Wellspring

Needing to turn inventory, skis are on sale. Discounting tools to 25% off. The AI model that summarizes this in WordPress JetPack is the same as the one behind the bot summoned last night through Jotform. Internet the largest sensory organ – projected consciousness. Already collected consuming huge amounts of water: power. They say each prompt is like turning on an electric kettle. 

Drive to originality, counter network effects, preferential attachment: hubs. Anonymous, obscure: untapped reserve.

Each prompt another meeting shoot. “Baby, model ‘…up the water sprout…’ ”

APPLICATION

The tension between network effects and originality described here is a real strategic problem for any leader operating in an information-saturated environment. Preferential attachment, the tendency of hubs to get larger while peripheral nodes stay peripheral, means that the obvious move of joining the conversation that is already dominant is also the move most likely to produce undifferentiated output. The untapped reserve is genuinely valuable precisely because it has not yet been colonized by the hubs. For strategic decision making, this suggests a deliberate practice: identifying the questions that are not yet being widely asked in your industry, the framings that do not yet have a dominant narrative, the options that have not been priced because no one has imagined them yet. AI, used as an imagination engine rather than a search engine, is particularly suited to finding these spaces. Asking it to generate scenarios that do not yet have precedent is exactly the kind of prompt that produces competitive insight.