Uphoff on Media Podcast

Anthropic and Salesforce announced Claude Tag on June 23, 2026. Most of the coverage framed it as a Slack upgrade. That positioning is wrong. What shipped two weeks ago is a signal about where enterprise AI is going, and the implications go well past faster meeting summaries. Here’s what you need to understand about what actually changed, which functions will be impacted first, and what the next 2...

A few posts ago, I made the case that Vibe Coding eliminates the queue: the wait for an engineer to build the thing you need. Last post, Solo Scale showed what happens when you remove the ceiling on how much one expert can supervise. Neither one, by itself, changes how your business actually works. Loop Engineering is what does. It’s the bridge between “I can build this” and “this runs the busines...

There’s a conversation happening about what AI means for software creation. Elena Verna at Lovable calls it Mom-and-Pop SaaS. The thesis is smart: as the cost of building software collapses, domain experts — not just developers — become builders. She’s right. And it’s only half the story. The bigger shift isn’t happening in software products. It’s happening in services. Agentic AI and vibe coding...

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk to the Southern California chapter of the Counselors of Real Estate. Seasoned operators. People who have financed, built, and managed commercial real estate through multiple cycles. Smart, experienced, skeptical. When I shared a slide showing that five technology companies plan to spend nearly $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, the room went quiet....

Something has gone wrong with digital networking. It was already broken in 2020. I wrote about it then and the response was significant. Thousands of people read it, shared it, and the engagement was immediate. Hundreds responded with their own stories. Worst LinkedIn outreach messages. Cringe-worthy cold emails. Tales of digital networking gone horribly wrong. Six years later, the problem hasn’t...

I was recently asked to speak to the Southern California chapter of the Counselors of Real Estate about the impact AI is having on their industry. The irony hit me the moment I started preparing. The Counselors of Real Estate is one of the most selective professional organizations in the country. Membership requires a minimum of ten years in the commercial real estate business, a 31-page applicati...

Part 3 of B2B Media in the Machine Age A note on timing : This post is publishing on a Friday, a break from our usual Monday/Wednesday cadence. The reason is a good one. I'll be back Monday with a piece that came directly out of a presentation I gave this week to a commercial real estate leadership group. I was invited to speak on agentic AI and its impact on commercial real estate, and it clarifi...

Part 2 of B2B Media in the Machine Age Something significant is being built from the ruins of ad-supported B2B media. Not a replacement for what was lost. Something more valuable and sustainable. Call it the vertical intelligence company. These businesses don’t look much like the B2B media companies that came before them. They’re not chasing page views and declining CPMs. They’re not dependent on...

Part 1 of B2B Media in the Machine Age B2B media isn’t dying. It’s being restructured by forces most of the industry still hasn’t fully identified. Over the next three posts, I’m going to name them. This series covers how the category got here, where it’s going, and what the restructuring means for the people running these businesses right now. I’ve spent most of my career inside B2B media. Publis...

The most useful thing I can offer on the AI disruption isn’t a prediction. It’s a pattern. One I’ve lived through before, at scale, in this sector. I was in the front seat of the roller coaster. At the time, I was running a fast-growing, $300 million print-centric B2B media business, and by every metric, we were succeeding. Then the Internet arrived. Not gradually, or at least it didn’t feel that...

Last week’s post, “The AI Layoff Myth" generated a ton of discussion: on the blog, on LinkedIn, and in private conversations with operators and executives across the industry. That response pointed directly to the question I'm being asked most in my advisory practice right now. This post is my answer, and the framework I've built around it. “How do we move?” That question comes up in nearly every...

Walk into any boardroom or investor meeting right now and you’ll hear the same narrative: AI is eliminating jobs at scale. Executives cite it as justification for workforce reductions. Investors ask about it in every portfolio review. Business media repeats it as fact. It isn’t. The AI layoff narrative is sloppy, opportunistic, and, in most cases, factually wrong. The companies attributing cuts to...

This is the fourth and final post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B marketing in the agentic AI era. Post 1, “How B2B Marketing Lost Its Way,” set the historical stage. Post 2, “B2B Marketing Is Broken. Brand Is Why. And Brand Is the Fix,” made the case for positioning as the foundation of everything. Post 3, “The Stack That Broke Marketing (And...

This is the third post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B marketing in the agentic AI era. Post 1, “How B2B Marketing Lost Its Way,” set the historical stage. Post 2, “B2B Marketing Is Broken. Brand Is Why. And Brand Is the Fix,” made the case for positioning as the foundation of everything. This post examines the technology and organizational ar...

B2B Marketing in the Machine Age | Part 2 of 4 This is the second post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B marketing in the agentic AI era. Post 1, “How B2B Marketing Lost Its Way,” set the historical stage: the decisions, incentives, and technology bets that brought the function to where it stands today. This post, “B2B Marketing Is Broken. Brand...

B2B Marketing in the Machine Age | Series Opener This is the first post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B marketing in the agentic AI era. This post sets the stage: the decisions, incentives, and technology bets that brought the function to where it stands today. Post 2 examines The Work: specifically why brand and positioning have become the mo...

Uphoff on Media | Field-Tested Frameworks When I became President and CEO of ThomasNet.com, I inherited a research project already underway with a firm called Strategyn. They were conducting over 300 individual interviews with Engineers, Procurement professionals, and MROs, all focused on the jobs to be done around custom manufacturing sourcing. The core value proposition of ThomasNet was supplier...

There is a room I keep walking into. The faces change. The industry changes. The agenda changes. But the missing person is always the same. The customer isn’t there. I recently sat with a group of senior Procurement executives. Smart, experienced operators redesigning their workflows for the agentic AI era. The conversation was serious, these were executives working through real transformation. Wh...

When the CEOs of Walmart and Coca-Cola announced their retirements, both cited AI disruption as a contributing factor. Let that land for a moment. Two of the most experienced executives in global business, leaders of companies with combined revenues approaching a trillion dollars, named AI as a reason for stepping back. This isn’t a technology story. It’s a leadership story. It has direct implicat...

There’s a lyric from the Oasis song “Wonderwall” that’s been living rent-free in my head every time I read another paywall story: “I said maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me.” That’s the emotion publishers brought to paywalls when the model went mainstream in the early 2010s. Not strategy. Emotion. Hope masquerading as a business plan. I don’t say that to be cruel. I say it because I was...

The most important thing Sequoia Capital published in the last year wasn’t a market map or a fund announcement. It was two sentences: “The cloud transition was software-as-a-service. The AI transition is service-as-software.” Ten words. The entire business model of enterprise software: two decades of per-seat licensing, recurring revenue multiples, and stack complexity, reframed in a single breath...

Gartner’s latest research: buyers spend just 17% of their total purchasing time in direct contact with vendors. 83% define their requirements before talking to sales. 81% already have a preferred vendor when they finally engage a rep. The buying journey isn’t a funnel anymore. It’s a verdict with an appeals process attached. The conventional worry about all of this is disintermediation. If buyers...

B2B brand building is about to be restructured from the ground up. Not incrementally refined. Not optimized. Structurally inverted. Here’s the reality most B2B CMOs haven’t fully reckoned with yet: in the Agentic AI era, your brand is no longer being evaluated by a human audience with machine tools. It’s being evaluated by a Machine + Human system. Agents and buyers working together, simultaneousl...

When Doug McMillon announced he was stepping down as CEO of Walmart after more than a decade at the helm, he didn’t blame the board. He didn’t cite personal reasons. He said something that should stop every senior executive in their tracks: “With what’s happening with AI, I could start this next big set of transformations with AI, but I couldn’t finish.” Read that again. The CEO of the largest com...

By Tony Uphoff · Uphoff on Media · 2026 In my ongoing conversations with B2B media, marketing, and tech leaders, the subject of Vibe Coding keeps coming up. I’ve been shown remarkable engineering productivity gains — 10X+ — by multiple, experienced software developers. I’ve had several conversations with Enterprise Tech leaders who chuckle and suggest the hype is overblown and that Vibe Coding won...