Xavier Bertels

MCP is going to enable all sorts of business flows inside of Chatbots. It will pull in data from everywhere, and it will add your personal context on top of that.

If you’re building a chatbot focused on just one vertical, your product will commoditize fast. There’s no real moat left in basic vertical chat experiences.

The real power moves to data repositories with robust APls on top. Own valuable data, expose it clearly, and layer specific vertical logic on top: compliance, workflow enablement… That’s how you’ll build something that will outlast the wave of general purpose chatbots that are coming to eat your software.

I’m in the middle of building and launching a new product, in stealth mode. It’s entirely built by me. And yet, it dawned on me that I still wrote a spec. And a roadmap.

The biggest change this time was that it was written as much for myself, as it was written for a machine. And it was also written by a machine. It looked like this:

1. Write spec together with ChatGPT
2. Write implementation plan together with ChatGPT
3. Feed it to Windsurf

In all cases I’ve been using the GPT 4.1 model and it’s phenomenally good. Inside Windsurf I’ve sometimes switched between GPT 4.1 and Windsurf’s own SWE-1 model.

It would seem that so far, I haven’t been able to replace clear thinking with AI though. As I’ve written before these LLMs can function as a mirror or a museum. They still don’t have real creativity and agency to start something new. But for how long…

When I joined my current company full time in 2021, I found a product/engineering org littered with complexity. Various people had tried to install all sorts of systems on the product/engineering side; scrum, agile, rituals here, manifestos there, automations everywhere. In that context, they had also hired new people with the idea of going faster. It was near the end of covid and people thought the financial free for all would last forever.

I found that situation incredibly flammable. It was like someone had poured kerosene into a poorly constructed engine and was about to ignite it.

So I went to work. I canceled 95% of rituals like daily standups that served no purpose but to keep up the appearance of progress. I analysed, then canceled software subscriptions for tools that could be replaced by GitHub or Slack. There was a transition period but ultimately we started shipping more, faster.

Then last year, I did the same for the customer success org, which was also in a dire state.

Now it’s 2025, 4 years later, and we’re serving more customers with a substantially smaller team. I’m proud of that achievement because I saw what was coming and was able to turn the situation around by focusing on my favourite mantra: complexity fails, simplicity scales.

Too many people debate ideas and ideals ad nauseam. Annoyingly often without having all the facts. Almost always without having first hand experience with really building anything. Few things separate the wheat from the chaff more quickly than inviting them into the arena.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Once in a while, a technology comes along that changes everything. Then a company comes along and creates a product that changes everything. It’s always seemingly overnight and it’s always inevitable after the fact.

If we’re lucky, we may experience a few of those changes in our lifetime. 18 years ago, that technology was multi touch and the product was the iPhone. Three years ago, that technology was Large Language Models and the product was ChatGPT.

For companies who are looking to do better than their peers, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to these changes and catch the wave, or slide into irrelevance.

Companies who embraced mobile technology outperformed those who didn’t. Companies who are embracing AI will outperform those who don’t. Momentum plays an important role.

The tricky thing is, you don’t see the difference between these companies until it’s too late. Organisations where people slowly built experience with AI systems already have a phenomenal head start.

I think we have a one year window until the opportunity window closes again for a while. If you’re running a business, now is the time to be on the right side of the shift.