Writing

Field notes on building
conversational AI.

Long-form pieces on prompts, orchestration, and designing AI that meets real people at 2am. Pour a coffee and stay a while.

Not sure where to start?Take the 2-minute quiz. I'll point you to the essay for you.What kind of AI collaborator are you?
  • Reading Decline
  • Attention
  • Media & Society

Why People Don't Read Anymore

The share of Americans reading for pleasure daily fell from 28% to 16% in 20 years, while book sales rose. What the data actually says, which viral explanations fall apart under scrutiny, and what brings readers back. With charts, for obvious reasons.

Jul 2026·8 min readRead
  • AI Careers
  • AI Fluency
  • Fundamentals

Breaking into AI in 2026

Ten AI career paths. For each one: the education that helps, the personality that fits, and the tech to learn first. Backed by research, written in plain language.

Jul 2026·20 min readRead
  • AI Evaluation
  • Release Gate
  • Production AI

The LLM Evaluation Framework

Building the eval harness is half the job. The other half is deciding what it gates on: containment, latency, satisfaction, and cost, held as one vector instead of a single number that flatters whoever is shipping. The operating manual companion to 'Evaluations are the product.'

Jun 2026·11 min readRead
  • AI & Society
  • Technology & Kids
  • Responsible AI

What Toy Story 5 Gets Right About Kids, Tech, and AI

I took my family to see Pixar's new movie, and a toy and a tablet explained my whole career back to me. An opinion piece on why the film's message about technology is the one we keep getting wrong about AI. Spoilers inside.

Jun 2026·8 min readRead
  • Agent Skills
  • Human-AI Collaboration
  • AI Workflows

Let the AI Interview You, Then Make a Plan

The biggest gains I see from AI do not come from a cleverer prompt. They come from two habits you can now package as skills: let the AI interview you to clarify the goal, then make it plan the work before it runs.

Jun 2026·9 min readRead
  • Ecommerce AI
  • Machine Learning
  • Agentic Commerce

Ecommerce AI Hit an Inflection Point

I pulled every ecommerce-AI project on GitHub from 2024 to early 2026, ran machine learning over it, and watched a quiet category become a crowd. Where it was, where it is, and where it's going.

Jun 2026·11 min readRead
  • AI Search
  • Google AI Overviews
  • Content Engineering

How Google's AI Overviews Work, and How to Earn a Citation

The reason Google still matters in the ChatGPT era, what's actually happening behind the AI Overview box, and the honest version of how to write for it.

Apr 2026·9 min readRead
  • AI Evaluation
  • LLM Evals
  • Fundamentals

Evaluations are the product

The teams that deliver reliable AI are not the ones with the best models or the cleverest prompts. They are the ones whose evaluation harness got built first, committed to version control, and wired into every release.

May 2026·7 min readRead
  • Context Engineering
  • Prompt Engineering
  • Orchestration

Context Engineering: The Prompt Was Never the Point

The practitioners getting strong results from 2026-era models are not the best prompt writers. They are the best context architects. The real design artifact is what the system assembles around every prompt, turn after turn.

May 2026·8 min readRead
  • AI Fluency
  • Prompt Engineering
  • Fundamentals

The AI Isn't Broken. The Collaboration Is.

When AI conversations go wrong, we blame the model. But after years designing these systems, I've started to wonder if the real failure isn't intelligence at all, it's that nobody designed for how humans actually communicate.

Apr 2026·8 min readRead
  • Prompt Engineering
  • Content Engineering
  • Digital Content

Content Engineering in 2026

The emerging discipline at the intersection of content strategy, design, and AI systems, and why it's quietly becoming a required skill.

Mar 2026·7 min readRead

Weekly on ICX

New essays every week on the ICX blog.

I publish longer pieces on conversational AI, orchestration, evaluation, and the work behind client engagements over at Intelligent CX Consulting. Fresh writing drops every week.

Work with me

Two ways to work with me.

Consulting through ICXA few consulting engagements each quarter through Intelligent CX Consulting . Start at services.

Hiring ChristiOpen to conversational AI, AI product, and applied AI roles. View my résumé.