors who invest at IPO, they lose their shirt (the big guys have already made their money to be clear).
But AI needs to sell more to be anywhere near making good on those revenue promises they have made in the IPO prospectus (and in Sam Altman’s parallel life of bullsh*t).
So - time to increase token pricing right? Let the gouging commence 🙂
Well no - they can’t do that, and we can all see why. Enterprise is not yet addicted to AI. The tech is not prevalent quite yet. What will stop that? Token costs….
The closer tokens come to the price of a human, the less likely they are to be used. And cranking yet another overhead on businesses who are struggling with Tariffs, Taxes, Gen Z attitudes to work - is ill advised.
The saving grace (in the UK) for AI will be the horrific HR laws which employers now need to navigate, and which make AI very attractive for owners.
Get them addicted first (we say) - THEN gouge them Sam - OK?
ABM - A new Circle of Trust
One for the SaaS vendors - as promised
ABM (account based marketing) will tell you that you need to continue creating content that is read and interpreted by Agents, but is unread by humans within your target accounts. The LLM is what the human engages with of course.... that layer of genius we all love now.
We have a volunteer client who has acted upon the advice we’ve been banging on about for ages now... building their own “community of trust” - in this case called “incentive economics”. We love the name (beautifully specific), and the ambition. If anyone can get a group engaged without selling these guys are the people we think can.
Trust is the only commodity in sales that has value today, and nobody is earning that with sales content. #payitforward to prospects, focusing on their problems and not your features - those are table stakes anyway now. The relationship will build as you carry out (free of charge) some Ai POC work, which the client know you will be putting into the solution anyway.
And how do you get that first conversation? Pursuing is the temptation, and along with 20,000 other vendors every client has techniques for avoiding you. In our view, the only offer with any appeal right now is some targeted free assistance in navigating the fluidity of the market, specifically with LLM’s. If we’re having trouble getting expertise to present about feeds just think about the opportunity for your biggest brains :)
The end of the highly paid loafer?
Finally, not content with poking fun with our friends at SaaS central, we take aim this issue at the personas in tech vendors that truly drive us to distraction. In this, our first iteration, the “highpaid loafer”.
We’ve all met them. Mid-atlantic males with sharp clothes and a low handicap. I worked with a good few back at Ziff Davis years ago... but now they’re a dying breed. The used to oil the wheels in deals, carry the bag, book the dinner. They traded off their friendship with Deloitte (replace GSi here), but never really moved the needle.
Back when SaaS was shaking this was fine, and if you look where they’re headed it’s all about the safe haven of Nvidia or similar now. The good news is SaaS has started trimming these people out, and with less money from clients it’s about time :)
As always, thanks for the gossip you send us and the rumours we hear - we couldn’t do it without you (well we could actually, but we felt we should say something nice)
Jamie
