Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Welcome to Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge with Dave Anderson, Mark McCann and Mike O'Reilly. We want to share our tools and techniques so that you can use them to communicate your Technical Strategy with your C-Suite and business owners. We want to help you to build a serverless first organisation. We will show you how to use Wardley Mapping to gain situational awareness of where your cloud applications and business are. And then how to develop your technical capability in away that builds engineering standards to set your organisation up for sustainable success.Sounds like the tools and techniques that you need - then hit the subscribe!-ABOUT- Dave, Mark and Mike are senior technical architects/leaders passionate about driving technical strategy. They have led transformation journeys, technical excellence, cloud adoption and tech strategies in many industries.Active in various technologies including ML/AI, Public Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), Engineering, Product, Cyber and UX.
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Serverless Craic Ep81 AI - differentiator or commodity?
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🎙 AI: Commodity or Differentiator? | The Value Flywheel in 2026
AI has taken a step change. Over the past few months, adoption has accelerated dramatically — but are organisations applying it with clarity, or just chasing hype?
In this episode of The Serverless Edge, we unpack:
AI as a commodity vs differentiator
Why clarity of purpose matters more than ever
The risks of “vibe coding” critical systems
Security, blast radius, and agent containment
Accelerating your Value Flywheel safely with AI
Why you cannot outsource critical thinking to an LLM
If you're a CTO, architect, or engineering leader trying to navigate AI adoption without introducing systemic risk — this conversation is for you.
⏱ Chapter Markers
00:00 – The AI Step Change: What Happened in Late 2025?
02:00 – AI as Commodity vs Differentiator
03:10 – The Cost of Building What’s Already a Commodity
04:20 – Internal Acceleration vs Product Features
05:30 – Training Data, Sovereignty & Enterprise Risk
06:45 – Where AI Becomes Dangerous in Your Organisation
08:00 – Agentic AI & Blast Radius: Why Containment Matters
09:20 – Competing With the Platform Providers
11:10 – SaaS Killed by AI? The AWS Reinvent Effect
13:00 – “Vibe Coding” Core Business Systems (And Why That’s Madness)
15:00 – Where You Shouldn’t Experiment With AI
16:00 – Faster Feedback Loops & Engineering Throughput
17:30 – Discipline, Metrics & the North Star
18:20 – Using AI to Improve Your Own Thinking
19:00 – Context Is Everything (And Harder Than You Think)
20:10 – Organisational Design for Humans and Agents
21:00 – Turning the Flywheel Before Adding AI
21:50 – Why Sitting on the Sidelines Isn’t an Option
🔎 Key Themes
1. Clarity Before Capability
Most organisations should consume AI, not build foundational models. The differentiator is rarely the LLM itself — it’s how clearly you understand:
Your user needs
Your value chain
Your supply chain dependencies
Your regulatory boundaries
Without that clarity, AI simply accelerates confusion.
2. Blast Radius & Containment
Agentic systems introduce a new risk profile.
If you deploy AI into:
Poorly governed SDLC environments
Weakly defined security domains
Legacy operational processes
You expand blast radius unintentionally.
Think SaaS isolation. Think sandboxing. Think containment by design.
3. Speed Changes Everything
If AI compresses delivery cycles from weeks to hours:
Your product discovery loop must accelerate
Decision-making must tighten
Metrics must be explicit
Engineering must sit inside the feedback loop
AI increases velocity — but velocity without direction is chaos.
4. You Cannot Outsource Critical Thinking
AI can help:
Refine your North Star
Improve impact mapping
Sharpen KPIs
Draft Wardley Maps
Analyse value chains
But it cannot replace:
Context
Judgement
Organisational alignment
Strategic trade-offs
You still need to do the hard yards.
đź“š Related Concepts & Resources
The Value Flywheel Effect
Wardley Mapping
North Star Framework
Impact Mapping
SDLC Acceleration
Agentic AI Architecture
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
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