Practitioner thinking, from the people doing the work.

At Midships we have made a conscious decision to cap the team at forty. Not forty people, forty excellent engineers. Every seat matters and every seat has been earned. In a year when most of my peers are talking about how many people AI lets them remove, I want to explain why we are doing something that looks, on the surface, like the opposite. It started with nostalgia. I was thinking back to the architecture courses I was sent on early in my career, the ones that genuinely

There is a version of the AI story that every enterprise has now heard. Autonomous agents can understand what a customer is trying to achieve and orchestrate across systems to deliver it. Intent in. Outcome out. It is being sold as a technology you buy and connect. Plug it into your existing products, channels and processes, and it works. That is the misread. And it is a big one. Customer intent driven workflow is not a tool that slots neatly into the organisation you already

For one bank, the answer starts with more than USD 15 million in five year software licensing savings. That is before the cost of running a simpler stack, before reduced operational overhead, and before the strategic value of growing a digital business without being penalised for every new customer, transaction, environment, or channel. For years, enterprises treated CIAM as a premium software category. That made sense when the market was less mature, open source was harder t