What This Is About
Most AI coverage focuses on the technology itself -- model architectures, benchmark scores, funding rounds, and what might happen next quarter. Return to Value takes the opposite approach. It starts with real business problems and works backward to how intelligence tools actually solve them.
This is a newsletter for practitioners. People who close deals, manage portfolios, advise clients, and build products. People who need AI to do something useful today, not hypothetically tomorrow.
The core thesis is simple: the most interesting AI story is not which model is biggest. It is how domain expertise, structured workflows, and intelligent automation combine to create economic value that was previously too expensive, too slow, or too complex to capture.
What You Will Find
- Practitioner Case Studies
- How real teams use AI to solve real problems -- from document extraction in tax credit due diligence to counterparty research in structured finance.
- Building in Public
- Honest accounts of building AI-powered products. What works, what fails, what we learned. No polished marketing -- just the actual experience of shipping.
- Structural Economics
- How macro forces like energy transition, infrastructure investment, and regulatory complexity create systematic opportunities for those positioned to act.
- Tool Reviews & Workflows
- Practical evaluations of AI tools in professional contexts. Not benchmarks -- actual workflow integration, with honest assessment of where things break.
- Deal Intelligence
- Perspectives on how data, automation, and AI change the dynamics of deal origination, due diligence, and closing in energy and infrastructure finance.
- The Craft of Code
- Technical deep dives for builders who care about how things work. Architecture decisions, MCP servers, AI-assisted development, and the tools behind the tools.
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Published on Substack. Free to read. No spam, no growth hacks -- just substance.