Newsletter: Customer Value & Hawaiian Shirts

Also more must-read Year in Reviews for 2025

Matt

Dec 21, 2025

Brixo Latest

For the past fifteen years, software teams obsessed over time to value.

How fast can we get customers to their outcome? Every click mattered. Every second of load time was scrutinized.

Then AI agents arrived, and that obsession changed.

Now the question is: “Is the agent working?”

Not “Is the customer getting what they need?”

You can see it in every demo. Teams proudly show agents that eventually solve the ask/problem.

But we’ve all experienced the reality: We make multiple attempts or rephrases of the same request or the agent confidently says it’s done when it clearly isn’t.

Sure, the customer eventually gets their outcome.

But we’re left with resentment.

That’s the part nobody’s measuring.

The frustrated acceptance. The “I guess this worked, but I hated every second of it.”

Time to value used to include the experience of getting there. Now it just means the agent finished the task. '

At Brixo, we’ve developed a new Customer Journey Flow for product managers to visualize this journey from the customer perspective. Now PMs can focus on cohorts in different stages to see what worked or didn’t work.

Is the customer asking the right questions?
Is the agent able to support these requests?
Do we need to re-train the agent on customer asks?

Ultimately, the new mission is to ensure both the Customer and the Agent meet their goals together.

If you’re interested in learning more, let me know!

What Stood Out

2025 LLM Year in Review from Andrej Karpathy

Andrej is a former co-founder of OpenAI and one of the original minds behind LLMs so this is a must read.

Direct from Karpathy:

TLDR. 2025 was an exciting and mildly surprising year of LLMs. LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected. In any case they are extremely useful and I don’t think the industry has realized anywhere near 10% of their potential even at present capability. Meanwhile, there are so many ideas to try and conceptually the field feels wide open. And as I mentioned on my Dwarkesh pod earlier this year, I simultaneously (and on the surface paradoxically) believe that we will both see rapid and continued progress and that yet there is a lot of work to be done. Strap in

What We Read/Listened/Watched

The companies making the most money from AI | The Verge

A fascinating read on the data side of AI. The article is appropriately titled “Feeding the Machine”

**How Tech’s Biggest Companies Are Offloading the Risks of the A.I. Boom

“Risk is like a tube of toothpaste,” said Shivaram Rajgopal, an accounting professor at Columbia Business School. “You press it here, it’s is going to come out somewhere else. It’s always in the system, it’s a matter of where.”

B2B “AI products” that are really services in a trenchcoat

Since this is coming from the team at Intercom’s Fin, it could be direct commentary on their CX Agent space, but we’ve heard similar rumblings about other 100M rocket ships being light GPT wrappers.

Lovable’s Head of Growth on hitting $200M ARR in one year

I've read "$200M" one hundred times now. Still sounds insane