The Agentic Stack Wars: Part Two - ARCHITECTURE
The article breaks down the "Agentic Stack Wars" by revealing that every enterprise AI agent follows a common five‑layer architecture: data, orchestrator, connectivity, action, and compute. It argues that vendors aren’t inventing new paradigms but are battling to own specific layers, creating varying degrees of lock‑in. Google and Microsoft push fully cloud‑native stacks, while Anthropic and OpenAI rely on desktop‑tethered runtimes, and Perplexity positions itself as a cloud‑agnostic middle ground. Understanding these layer‑ownership bets helps buyers gauge cost, control, and migration risk before committing budgets.
All of This Has Happened Before
The author compares four high‑profile digital‑health failures—Olive AI, IBM Watson Health, Carbon Health and Babylon Health—to reveal a repeatable playbook of overpromising and underdelivering. In each case, bold claims were funded before any independent proof, with elite investors and government...
Strategic Insights: The Last King of Babylon
Babylon Health, founded by Iranian‑born entrepreneur Ali Parsa in 2013, rode a wave of AI‑driven telemedicine hype to a 2021 IPO that valued the company at $4.2 billion. Within two years, mounting regulatory scrutiny, clinician distrust and operational shortfalls forced the...
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Prompt
A senior product leader revealed that their board is pushing a ten‑fold increase in feature output by leveraging AI‑assisted "vibe coding." The author warns that while AI eliminates the engineering friction that once acted as a quality filter, it also...
Strategic Insight: Carbon Health’s Boom, Bust, and Bankruptcy
Carbon Health surged during the pandemic, scaling from a few clinics to over 125 locations across 13 states by leveraging COVID‑19 testing sites and telehealth, and raising more than $600 million in venture capital, including a $350 million Series D at a $3.3 billion...