What Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #002Taste Is Still the DifferentiatorCurated, Not AggregatedWhat Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #002Taste Is Still the DifferentiatorCurated, Not Aggregated
Weekly Links
What Caught My Eye
Curated links on culture, brands, design and building.
Week of 20 March 2026 · Issue #002
↓ eight links worth keeping a tab open for
AI & BuildingCulture & BrandsDesign & ProductStrategy & BusinessWild Card
M.G. Siegler channels Steve Jobs to argue that as AI makes building trivially easy, the gap between competent and exceptional comes down to one thing: aesthetic judgement. The ability to know what to build, not just how.
This is the thesis I keep coming back to. The model is not the product. The person deciding what the model should make is the product. If you have taste, you have leverage. If you don't, you're about to find out.
^ said it better than I could
Send to:every founder who thinks shipping fast is the same as shipping well
Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are all building infrastructure for AI agents to autonomously make purchases. Stripe-backed Tempo has launched a Machine Payments Protocol. Visa and Mastercard are issuing virtual cards directly to AI agents.
This is the invisible interface moment. Commerce is about to happen without a checkout page, without a basket, without a human clicking "buy." The brands that understand agent-readable product data will win. The ones optimising for eyeballs are already behind.
command-line commerce is here
Send to:the e-commerce lead still A/B testing button colours
Anthropic interviewed over 80,000 Claude users across 159 countries. The top desire? More time with family. The top fear? Losing human autonomy. People want AI to make their lives better, not to replace them.
The research confirms what builders already feel: the winning use case for AI is not automation for its own sake. It is giving people back the hours they lose to tedious work so they can spend them on what matters. Build for that.
80K people can't be wrong
Send to:anyone who thinks "AI" just means "chatbots"
As AI agents mediate more of discovery and recommendation, niche brands face a strategic dilemma: optimise for AI visibility and lose your mystique, or stay deliberately AI-invisible and let scarcity do the selling.
This is the best brand strategy piece I've read this month. The argument is counterintuitive but correct: in an AI-saturated discovery layer, opacity becomes a competitive advantage. The brands you have to know about become the brands worth knowing about.
the anti-SEO strategy
Send to:the marketing director who just asked "how do we optimise for AI search?"
Mastercard is acquiring stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for $1.8 billion. Not a toe-dip, not a pilot. A full strategic commitment to crypto-native payment rails at the infrastructure level.
When a company with 3.3 billion cards in circulation acquires stablecoin infrastructure at this scale, it is not a bet on crypto speculation. It is a bet on the future plumbing of money. The Foundry team will be all over this.
$1.8B is not a pilot programme
Send to:anyone who still thinks stablecoins are a niche crypto thing
James McAulay's free workshop walks through building an AI copilot for go-to-market, sales, and fundraising. It starts with basic AI assistance and progresses to full agent capabilities using Claude or ChatGPT with integrations.
The best product education right now is not courses or bootcamps. It is people showing their working. This workshop does that: takes you from "I use ChatGPT sometimes" to "I have an agent that does my pipeline work" in under an hour.
show, don't sell
Send to:the founder who keeps saying "I should learn AI" but hasn't started
NBCUniversal just announced "Bravoverse," an AI-powered platform that creates personalised fan experiences across its reality TV franchises. Individual viewers get tailored content, recommendations, and interactive moments based on their viewing behaviour.
This is what happens when a media company finally treats its audience data as a product, not just an ad-targeting tool. The play here is not "AI content." It is AI curation of existing content for an audience that already self-selects. Smart.
taste-matched media, at scale
Send to:the media strategist still pitching "second screen experiences"
HP printed 319 individual A4 pages and physically stuck them to a billboard. No digital screen, no projection mapping, no AR. Just paper, ink, and the product itself as the medium. A lo-fi flex in a high-tech category.
In a world where every brand is chasing the AI-generated, digitally rendered, algorithmically optimised version of everything, HP went the other way. The craft is the message. The constraint is the creativity. This is how you make people stop scrolling and actually look up.
319 sheets of pure confidence
Send to:the creative director who keeps getting told "make it more digital"
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