Know the frontier
We continuously test what is currently achievable: on real tasks, with real data, not on vendor benchmarks.
Playbook · Chapter 01
SOTA. A standard, not a technology.
State of the art is not a model name. It is a discipline: for every problem worth capital, know what the best currently achievable solution is, and hold your own work to it.
The frontier moves. The standard doesn’t.
Models, frameworks and vendors change quarterly. A firm anchored to any one of them inherits its decay. We anchor to the standard instead: for each intervention we ask what the best currently achievable result is, across AI, automation, software, optimisation and plain process redesign, and we select the minimum complexity that reaches it.
That is what technology-agnostic means in practice. Sometimes the state-of-the-art answer is a frontier model. Sometimes it is a well-built queue and a rule. The outcome decides, not the technology.
Match it to value
Capability only matters where it moves an economic outcome. We map the frontier to the value levers of the business at hand.
Re-test the claim
What was state of the art last quarter may not be now. Every deployed solution carries a review cadence, not a warranty of permanence.