09/30/2026
I have been thinking about machines doing human work for a very long time.
Long enough that in the 1990s I wrote a Star Trek episode because I was fascinated by what happens when technology becomes capable enough to take over work we assume requires people.
Now we are getting much closer to that world.
Meta recently introduced Muse, a personal AI agent that can browse, fill out forms, negotiate, book travel, send email and make purchases.
That is where I start paying much closer attention.
Because productivity is one thing.
Giving a machine permission to act is another.
And as someone who has spent decades working across sales, service, finance, product and operations, I keep coming back to one very boring truth:
Cash still wins.
Meta generated $31.86 billion in operating cash flow in Q2 2026.
Its capital expenditures, including finance-lease principal payments, were $31.08 billion.
Free cash flow was $784 million.
Meta is nowhere near a liquidity problem. The interesting question is how much capital can be poured into AI before the economics have to show up.
And then there is a second question.
What happens when the machine is wrong?
Most of us have already seen AI confidently give us a bad answer.
Now imagine the same system has permission to send, buy, approve, negotiate or transact before a human catches the mistake.
That changes the conversation.
A recent NBER study of more than 500,000 developers found that autonomous coding tools dramatically increased coding activity, but the effect was much smaller by the time researchers measured actual software releases.
Something happened between activity and shipped value.
That is the part I think businesses need to pay attention to.
Where did the rest go?
Review?
Rework?
Integration?
Approval?
Work nobody really needed?
And now we are adding authority on top of that.
If an agent acts on behalf of a company, who authorized it?
What was it allowed to do?
Was that authority still valid?
What credentials did another organization rely upon?
Could they verify those credentials were still current?
Those are some of the questions behind the work we are doing at Validera around continuously verifiable organizational credential status and reliance.
The technology is moving fast.
The economics, authority and trust infrastructure have to catch up.
I wrote the full piece here:
https://theimpactvc.com/blog/eventually-it-has-to-reconcile-to-cash
It is Part 1 of a three-part Chaos to Cashflow series.
Part 2 is about what happens when your customer has an agent.
Part 3 gets into the question I think will become unavoidable:
Who authorized the machine?
