— Notes from Mallin

Blog

Thoughts on selling, building Mallin, and everything we're learning along the way.

• September 15, 2026·4 min read

  Labor Day is not a thank you note

  Every productivity revolution before this one got partly converted into time, and never automatically. Someone converted it. The AI dividend is real and arriving, and right now almost nobody is deciding what it turns into.

• September 14, 2026·4 min read

  The penalty for honesty

  The research is blunt about it. Using AI quietly costs you almost nothing, admitting you used it costs you a lot, and nobody can tell the difference anyway. That equilibrium rewards concealment, and it is going to expire.

• September 8, 2026·5 min read

  Your time savings are on someone else's calendar

  The productivity argument keeps measuring the moment work gets produced. The cost moved to the moment it gets checked, it usually lands on a different person than the one who booked the saving, and almost nobody has a number for it.

• August 31, 2026·4 min read

  Nobody has a control group

  The most rigorous measurement we have of AI at work found the opposite of what the people being measured believed. Most companies are buying on the same evidence those people had: a feeling of speed.

• August 24, 2026·5 min read

  We automated the apprenticeship

  The boring work AI is taking over was never just overhead. It was the curriculum. Companies are removing the only mechanism they have for manufacturing judgment, and assuming judgment will keep showing up anyway.

• August 17, 2026·3 min read

  AI keeps getting better. The returns aren't following.

  Even as AI capability climbs, most companies still can't turn it into returns. The gap isn't the models. It's judgment, grounded in real experience and kept honest by governance.

• August 11, 2026·3 min read

  Mallin is live: Pre-Call intelligence for the people who carry the number

  Today Mallin goes live. This is the beginning of something bigger, but it starts in one place: the moment before the call. Guidance for the seller who walks in alone, and support for the manager who can't always be in the room.