AI & Troy

I’ve been thinking about Troy lately. You know the story - impenetrable walls, a city so fortified that it took ten years and a wooden horse to breach it. Historians love to talk about those walls as a marvel of ancient engineering. But I wonder… what it must have been like to live outside them.

When you build walls, people fear what’s on the other side. They wonder what you’re protecting.

What you’re hiding. They build their own walls in response. Pretty soon, everyone’s fortified and no one’s moving forward.

This year, we built a lot of AI. Systems that predict, recommend, and optimize tons of processes. We didn’t build walls – we enabled everyone to build with us. I’m extraordinarily proud of what the team accomplished.

The story I keep thinking about though, is the handful of people who stood at a crossroads and had to decide: build walls or get vulnerable. Some chose vulnerability. They admitted what they didn’t know. They leaned into discomfort. One person told me, “I’m worried this makes my expertise irrelevant.” Another said, “I don’t understand it, and I’m scared to look stupid.”

That kind of honesty? That’s the opposite of walls. That’s emotional Troy without the fortification.

And those people? They’re thriving. Not because they figured it all out, but because they were willing to NOT know. They took their expertise and asked, “How does this get better with AI?” instead of “How do I protect this from AI?” They went on journeys - often uncertain - and came out the other side not just surviving but leading. And my team met them with the same vulnerability so we could learn and grow together.

What about the walls, though? I see them going up. Smart people, talented people, building fortifications around themselves. Convinced that if they just protect what they have, they’ll be safe. The future doesn’t care about your walls. It’s coming anyway. And when you spend all your energy defending, you miss the head start you could’ve had on something inevitable.

Trust is the sum of credibility, reliability, and intimacy, divided by self-orientation. Walls are pure self-orientation. Vulnerability is what happens when you lower that denominator. When you admit, “This scares me, but I’m going in anyway.”

The walls at Troy were impressive until they weren’t. What I’m most proud of isn’t the automation or the efficiency or the metrics. It’s watching people choose vulnerability over fortification. Watching them trade walls for bridges.

Heading into this year, I keep thinking about dynamic incompleteness - this idea that you don’t need all the answers before you start. You just need the courage to begin and the willingness to be wrong along the way.