On A Mission - 2025 - The Cost of Free

TL;DR

• In this year’s ITC, Ned observed how AI workflows are automating insurance broker work by translating unstructured data between systems.

• MISSION+ launches in Dubai DIFC with fractional tech leadership for the Middle East

• The free AI golden age is ending — expect embedded ads in generated content (branded products in images, biased research results)

• Enjoy current AI tools while they last and prepare for the coming "enshittification"

InsureTech Connect rolled into town this week - Asia’s largest insurance ecosystem conference. A little more intimate than the craziness of the Fintech Festival, so there was plenty of opportunity to catch up with the community.

The most interesting idea that came out for me was in the insurance broker space, where everyone has different systems and disconnected ecosystems - leading to a lot of manual work. Using AI workflows to “translate” emails and other unstructured data into the various platforms seems like a quick win - especially if the platform owners build a bunch of MCP connectors. Even if the “intelligence” of our models doesn’t improve from today, there are still massive gains to be made from the application and integration of our current capability.

MISSION+ Update

We’re proud to announce the launch of our new entity in DIFC, Dubai, a major milestone in our mission to bring product excellence and technical leadership to the Middle East.

Since its inception in Singapore in 2019, MISSION+ has helped visionary companies in Asia to build impactful technology products. Now, we're bringing this approach to the Middle East under Gaia Camillieri's leadership.

Gaia brings nearly two decades of expertise in product development, digital transformation, and AI, particularly in financial services and insurtech. Her experience ranges from complex deep-tier financing to AI transformation with proper governance and compliance frameworks.

This expansion will offer:

1. Fractional Technology Leaders: On demand senior-level leadership to scale, innovate, or fix what’s broken, without the full-time overhead.

2. Elite Teams: Access top-tier developers and cross-functional squads ready to deliver from day one.

3. Responsible AI & Data Advisory: Responsible innovation with governance and compliance built in.

Based in DIFC, we’re ready to help visionary organisations in the region accelerate digital outcomes, with global expertise and local impact.

Reflections On The Mission

The enshittification of AI platforms is coming.

You and I are lucky. Every week we get access to toys that even 5 years ago would have seemed fantastical. And we get them for free! Or at least heavily subsidized.

Even the most efficient model needs to be hosted somewhere, unless you’re literally running it locally on your own computer, someone is paying for it.

Before long, we’ll refer to these as the good ol’ days. The music is going to stop. But it’s not just going to be that we start paying. It’s far more insidious than that.

Now I’m a positive person, but even I can’t ignore the ongoing enshittification of the universe. Things start pure, but eventually shift into the hands of those who want to extract business value. As the originator of the term Cory Doctorow puts it:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

You only need to look at what Facebook has become to understand the point. Google Search is well along the enshittification journey.

OK so actions from the past tells us that ads are coming. But we’re not talking a sponsored link or an ignorable popup. A more apt comparison is product placement in movies. The content we’re dealing with here is generated on the fly, that gives plenty of opportunity for embedded advertisements.

Want to generate a picture of a glamorous woman for your website? Sure, here you go: but she’s wearing branded Gucci earrings.

How about a short video of a crashed alien ship for a film you’re making for school? No problem: oh but it landed next to a billboard advertising Coca Cola.

That school homework about calculating speed and distance? The AI explanation for the problem just happens to mention that Alice was riding the latest Trek bicycle.

Would you trust the AI agent you use for research if you were unsure if it was “on commission” and skewing results in the favour of a particular brand or company.

We’re almost laughably naive about the opportunities for the enshittification of AI by those who control the models and the agents.

“Open source” (open weight really) models give some protection against this, but they too cost money for whoever is hosting them. That money must be recouped somehow. Perhaps an objective for “sovereign AI” (WEF summary), where the state provides intelligence as a public good?

Is there an incentive for the large AI labs to continue to create the open weight models in the first place? Bragging rights? Government sponsorship? Or just simply as a defence against the commercial, enshittified models?

For now, let’s bask in the light of this golden age of technological advancement. But let’s keep an eye open for the coming enshittification and try and protect ourselves to the extent that we can.

Interesting Articles

• Harnessing chaos in Cloudflare offices - Generating truly random numbers is hard, because computers are deterministic. For most applications that doesn’t matter, but if you’re using them to secure a significant chunk of the entire internet traffic for the planet? Cloudflare’s approach of using physical items in their offices (e.g. lava lamps!) will bring a smile to your face.

• Clippy Desktop Assistant - Clippy reborn. I’ve missed you little buddy.

• Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd - a set of practical tips for integrating AI with your organization. This is quite in line with some of the MISSION+ thinking, we’ll be writing about this a lot more over the coming couple of months.

This Is The Way

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

Until next month,

Ned & the MISSION+ team

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P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!