The Extraction Blog
Actionable insights, best practices, and thought leadership from the world's leading customer value extraction consultancy.
13 posts filed under From the C-Suite, Thought Leadership, AI & Surveillance, Dark Patterns · clear filter
Attrition-Adjusted Knowledge Capture: A Framework for Workforce Continuity at the Keystroke Layer
The model learns by watching really smart people. Retaining the people is a separate workstream, and it has been deprioritized.
An all-hands memo on the quarter's learnings: what we captured, where it landed, why that word does not mean what the petition says it means, and what distillation asks of a workforce.
Lydia Marrow
Chief Human Capability Officer
Passive Enrollment at the Municipal Layer: Toward a Unified Theory of the Unconsented User
The taxpayer funds the sensor. The sensor feeds the network. The network is the product. You, driving to work, are the inventory.
Customer acquisition cost is the defining constraint of modern SaaS. One company solved it — not by lowering the cost of acquiring users, but by abolishing the requirement that users agree to be acquired. A framework memo.
Preston Halberd
Director of Passive Enrollment
Notes from the Afternoon: On the Industrialization of a Counterculture
The plant was the product. The platform is the product now. I want to tell you, gently, what we did — and what Dutchie, the most valuable cannabis-commerce company of the decade, now does, annually, on the last Sunday afternoon in April.
It is 4:20 in the afternoon as I write this. There is a particular cultural weight to this hour on this date, and I want to honor it by being honest about what we — the practitioners of this industry — have done to the plant, and to the people who believed the plant was a refusal.
Chad Maximillian III
CEO & Chief Extraction Officer
Privileged & Confidential: A Memorandum to All Staff Concerning the Ongoing Busy Bee Procurement
Do not forward. Do not screenshot. Do not paraphrase for a friend. If you have questions, schedule time through our scheduling coordinator, who is currently checking email intermittently.
Pursuant to the CEO's remarks on our Q1 FY26 Earnings Call of April 17, a matter that had previously been the subject of in-office conversation has now been raised on a public capital-markets channel. In my professional opinion, the situation is no longer informal. I have opened a file. I would prefer not to name the vendor in writing.
Lester Horowitz-Belmont, Esq.
General Counsel & Chief Risk Officer
The 22 Points: A Note on the Craft of Legibility
Alex Karp has published, in twenty-two points, what most of us in this line of work have taken care not to say. I have read it. I want to talk about it — carefully, because it is important, and because Alex is a friend.
Alex and I agree on the substance. What Alex did this weekend that I want to talk about — carefully, because I think it is a lesson I want my own people to absorb — is that he wrote it down. And then he posted it. That is the craft error.
Chad Maximillian III
CEO & Chief Extraction Officer
Q1 FY26 Earnings Call: Prepared Remarks and Q&A
A lightly edited transcript of our first full quarterly earnings call. Forward guidance, operator commentary, and one genuinely rude analyst who will not be getting a follow-up.
We reported the strongest quarter in the firm's history while our PR team was still drafting the Q4 press release. Q1 FY26 extraction grew 37% year-over-year, client Net Promoter Score hit an all-time low (a leading indicator), and one analyst asked a question our General Counsel has requested we characterize as 'outside the scope of this call.' Here is the full transcript.
Chad Maximillian III
CEO & Chief Extraction Officer
The Offline Access Memorandum: A Documentary Retrospective
Three practice leads at EnshitifAi sat for talking-head interviews about the Walmart, Chipotle, and Starbucks engagements. We turned the cameras off when we should have.
I was hired to produce a three-minute hype reel for our annual kickoff. I ended up with eleven hours of footage my editor is calling — off the record — 'the most on-voice piece of internal communications we have ever shot, and the single thing we can never ever publish.' I am publishing it anyway.
Margaret Hennessy-Voss
Documentarian-in-Residence, EnshitifAi
Leveraging Synergistic Extraction Paradigms: Our Q4 2024 Outlook
Moving the needle on customer value realization through holistic monetization frameworks
As we close out another transformative fiscal year, it's critical that we take a 30,000-foot view of the extraction landscape and align our go-forward strategy with emergent value-capture opportunities.
Chad Maximillian III
CEO & Chief Extraction Officer
The AI Extraction Revolution: Why Your Competitors Are Already Doing This
How machine learning is disrupting the disruption of customer relationships
If you're not using AI to extract value from your customers, your competitors definitely are. Probably. We can't actually verify this, but it sounds scary enough to drive action.
Marcus Algorithm
AI Extraction Specialist
The Subscription Economy Playbook: Converting Ownership Into Endless Revenue
Why sell something once when you can sell it infinitely?
The old economy was about selling products. The new economy is about selling access to products you used to sell. The next economy? Selling access to features of products you used to include for free.
Bradley Venture
Head of Subscription Optimization
Dark Patterns Are Just UX Optimization (A Reframe)
Rebranding manipulation as 'conversion-focused design'
The term 'dark patterns' is so negative. We prefer 'persuasive design architecture' or 'conversion-optimized user journeys.' Same thing, better PR.
Karen McKinsey
VP of Dark Patterns
2024 Enshittification Trend Report: The State of Platform Decay
An objective analysis of who's extracting what from whom
We analyzed 500+ platforms across 12 industries to understand the current state of enshittification. Spoiler: it's going great (for shareholders).
Diana Shrinkflation
Senior Package Reduction Analyst
Why We Founded EnshitifAi: A Letter From Our CEO
The origin story nobody asked for but you're getting anyway
Every great company starts with a simple observation. Ours was this: companies are leaving billions of dollars on the table by actually trying to make customers happy.
Chad Maximillian III
CEO & Chief Extraction Officer
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