Jacob Laurvigen
Thoughts
Essays exploring the future, human experience, business, trust and value. Each offers a perspective to consider and room for a different answer.
The “Thoughts from” labels refer to when the thinking began.
Thinking about the future
5 thoughtsIf we build the world what do we owe its inhabitants
Thoughts from April 2025
The simulation question usually begins with us.
The map belongs in the operating plan
Thoughts from July 2026
A business can have customers in one country, invoices in another, software running in a third and critical hardware passing through several more.
Reputation when the reader is a machine
Thoughts from October 2026
Imagine being introduced by someone who has read widely about you, retained an uncertain mixture of old and new information, and feels no social discomfort about summarising it with confidence.
The colleague needs boundaries
Thoughts from August 2026
The personal AI I find interesting would remember why a task matters.
Building and owning
5 thoughtsRebuilding a business that already has customers
Thoughts from July 2025
A company can have loyal customers, recurring revenue and a team that understands its market, yet still organise its work around limitations that are disappearing.
AI can work while its financing disappoints
Thoughts from May 2026
A useful technology can arrive on time and still disappoint the people who financed it.
Where value survives when software becomes easier to build
Thoughts from April 2026
It is becoming easier to show a customer something that looks like the software they asked for.
The physical limits behind the AI economy
Thoughts from August 2026
A proposed data centre can look complete in a presentation.
Trust and authority
5 thoughtsWhen software gets a new user
Thoughts from April 2026
Most business software assumes that its user has eyes, a mouse and a working tolerance for menus.
The permission has to fit the action
Thoughts from September 2026
“Make the agent safe” sounds like an instruction until somebody has to implement it.
Evidence starts before execution
Thoughts from July 2026
An assistant sends a document to the wrong recipient.
Read the policy before the incident
Thoughts from July 2026
There is a simple idea I keep coming back to: let an organisation bring its insurance policy into the design of its evidence system.
Know who controls the keys
Thoughts from October 2026
A service can promise a great deal about security while depending on somebody else to perform the decisive action.
Value and incentives
5 thoughtsWhen useful AI gets smaller
Thoughts from May 2026
There is an interesting possibility hiding behind the race to build larger AI systems: a meaningful share of useful intelligence may become cheap enough to run close to the person using it.
Who benefits when an AI company goes public
Thoughts from August 2026
An IPO has a headline audience: the new shareholders.
Software has a life after the demo
Thoughts from July 2025
There is something genuinely exciting about describing a piece of software and watching a working version appear.
The next product may already have a customer
Thoughts from October 2026
A company looking for its next growth opportunity often starts by asking what new product it could build.
The revenue behind the multiple
Thoughts from October 2026
Two businesses can report the same revenue and offer a buyer very different futures.
From the existing archive
Earlier perspectives
- Building in a world that keeps changing the rules
Political risk, technological dependencies and the practical value of retaining control.
- When AI becomes the user
Where value moves when agents work directly with data, permissions and business logic.
- What changed in your market?
Why collecting market data begins with the decisions a business needs to make.