The Cathedral, the Bazaar & the AI Economy
AI's future demands both cathedral-style labs to push frontiers and bazaar-style open models to spread advances, boosting innovation and growth.
.png)
James Gross
James Gross is the co-founder of Alephic, an AI-first consultancy tackling marketing's most complex challenges. Previously, James co-founded Percolate, a pioneering content marketing platform serving giants like Unilever and GE, which was acquired by Seismic in 2019. He also co-founded Micromobility Industries, the largest community for small electric vehicles, and is the founder of Ride AI, focusing on autonomous vehicle marketing challenges. James has a track record of identifying technological shifts and building solutions that help enterprises navigate transformative moments in marketing and mobility.
Posts by James Gross
The Expert Buyer in AI
The most important person in an enterprise AI deal may not be the budget owner, user, technical reviewer, or internal champion. It is the Expert Buyer, whose domain expertise determines whether an AI system becomes differentiated or merely average.
It isn't Misinformation it is a Miss of Marketing
People may fear AI and data centers not from ignorance but from lack of trust. Marketing must make the real costs and benefits clear to earn public buy-in.
Destroying Demand & The Anti-Bubble
AI's explosive demand meets a lagging supply chain, throttling growth and potentially driving rampant inflation. What are we doing?
Noah on Bloomberg: Claude Code and the AI Coding Boom
On Bloomberg’s Odd Lots, Noah Brier highlights Claude Code as a “computer within your computer,” using file system access and Unix commands to bypass...
Announcement: Ride AI 2026 - It's Time to Market
On April 15, 2026 in San Francisco, Ride AI 2026 brings together AV pioneers, regulators, and AI experts to tackle the final frontier: marketing autonomous...
You Don’t Clean the Garbage Can by Labeling the Trash
Rather than wrestling with bureaucratic checklists and hand-crafted rules, organizations should define the desired outcome and let AI’s computational scale...
The SaaS Industrial Complex: When Their Mirror Becomes Your Mold
Just as Eisenhower warned of a powerful military-industrial alliance and Conway observed that systems mirror their creators’ communication structures,...
Alephic Won a Cannes Lion
Alephic’s AI-powered StarSearch tool teamed up with Amazon’s XCM to mine customer reviews and spin authentic feedback into an award-winning holiday campaign,...
Autonomous Vehicles Are Now a Marketing Challenge
Technological breakthroughs have historically shifted from engineering challenges to marketing battles, as seen with personal computing, the internet, search...