Sign Your Work
How Manufacturing, Brands, and Retail Prevent AI From Shoplifting the Future
“AI’s natural affinity for monopolies will bring winner-take-all economics to dozens more industries.” — Kai-Fu Lee
In 2026, manufacturers, brands, retailers, and people enter a new era shaped by climate regulations, blockchains, AI, customer expectations, and automation. AI presents significant market opportunities. It also builds a dangerous Iron Stool of capital, data, and LLMs that hyper-centralizes market power, creates durable inequality, and increases distance from power that current policy and business strategy do not discuss. Uncountered AI shoplifts agency and margin. To keep what is ours, sign your work.
Distance from power is a useful lens for how consolidation works. Technology extracts rents by controlling facts, terms, and economic/ecosystem relationships that reinforce a firm’s advantages. In other words, centralized control increases the distance between value creation and market power.
Technology platforms and incumbent firms built Sustainable Competitive Advantage by controlling facts and relationships that separate value creation from trust. The new advantage comes from collapsing that distance. Signed data graphs at the point of value creation unlock the $5 trillion agentic commerce economy, lower costs and risk, let makers and communities keep more of the value they create, and introduce mathematical liability that constrains centralized AI.
Cultural, economic, and information asymmetries create hard-to-dislodge advantages. The AI-fused Iron Stool form a natural oligopoly of consolidated asymmetries that multiply imbalances to lock in high returns. The Iron Stool uses data advantages to manipulate markets, set prices, control customers, and write the rules for everyone.
We focus on AI absorbing tasks and jobs. The real risk is the consolidation of structural power that locks platform advantages in place. Unchecked AI freezes today’s structural hierarchy, limits social mobility, and suppresses growth in the real economy. It surrenders future development and value creation to terms set by a few data-rich monopolies.
Markets already price AI as a permanent concentration of structural economic power that lets a few winners absorb the business and personal agency of the rest. Venture capital sees this future and prices it with crazy-high valuations. These high-stakes conversations do not reach the broader public or policy debate. “Sign your work” changes that.
The Strategy | Sign Your Work
The structural response to an Iron Stool of capital, data and AI is to disrupt incumbents by moving the source of truth and sustainable competitive advantage closer to value creation. Put simply, sign your work. The strength of a firm’s new SCA is inversely proportional to the distance between trust and value creation. In this new environment the shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and Industry 4.0 inverts the structure of competitive power.
Stop AI Shoplifting
Signed, permissioned, product, event, and measurement data graphs introduce mathematical liability to LLMs. They bind origin, provenance, permissions, and value flows into equations that constrain how AI plans, acts, and extracts value. In other words, signing your work exposes AI shoplifting.
Relocating trust embeds real-time work into signed data chains at the point of value creation. These chains document who did what, when, where, and under which standards work happened. This fusion of work and trusted, permissioned information moves trust closer to value creation. This all-in-one structural move strengthens bargaining power, yanks data authority back from centralized AI, and compensates people who create value in the real economy.
Agentic AI Strategy
My strategy formulation for manufacturing, brands, and retail is: “Build the highest-integrity, lowest-cost trust layer for products and services. Activation: Signed, Permissioned, Item-level data graphs and open coordination cut waste, strengthen margins, and capture price premiums today while unlocking agentic value tomorrow.
Signing your work collapses the distance from real bargaining power, and moves trust closer to value creation. This is the best low-risk, low-cost way to yank trust back from centralized AI, restore control to the people who create value in the real economy, get them paid by centralized AI for the value they create, and unlock the $5 trillion agentic commerce economy.
Sign your work.
Each era loses its advantage when technology makes the old scarce resource abundant.
New technologies reset bottlenecks and scarcity: capital > attention > control and extraction > trust.
Advantage now comes from signed, permissioned product, event, and measurement facts that agents, regulators, and customers can act on.
The new scarce thing is high-integrity, atomic-level truth.