Eric Pilkington

t's never been a more exciting time to be a tech executive, and robotics is the thing that has my attention these days. Not because of the demo videos. Because of a number I can't stop thinking about: 9 minutes. That's how long Agility Robotics' new Digit 5 takes to charge for 90 minutes of work. It will never make a headline. But anyone who has run a warehouse floor knows it's the difference between a demo and a shift. The bigger story is who Digit 5 is designed for. It works "cage-free" beside people—an independent safety controller, human detection, light and sound cues so the person next to it always knows what it's about to do. Agility has $300M+ in orders from GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota, and is lining up a public listing. A startup betting everything on one idea: the robot's job is to fit into a human workplace, not the other way around. In my experience, digital projects fail for one main reason—they were built around the technology and the people were expected to adapt. The ones that worked started with the person doing the job. Robotics is about to learn the same lesson, and I think the winners will be companies you haven't heard of yet. Will it be a startup, or one of the big players that win the robotics race? #Robotics #Humanoids #FutureOfWork #DigitalTransformation

Hey, Cincinnati! 👋 We're coming to you live at BLINK Festival this year and we're bringing a special friend with us! Introducing Vurvey’s AI Brand Companion Blinky, the official AI companion of the BLINK festival. Blinky can help you get closer to the artists and discover the unique perspectives, details and experiences that make BLINK artists human. What is BLINK? A free, four-night festival of light and art that draws millions every year. Join us October 8-11 across Cincinnati with projection mapping, murals, and light installations spread over 30 city blocks. We make AI that celebrates the magic of humanity, so a festival built around artists feels like the right place to show what that looks like. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/eFJ_XFQT #AIPoweredByPeople #BLINK2026 #Blinky #VurveyLabs #Cincinnati

Mostly it’s about product and desire. Invest in product! Neem London

This has been one of the most fun papers I have written. Not because governance is usually a crowd pleaser. 😄 It is typically viewed as necessary overhead: more controls, more review, more friction. Yet runtime governance at the reasoning layer can do more than manage risk. Before an agent’s interpretation becomes action, it can prevent some of the reasoning, tool use, downstream work, review and remediation that would otherwise follow an interpretation the institution did not authorize. Token prices are falling. Systems can reason more, call more tools, hand work to other agents and keep going longer. What matters is not only the cost of an inference, but what an interpretation is allowed to set in motion. Preventable Computation describes the additional work that could have been avoided if an available runtime control had held an unauthorized interpretation before it entered execution. And then there is Governed Semantic Reuse. Instead of making an AI system reconstruct the same approved institutional meaning in broad prompt context every time it encounters a familiar kind of decision, previously authorized meaning can be reused under matching runtime conditions. The facts may change, but an organization should not have to keep teaching the system what its own approved terms, policies and rules mean. Less repeated context. Less unnecessary inference. And perhaps a small but meaningful contribution to “green computation.” My Executive Brief is below.  #ai #token #tokenomics #cost #aiusage #ArtificialIntelligence #AIGovernance #ResponsibleAI #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI #CyberSecurity #RiskManagement #GRC #AISafety #AIsecurity #AIArchitecture #preventablecomputation #GovernedSemanticReuse #greencomputation

January isn’t a strategy - it's a date on the calendar... I've been in this cylce a long time and one of the stranger things about advertising: some companies spend all year building awareness… then pull back in Q4 and decide they’ll “really get after it” in January. Not sure about you, but I don't know anyone that resets on January 1st (unless you count the fake resolution that lasts a week). If you want 2027 to start strong, start building that momentum now. Stay visible. Stay relevant. Take advantage of the noise getting quieter around you. And because repitition matters... January isn’t a strategy - it's a date on the calendar.

I can proudly say that my mom, Mary Ellen Guest, made a huge impact on me, my brother, her grandkids, my family, her friends, and countless others across the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois. She gave herself selflessly to all of us, always with a huge smile on her face, ready to give a huge hug, quick to laugh, and always asking what she could do and how she could help. She was equally amazing in the kitchen baking desserts as she was in the political and non-profit strategy arenas. This past weekend, she died after battling more serious illness for a few weeks in addition to a yearslong decline brought on by multiple chronic conditions. We will always remember her and carry on her legacy of love, warmth, and the commitment to progress and justice. Her obituary can be found below and I look forward to seeing those who can make it to celebrate her life and grieve together. https://lnkd.in/gur6PASd

What drives desire and where does AI collide with human understanding on this topic? Most importantly, what are brands getting wrong here? Chad Reynolds, our CEO, sat down to discuss this and much more with Mark Sinnock, Global Chief Strategy, Data and Innovation Officer at Havas Creative, Sarah Collinson, CEO of Havas New York, and Jackie Lyons, Chief Planning Officer Havas Media for the Decoding Desire in the Age of AI Summit in NYC. Thanks to Havas and Brand Innovators for putting this group together.

Heading to Dirty Jobs in San Francisco tomorrow (September 23rd) obo LVLON and ALAi Tech Inc. At ALAi we use AI to discover new molecules in materials science, so I want to meet anyone whose hardware is quietly waiting on a better material. Say hello if you're going, and let's 'Talk Dirty!' thank you Vijay Chattha and Jay Kapoor for getting a bunch of living legends in the same room and letting me in to be a counter weight and balance out the high IQ ;-)

Advertising is having yet another identity crisis. Agencies are reinventing themselves again and again. New operating models. New acronyms. AI transformation. Creator ecosystems. Cultural intelligence. Experience orchestration. Another new CEO uses language that makes the latest reorganization, tech evolution, and layoffs sound like the invention of electricity. Executives take the stage to explain the future of marketing with the solemnity of people negotiating nuclear treaties. Holding companies spend fortunes restructuring themselves to become more agile, integrated, intelligent and modern. And then somebody makes that ad. Novig. Callaway. Pick your example. The names almost don’t matter because another one will be along shortly. The formula has become depressingly familiar: take gambling, sex, humiliation, misogyny, stupidity or some combination thereof; wrap it in irony; call it culturally provocative; wait for people to complain; celebrate the engagement; and, if necessary, have the CEO issue the ceremonial apology explaining that the work “missed the mark.” Maybe it didn’t miss the mark. Maybe this is the mark now. That is the more uncomfortable possibility. Because some of this advertising works. People notice it, share it, and argue about it. Search goes up. Earned media follows. The algorithm does exactly what the algorithm was designed to do. But effectiveness and value are not the same thing. A fistfight in a restaurant attracts attention too. That doesn’t make it hospitality strategy. The industry spent decades arguing that brands have meaning, purpose and cultural influence. Fine. Then it cannot suddenly claim moral neutrality when degrading behavior happens to generate impressions. Corporations are underwriting culture whether they acknowledge it or not. Every media dollar rewards something. Every sponsorship legitimizes something. Every campaign makes a small argument about what deserves our attention. Increasingly, advertising seems willing to make that argument from the gutter. The irony is almost perfect. We have never possessed more sophisticated technology for understanding human behavior, predicting preference, personalizing communication, and measuring response. And somehow all that intelligence keeps producing more sophisticated ways to make people look. That isn’t creative bravery. It’s attention arbitrage. Perhaps the next reinvention of advertising doesn’t require another operating model, AI platform or Cannes panel about the future. Perhaps it begins with remembering that getting someone’s attention was never supposed to be the highest ambition of the business. Because when an industry becomes willing to do almost anything to be noticed, the question eventually stops being whether the advertising worked. The question becomes what the industry is becoming in order to make it work.