strategy Archives - Gérard Métrailler

July 14, 2026July 30, 2026

Your AI Agent Will Never Question the Premise

It was built to reply with the “best” existing answer. The one move it can’t make is the one now worth the most.

Ask an agent to price your product, and it hands you a polished version of what your competitors already do. That’s not a bug; it’s the objective working perfectly. A model is a machine for the most likely next thing, which means it drifts toward the average answer, the one everyone else’s agent is also producing. The expensive human move runs the other way. SpaceX did it with a rocket and found that 98% of the cost was due to inherited habit. Here’s why that move is now the edge, and why a faster agent makes skipping it more dangerous, not less.

January 27, 2026January 27, 2026

AI SaaS Pricing: How to Profit When Every Prompt Has a Real Cost

In SaaS, variable costs are familiar. AWS and Azure bills rise and fall with traffic, storage, and bandwidth, but you can usually forecast them and smooth them with commitments.

AI flips the model because cost is triggered by a mixture of behavior and model choice, not just scale. Each generation can add metered COGS, and multimodal makes the spikes sharper: images, audio transcription, voice output, and video generation can cost orders of magnitude more than a short text reply. Retries, longer outputs, bigger context windows, and tool calls amplify this fast.

Then comes the perception problem. Buyers are trained by ChatGPT and Gemini that AI feels cheap or “free” at the point of use, which anchors expectations. The executive challenge becomes defending value and margin while keeping usage predictable.

April 1, 2025April 1, 2025

GenAI for Business Leaders: Strategic Lever or Cognitive Trap?

Generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4o, have swiftly revolutionized our work dynamics. They have emerged as indispensable business tools, reshaping the modern corporate landscape. These advanced AI systems promise transformative benefits, driving unparalleled productivity, innovation, and profitability. Despite the complex challenges that come with their adoption, companies embracing GenAI are on the brink of a transformative era. The success of this journey hinges on intentional oversight, robust governance frameworks, and a strategic balance between automation and human judgment. How prepared is your organization to harness the full potential of this transformative era?

May 10, 2021May 10, 2021

It’s not your opinion, it’s your expertise that matters

Everyone has plenty of them, and sadly, many of us are not afraid of sharing them regularly. Not only that, but they often have absolutely no relation with reality. Problematically, the more authoritative your position, the more significant their effect. Yes, I’m referring to opinions. Yet ultimately, what matters is expertise, not opinions.