I was 16 years old when I wrote my first program at Illinois Institute of Technology.
A few years later, I found myself inside International Harvester — one of America's oldest industrial giants — watching it fight for its life.
The stock was at $7 when I arrived.
It was $35 when I left.
The transformation wasn't accidental. Someone saw the pattern. Someone moved first.
I've spent 50 years watching that same sequence repeat.
Crisis arrives. Most people freeze. A few people see the gap. Those people win.
Anthropic just handed you one of those moments.
Anthropic raised at a $350 billion valuation.
That's the headline everyone ran with.
But buried in their release was a data chart that matters more than the valuation number.
It shows where AI agents are actually being used today.
Software engineering: 49.7%.
Everything else?
Single digits.
Marketing and copywriting: 4.4%.
Sales and CRM: 4.3%.
Finance and accounting: 3.0%.
Data analysis: 3.0%.
E-commerce: 1.3%. Healthcare: 1.0%.
Stop and read those numbers again.
These are not niche markets. These are trillion-dollar industries. And AI agents have barely touched them.
Here's what most analysts will get wrong about this data.
They'll frame it as an AI capability story. They'll say agents aren't ready for healthcare or finance yet. They'll talk about regulation and risk.
That's the wrong lens.
This is a workflow story.
Developers adopted AI agents first because building tools is what developers do. They had the technical fluency. They built the integrations. They rewired their workflows before anyone else had a map.
The result? They captured half the entire usage share.
Not because AI is only good at code.
Because they moved first.
Every other industry on that chart is still running pre-AI workflows.
And that gap — between what's possible and what's deployed — is where the next generation of business value gets created.
When International Harvester became Navistar, I watched two kinds of people.
The first kind looked at the crisis and froze.
The second kind looked at the crisis and asked: what does this reorganize?
The second kind built careers. The first kind got left behind.
When AT&T broke up and Illinois Bell went through its transformation, same pattern. When MCI collapsed into WorldCom and WorldCom collapsed into bankruptcy — same pattern.
Crisis doesn't destroy opportunity.
Crisis relocates it.
Right now, that opportunity is relocating from engineering into every other major industry on the planet.
The question isn't whether AI agents will transform marketing, sales, finance, and healthcare.
They will.
The question is: who will redesign the workflows first?
Most businesses will not capture this opportunity.
Not because they lack money. Not because they lack talent.
Because they're waiting for someone else to build the playbook.
They'll hire another analyst. Commission another report. Attend another conference.
And while they wait — someone else will rebuild their industry's workflows from scratch.
I've seen it happen four times in my career.
The pattern doesn't change.
Only the technology does.
Let me be specific.
Marketing and copywriting at 4.4% agent adoption means 95.6% of marketing workflows are still running on pre-AI systems. That's not a risk. That's a gap.
Sales and CRM at 4.3% means the entire revenue function of most companies has not been reimagined yet.
Healthcare at 1.0% means one of the most data-intensive industries in the world is operating at near-zero agent integration.
Each of those percentages represents a delta between what exists and what's possible.
That delta is where new business models get built.
That delta is where established players get disrupted.
That delta is the crisis-to-revenue opportunity hiding in plain sight.
I didn't build MAD 2.0 to be another business newsletter.
There are enough of those.
I built it because pattern recognition is a competitive weapon — and most executives are still operating without it.
MAD 2.0 delivers visual strategic intelligence. Mind maps. Opportunity gap analysis. The kind of structured thinking that turns a chart like Anthropic's into a concrete business move.
Not theory.
Not hype.
Signal.
If you want to see the next gap before your competitors do —
Subscribe to MAD 2.0 below.
Stop Reading. Start Seeing.
P.S. The leaders who will win the next five years are already redesigning their workflows. If you're still consuming information without acting on it — MAD 2.0 isn't for you. If you're ready to move — welcome.
