POWER OF THE CORE IN THE AGE OF AI

What Patagonia, Disney, and Chiat/Day taught me about never betraying your core, and why it matters more than ever in AI tech and immersive.

Above all: never underestimate, or worse, insult the core customer.

• At Patagonia, the core was the dirtbags: climbers living out of cars, chasing peaks, building a life around freedom and nature. Lose them, you lost the brand.

• At Shorty’s, it was the street skaters: raw, irreverent humor, gritty. Suburban kids bought the boards, but the streets gave the brand its soul.

• At Disney, pitching Eisner and Iger on digitizing the X Games worked because it was true to the core. Youth athletes were superheroes to an audience Disney was missing. Same magic, through a new lens.

• At Chiat/Day, Lee Clow and Adam Morgan made it clear: a brand only works if it stands for its actual universal truth, carried through every touchpoint.

Authenticity is the core. Execution is scale. Lose one of these, you stall. Lose them both, you crash.

That was true then. It is even more true now.

I started as an oil exploration engineer; 72 hours awake in the Sahara, soldering resistors onto million dollar tools, and running calibration after calibration. Engineers respect the core of the system. That same discipline is what is missing in customer strategy today.

I call this discipline CoreOps: taking the human truth at the center, building it into the experience, embedding it in the system, and scaling it.

This is not about defending the old ways. It is about pointing out what is missing in too many AI and immersive business models today: a respect for human truth (and business objectives) as the guiding force.

No matter how advanced the platform, it only works if someone keeps the core human and customer truth as the guiding force.

Disrespect the core, and you will fail.