Your best knowledge leaves with your people
Say a new SEO or AEO hire takes six months to onboard. They compound everything they learn in their head. Then they leave, all that compounding is gone, and the team starts over.
Panopto’s research puts a number on it: 42% of institutional knowledge is unique to the person who holds it, so when they leave, their colleagues can’t do 42% of their job.
That’s how we’ve always worked. Around September 2025, that changed.
Everyone’s using AI. Few are compounding it.
At MozCon, a good chunk of the room raised their hands when I asked who uses Claude Code or Codex. When I asked about autonomous agents like Hermes or OpenClaw, I counted about three hands.
That’s an AI-fluent crowd, and I’d still bet most of them aren’t using these tools in a way that compounds. BCG found the same gap across 1,250 companies: only 5% achieve AI value at scale, while 60% get little or none despite heavy investment.
The people moving fastest have stopped writing prompts. On X, they talk about loops instead. I couldn’t figure out what a loop was for weeks, and I’m a non-technical person. But if the fastest movers work this way, it doesn’t make sense for me not to. It doesn’t make sense for you not to, either.