The Signal Layer: What to Build When Anything Can Be Built — Lena Hall, Akamai
Aug 29, 2026 · 19:44
Lena Hall of Akamai says when AI lets everyone build anything, the scarce skill is choosing what to point it at and keeping it undistorted — a 'signal layer' — since competitors get the same leverage the same morning. She calls AI a 'convergence machine' that makes average work worthless, and rejects taste as a trainable differentiator; what survives is judgment about events not yet happened and relationships models can't observe. Citing Hamming, she says AI gave everyone an attack on every problem, making the rare skill choosing which problem deserves one. Signal distorts via founders compressing context, org layers rerounding to average, and AI remixing claims into promises — a 94% eval became a promise. Trust has no grader; define and protect your signal and use AI for the rest.
