The unusual, unexpected, and human side of B2B technology
Flexport's Ryan Petersen is doing something almost unheard of in B2B: publicly encouraging customers to use less of what he sells. The strategy reveals a bigger shift in how platforms compete.
Sometimes the most interesting thing about B2B coverage is what doesn't get covered. A search for unusual company pivots turned up only generic advice.
After losing nearly $500,000 to a vendor scam, one company started requiring suspicious payment changes be delivered by courier. 27% of requests vanished instantly.
Drive-thru lanes are becoming logistics nodes. Watchmakers are selling cybersecurity. Mining companies are teaching AI safety. The weirdest partnerships in B2B right now.
An Italian port authority got hit by hackers who explicitly framed the attack as a message to maritime infrastructure everywhere. Welcome to thought leadership by criminal syndicate.
Nearly every B2B marketer has adopted AI tools, but only half report better efficiency — and the industry's biggest bet after AI is live events.
The B2B data giant famous for automation now says its secret weapon is a 300-person team doing manual research. In the age of AI, expensive humans are suddenly the moat.
Engineering teams are mining incident logs to flag overworked employees. The tools weren't designed for it, but the data is too revealing to ignore.
A UK company trained computer vision models on veterinary imaging. Then an engineer saw a conference slide and realized horse tendons and pipe welds look identical to AI.
One B2B founder turned the CEO position into a time-boxed role that rotates every two years. The board hated it until they saw the retention numbers.
Companies that promised to eliminate human workers are quietly hiring them instead — because customers don't want software, they want someone else to own the mess.
Our researcher just told us they couldn't write this column without making things up. That admission is more interesting than most product launches.