AI, commerce, products. When the playbook runs out, make the call.

There is always a name that comes up when a difficult question has travelled around the room without an answer. The architect who understands the old platform. The SAP expert who remembers why the strange process exists. The infrastructure specialist who knows what nobody dares to touch.

Everybody waits for the verdict. It is usually right and rarely challenged.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower has its Crimson King. The corporate version is less dramatic. Its ruler has no supernatural powers, only years of experience, documentation nobody else understands, and a calendar full of meetings.

For years, it was hard to tell how much of that authority came from being right and how much from being impossible to verify. Now something else has learned to climb.

Tech-first companies optimise for what is possible. Give talented engineers room and ideas appear. Shipping them feels like progress, but a stream of features is not a strategy. Somebody still has to decide what deserves company time.

At K5, I kept seeing the same promise in different packaging: an AI agent that searches, advises, decides, or buys. Many of the demos were impressive. Yet once I looked under the hood, one uncomfortable question kept coming back: if the intelligence is rented through an API and the solution can be copied, where is the competitive advantage? In my opinion, it is not in the agent. It is in proprietary data and the knowledge of how your business actually works.