The Signal by #NoVendors

Meta and xAI are both moving to sell off their excess AI capacity. The headlines are calling it a retreat, proof the AI bubble is deflating and demand is drying up. I read it differently. Owners aren't walking away from AI. They're worn down by broken promises and expensive tools that never delivered what the sales deck swore they would. Demand for results is still there. What's gone is the patien...

Is your best employee your biggest risk? I'm asking because I just lived the answer. This week I recorded The Signal from the road because I finally took a vacation with my daughter, and the show still shipped. It shipped because I moved my agents off my home computer and onto the cloud, so the work runs whether I'm at my desk or on a beach. That small move is the whole episode. Every business has...

AI is winning real court cases right now, and I know the feeling firsthand. A few years ago I represented myself across five court appearances in a case that mattered to my family, using ChatGPT to build the case and local duty counsel to keep it legal. I won four of those five appearances. The fifth one still stings, and it taught me more than the four wins did. In this episode, I walk through ex...

Claude launched Fable as its most powerful model yet. Within days, the US government placed it under export controls, and Anthropic had to disable it for every customer to comply. In E15, Jeff uses that overnight shutdown to make the case at the heart of Decision 5 of The High-Stakes AI Playbook. Never hinge your business on a single vendor, a single model, or a single platform. He walks through t...

Episode 14: You Don't Need AI A lot of operators are asking lately whether they really need AI. The honest answer surprises most of them. Nobody really needs AI. It is a tool, and tools serve specific purposes. What most operators get wrong is treating AI as a category instead of as a deployment choice. What you'll hear: - Why AI tools are designed for engagement the same way social media platform...

Episode 13: Your AI Bill Shouldn't Scare You Most operators looking at AI see the headline pricing and budget for that. What they miss is the way AI tools actually charge, which is by token consumption. Long chatty inputs and detailed outputs both consume tokens, and the bill arrives at the end of the month based on what you used. The fix is not about using less AI. The fix is matching the model y...

The Signal E12: Amplify, Don't Replace Humans Big Tech is selling owners a story about AI that says cut staff, deploy AI, and watch the stock surge. That playbook works for Big Tech. It does not work for businesses where people are on the job site, in the field, in the clinic, or in the truck. This episode walks through three real AI deployments from high-stakes businesses and ends with the three-...

Big Tech is telling owners they have to build with AI or get left behind. That story is wrong about how most real businesses actually work. This episode opens with three patterns from a year of building AI agents alongside hands-on owners and CEOs of high-stakes companies. - AI moves fast (and breaks things every model update). - Specificity hurts AI performance (which is why knowing when to deplo...

Markets are at record highs. Most sellers are reporting flat or down numbers against last year. The disconnect is the story of this episode. I break down the three categories of government activity creating buying triggers in 2026: tax incentives, direct funding programs, and policy mandates. Real examples include IRS Section 179 (where one auto dealer used the 100% same-year write-off to 5X comme...

After a year of building AI products for sales teams in high-stakes government markets, the question I keep getting asked hasn't changed. People want to know if AI is going to replace them. My answer hasn't changed either. In this episode, I walk through three places I've deployed AI in real businesses. SOS Signals for B2G research, a voice onboarding agent for a colleague's fast-growing services...

A founder I was advising once asked me whether we should hire fifty business development reps to scale his global team faster. I told him to wait. What happened next is the story behind this episode. Four months of working the formula. Six meetings per rep per month, climbing to fourteen. A plateau that taught me something I've carried into every founder conversation since: optimization works fast...

Most subcontractors selling to government have the same quiet problem. Their pipeline depends on Prime contractors remembering to bring them in. That works until it doesn't. In this episode, Jeff walks through what happened when he tried to solve this problem for a flood mitigation company in the years after Hurricane Sandy. The RFP tools failed. The Prime networking worked sometimes. What actuall...

I used to celebrate 125 cold calls in a single hour. Reps on my teams would race each other for bragging rights, free lunches, and a spot at the top of the leaderboard. We called it Pipeline Day, and it was one of the best things I ever brought to a sales floor. Last Thursday, I brought it back. I sent 20 emails through one channel, and every message was built from verified Signal data. I got the...

My partner broke her toe last week. We sat in a hospital waiting room for five hours on a set appointment. While she waited, I pulled out my phone and started researching. Within an hour I had found a live negotiated RFP in Nova Scotia, a provincial mandate in New Brunswick, a $5.2 million contract in Ontario, and an $11 million contract in Newfoundland and Labrador. All of them aimed at solving t...

Right now, TSA wait times are the longest in history. Four-plus hours at Houston. Lines stretching into parking lots at JFK. Hundreds of TSA officers quitting, thousands calling out, and ICE agents handing out water bottles to travelers who just want to make their flight. I used to be in those lines two or three times a month. Vancouver to Croatia, Germany, and everywhere between, living out of a...

Something happened when I sat down to record this episode that I wasn’t expecting. I kept looking at the three slides I built and thought, "This doesn’t look like a year’s worth of work.” The framework looks simple because I worked hard to make it simple, and there’s a meaningful difference between those two things. What I can’t compress into three slides is the pattern recognition that tells you...

I've spent 20 years building and managing GTM teams. I've tried every approach I could find to solve the same problem: how do you get the right account intelligence, on the right agency, at the right time, without burning your most valuable people to get it? In this episode, I walk through five approaches I've used personally, or watched clients use, and why each one eventually broke down. I'm not...

In this episode, Jeff Swan breaks down how political and regulatory shifts directly impact B2G sellers, marketers, and founders. Starting with a real conversation he had over coffee with a founder who lost two major state contracts when the administration changed, Jeff shares his own experience pivoting his infrastructure sales pipeline during COVID after the former head of FEMA explained on his p...