I met this week with an executive I first interviewed back in March for The Agentic Awakening: After our first conversation, my impression was clear: he was deeply AI-pilled, and the management team was committed to the transition. They had already formed an AI leadership committee and a cross-functional enablement team spanning engineering, IT, security and infrastructure. They were measuring adoption and had stopped treating AI as a simple tool rollout. But the organization was still struggling to convert. Small, modern squads were demonstrating what was possible. The harder challenge was moving long-established teams responsible for mission-critical infrastructure, an eight-year-old codebase, and hardware-related projects. The promise was visible locally, but it had not yet translated into company-wide productivity. At the time, they were roughly five months into the awakening. This week, five months after that initial conversation, the progress was astonishing. The engineering organization has shifted from thinking about building applications to thinking about building factories. Engineers have considerable freedom to shape their working environments. They can choose among multiple agent harnesses and are encouraged to consume the tokens needed to get the job done, rather than treating token usage as something to minimize. The company measures both AI usage and engineering productivity, then makes the results transparent across the organization. The purpose is not simply to rank people. It is to help every engineer understand where they stand, find colleagues achieving better results, and learn how they work. According to the company’s measurements, engineering delivery has now reached roughly 3× its previous level. That creates an entirely different leadership question. The immediate temptation is to capture the productivity dividend through cost reduction. For some companies, that will be the right answer. But the more consequential opportunity is growth: accelerating the roadmap, responding to customers faster, entering adjacent markets, and pursuing ideas that previously could not justify the engineering investment. Once engineering can deliver at 3×, the constraint moves again. The question is no longer whether the organization can build enough. It is whether the rest of the company can identify and absorb enough valuable opportunities to use the new capacity well.

It has been almost a week since we released The Agentic Awakening: The response has been remarkable, with tens of thousands of readers across more than 100 countries. What I have enjoyed most are the direct messages from readers who shared how the playbook resonated with what they had been going through and helped them better understand how to approach it. Today, I met with the CTO of a successful SaaS company who had read the playbook over the weekend and reached out to discuss it. He has a strong AI background, but his organization is still lagging behind. I asked one question: How many tokens are your developers consuming? The answer immediately exposed the gap. High token consumption does not necessarily indicate efficient or productive work. But if the average engineer is consuming less than one billion tokens per month, meaningful agentic work is unlikely to be happening at scale. The playbook includes stories of companies that made an overnight, company-wide switch to agentic programming. That is not always the right approach for every organization. For this company, we discussed hand-picking high-agency internal candidates and forming small, autonomous squads, pairing product managers with engineers given the nature of the business. Give them the infrastructure, authority, and freedom to work differently, and turn them into champions for the rest of the organization. If the playbook resonated with you, I would love to hear your story. Send me a message or share it in the comments. Over the coming weeks, I’ll share some of the most interesting ones. @AdamRFisher @BessemerVP

I'm extremely excited to release The Agentic Awakening playbook today: When @AdamRFisher approached me earlier this year to research agentic development, I had no idea it would turn into the book and site we're releasing today. But after several rounds of interviews it became clear that the challenges the 20+ leaders we spoke to were facing weren't unique, and deserved deeper analysis. The software development methodologies that evolved gradually over the last decades are being rapidly replaced with a new one, in which coding is no longer the slowest link, and humans are no longer the best candidates to generate it. This has a profound impact on the development process, on the talent, and on the organizational structure needed to support it. Which is what this three-part document is all about. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Liran

🚀 #CTERA# announces $80M investment from #PSGEquity#! 🚀Welcome Ronen Nir from PSG to our board. This will help us: • Accelerate growth • Innovate in cyber resilience & AI • Expand globally 🔗 Full release: #Funding# #Investment# #AI# #TechNews#

This! @billmaher on the war between Israel and Hamas: “All wars end with negotiation, but it's hard to negotiate when the other side's bargaining position is "you all die and disappear."

I was asked to talk last month about "how I speak up" on behalf of my country, and this is what I said. My talk centered on the fact that there are two wars being waged simultaneously: the real war and the information war. In this conflict, both vectors are forms of “asymmetric warfare.” Hamas came equipped with GoPros on Oct 7 for the same reason white supremacist “shooters” did it in Buffalo and Christchurch. They knew they likely wouldn’t survive, but wanted to memorialize the violence in a way that instilled and inspired terror long after they were gone. In the case of Hamas, they had an additional reason because they knew an "information war" would erupt in parallel once Israel responded to the live-streamed massacre of 1200 of its citizens and the kidnapping of 240 more. As a result, Oct 7 was the opening salvo of both the real and information wars. In understanding the information war I posed three arguments: 1) Israel doesn’t care much about perception in the West because it is too focused on delivering a clear message of deterrence to Iran, Hezbollah and other enemies. If it has to choose between addressing the hearts of American college kids or the fears of the Ayatollahs, it will choose the latter every time. 2) The better Israel does at winning the real war, the harder it is to win the information war. This likely applies to any warfare in the modern age, where there are cameras on hand to witness the carnage that inevitably results from war. It also stems from the fact that Israeli success in the real war means Hamas can’t inflict more atrocities on the Israeli side. Needless to say, Israel foremost needs to win the real war. 3) Democracies should not focus on trying to "control the narrative", but instead should focus on clearly communicating the facts and intentions, including any mistakes. This is essential for maintaining credibility with its citizens and with its allies in all matters. Private citizens and organizations are free to propose and advocate for whatever they want, including opposing the war or criticizing its goals. An asymmetric information war is not only difficult for a democracy to win, but likely impossible to win. The terrorists have no credibility to lose, which allows them to lie and manipulate to suit their goals. There is no fact checking by civil society organizations or independent media, and no treaties or international conventions to uphold. Speed and outrage are the only criteria when engaged in an information war, which is why Hamas can say within minutes of an explosion precisely how many people died with gory pictures ready for distribution. They don’t need permission from parents to share photos of their dead children and exploit the freedom of the west while denying it to their own people. It may be tempting to emulate these awful tactics, but advocates for Israel must focus on truth and reason, while eschewing hyperbole and emotion. My recommendation is to ignore the haters and ideologues, and instead focus on educating others with facts, nuance and explanations. People don’t change their minds easily, but they do modulate their behavior when they realize they don’t know nearly enough to have a strong opinion. "Ridicule and Criticism" only work when Israel haters make statements that reveal inconsistencies (#metoo#, but not this time), incomprehension, or moral failings. I criticized several high profile personalities because they kept attacking Israel’s response without ever mentioning or condemning the unprecedented massacre that triggered it. That is a moral failing, and I will call it out every time. Only conspiracy theorists would spin any of this as a "coordinated" effort to suppress pro-Palestinian voices. I have no problem saying that the death of Palestinian civilians is sad, tragic, and awful. But this is not a war Israel started, and Israelis will never countenance a terrorist state on its border (nor would any country). It’s easy to be a righteous pacifist across the ocean when you have no skin in this game. But in the midst of the largest hostage crisis ever, when missiles are falling on our towns, and when our family and friends are on the frontline risking their lives daily, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Israelis will take the time to advocate for their country even if that means attracting more attention from the haters.

Israeli tech delivers, no matter what. Israeli companies have been listed on Nasdaq for over 35 years, doing amazing things for their customers and for the world. With over 100 Israeli-listed companies on the Nasdaq and 7,500 startups, the Israeli tech ecosystem continues to show resilience, even in the face of adversities. And we continue to deliver. Thanks Nasdaq for your support.

Eyal Waldman, an Israeli high-tech tycoon, founder CEO of Mellanox Technologies, created research and development centers five years ago first in Judea and Samaria (Palestinian) and then two years ago in Gaza, employing hundreds of Arab Palestinian developers. He used to say then: "We have a lot of employees in Gaza today. There are talented and smart people out there, economically it will pay off. We have good staff, within a time zone, highly motivated, accessible and opportunities. And I believe this is very important to bring the two nations together. People used to be afraid of each other and didn't talk. But the positive is created when people start working together and see tension being reduced and cooperation working. It's good for all sides." On October 7, 2023, Palestinian terrorists came from Gaza and murdered his 24 year-old daughter Danielle less than a mile from where her father opened the most innovative factory for Gazans.

Renana Jacob from Kibbutz Nir-Oz, whose two sons, Or (16) and Yagil (12), were kidnapped, created an animated short film that describes her last phone call with them. "Don't take me, I'm just a child", were the last words she heard them say to the Hamas terrorists who broke into their home and kidnapped them into Gaza. #BringThemHome#