Exploring ideas here on medium led to the creation of the A.I service business Peristyle where ideas are refined in practice.
I’ve long been a fan of Simon Sinek’s Why-How-What circle. It was time to do one for Peristyle, as it moved beyond reference customers and needed to communicate it’s reason for existence. The ideas were all written down here, it was just time to draw some circles around them!
Why
Empower people with A.I, not exploit.
The tiresome big tech playbook is to exploit their users and customers as soon as they have the power to do so. We have all experienced it. Once we have invested the effort to get on their platform, inertia will be quickly exploited to raise prices. Once a critical number of users are reached, exploit network benefits to put features behind a paywall. The same playbook is already being followed for the agentic A.I era. A recent example that I ran into is that X.com just increased the paywall for agentic access from ~$10/month to ~$100/month.
Peristyle is built around inverting this. We seek to empower people, organizations and institutions. Critically, this includes providing the power to walk away easily.
How
Data sovereignty in an open ecosystem.
If a system is built around an open weights A.I model, running on an open source harness, and ensuring all data stays private, ultimately the individual or organization can move easily to another vendor or host the system themselves. That final fail safe of easily walking away with data privacy intact is the only real protection against bad behavior.
In a time where Anthropic and OpenAI are deliberately trying to scare us and lawmakers into giving them more power, it’s quite clear that we have come to a fork in the road.
It won’t be easy for us to navigate, but a first step is perhaps to recognize there is a clear alternative to the dystopia that OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are trying to engineer.
Peristyle retains customers by providing ongoing and evolving value such as model upgrades, backups and security updates. Not holding customer data and processes for ransom.
What
A.I team members and systems built for them to operate.
Persistent agents powered by open weights models are now capable and affordable enough that organizations can integrate them as industrious, always working team members, rather than sparingly used curiosities. The new design challenge for organizations is not just to integrate A.I agents into their operations, but redesign systems and processes around A.I from the ground up.
It is not often that we are challenged to completely rethink how we operate based around a new technology. Perhaps the greatest service Peristyle offers is assistance navigating something that is both terrifying and exciting at the same time.