- Essays··8 min read
Twelve Thousand at Shoprite, No Baseline Underneath
Shoprite runs generative-AI tools across 12,000 employees — 6.9% of its 174,000-person workforce — through a proprietary routing gateway that dispatches each request to the least expensive capable model. The group has not published a pre-deployment baseline, a cycle-time figure, or a per-engineer throughput measure against which the programme can be audited. METR's second-round productivity data shows why that gap matters: the counterfactual is disappearing faster than the measurement apparatus can catch it.
enterprise-airetail-aiworkforce-productivityai-measurementRead - Essays··10 min read
The Cart That Signs Itself
The question in agentic commerce has moved. A language model can assemble a cart, so the live issue is who holds legal authority when that cart signs itself against a live payments rail. The planner-executor split now carries cryptographic mandate obligations with EU regulatory teeth. The missing component in every production deployment studied here is an eval harness rigorous enough to catch the 5–10% of cases that define next quarter's returns rate.
agentic-commerceplanner-executorretail-aipayments-infrastructureRead