Ray Arell

I know I will piss off the AI lovers here, and that’s fine. This needs to be said. What is being quietly erased from the conversation is the question of where AI actually comes from. Well, every impressive response, every polished paragraph, every confident recommendation is built on the experience, hard-won judgment, and creative work of real people—often the very experts now being sidelined, devalued, and quietly ripped off in the name of efficiency. No, your favorite AI did not create...

As a company, we buy services. We work with consultants, vendors, and partners. We rely on external expertise, and we value strong, capable people who help us do our work better. What we don’t do is skip straight to transactions. In recent years, outreach has become increasingly automated and increasingly impersonal. A connection is made, and almost immediately, a pitch follows—often generic, disconnected from who we are or what we do. That approach assumes intent without context and speed...

Before I go any further, I owe you an apology. This is a heavy way to start a first blog post in 2026. I would much rather open the year with hope, momentum, and possibility than with frustration and loss. But pretending this didn’t happen, or softening it into something more comfortable, doesn’t help anyone. If we are going to move forward, we have to be honest about where we are. I am still unsure what to call what happened in 2025. It was not a recession in the traditional sense, nor was...