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We help leadership teams pressure-test strategy before a platform shift is fully reflected in the market.
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across the technology stack.
Independent technology analysis since 1969.
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What we do
Technical change becomes useful when it is translated into a decision.
Market transitions are often misread because each layer gets analyzed in isolation. Our work starts with the operating constraint, follows it through the stack, and shows where the strategic pressure lands.
Market intelligence
We combine technical depth with customer behavior so the direction of travel becomes clear before the data is complete.
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We turn infrastructure constraints and product transitions into a sharper view of business quality and market structure.
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Close to the decisions that built the technology industry.
Creative Strategies began in 1969. Our work has moved with the market, from early personal-computing research and the original IBM PC era to the full-stack economics of AI.
Read our history1969Founded in Silicon
Valley
1981Inside the birth of the PC industry
TodayMapping AI
across the full stack
Latest research
Research that explains how change moves through the technology industry.
GPT-5.6, the Diligence Stack Agent Bench, and Why Practical Agent Benchmarks Need to Get Real
Most AI benchmarks still do a mediocre job of explaining how useful models are in the kinds of agentic workflows businesses actually care about. That is not because benchmarks are useless. They are useful. But many of them are still optimized around narrow tasks, coding-heavy environments, academic-
Read the reportIntel’s New G3 Extreme Shows Why PC Handhelds Will Keep Growing
I have a habit when I review gaming hardware: I use the review as an excuse to finally play something I have been putting off. The RTX 5090 was my excuse to play Alan Wake 2, and I loved that game. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ became my excuse to restart Marvel’s Spider-Man 2,…
Read the reportThe Web Was Not Built for Agents. AWS Is Starting to Fix That
The web’s transaction model was designed for humans. You visit a page, see an ad, click a link, or buy something. Every monetization mechanism built over the past three decades, advertising, subscriptions, paywalls, affiliate revenue, assumes a person made a choice. That assumption is breaking. At A
Read the reportWWDC 2026: Apple Kept It Real
No Overpromising, Meeting Users Where They Are At WWDC, the expectation is for a long list of new features rolling across every OS Apple supports in its portfolio. This year, Apple reframed that. Rather than leading with what is new, the keynote centered on perfecting and homogenizing the experience
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The Diligence Stack
Gigawattonomics
Read on Substack
The Diligence Stack
Meta Is an Ads Company Building a Token Factory
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The Diligence Stack
The GPU Tsunami: TSMC, Intel, and Samsung Foundry
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The Diligence Stack
Where AI Constraints Become Pricing Leverage
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Chipstrat
PicoJool’s Al Yuen: The Case for GaAs VCSELs in Scale-Up Interconnects
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Chipstrat
The Next Trillion-Dollar Chip Company
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Chipstrat
High Bandwidth Flash: The Full Report
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Chipstrat
Micron's Blowout and the Case for a Memory Supercycle
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The Heart of Tech
HPE’s 2025 Living Progress report repositions sustainability as cost discipline
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The Heart of Tech
Microsoft Says AI Isn’t Replacing These Jobs. The Work Already Changed.
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The Heart of Tech
Google’s Environmental Report Splits the AI Story in Two
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The Heart of Tech
What Amazon's 2025 Sustainability Report Says Once You Get Past the Headline
Read on SubstackResearch portal · Coming soon
Research becomes more useful when you can interrogate it.
The coming portal turns the Diligence Stack corpus into a working surface. Ask a question, trace the citations, then move into the full report or maintained model when your access includes it.
- 01 Citation-backed answers across the research corpus
- 02 Live web context alongside maintained models
- 03 Direct paths into reports and subscriber tools
The Diligence StackResearch portal
Your question
What determines whether an AI factory earns an acceptable return?
Useful utilization sets the floor for returns.
The return begins with useful utilization. Power, time-to-energize, and the workload mix determine whether purchased compute becomes productive capacity or stranded capital.
4 reports · 2 maintained models
[1] AI Factory Economics[2] Compute Utilization ModelCreative Strategies media
See the analysis in motion.
Latest video · June 9, 2026
WWDC 2026: No Hype Required
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Latest video · June 3, 2026
Bit by Bit: Leadership Conversations | Improvement Is Not Transformation: The Real AI Enterprise Gap
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Latest video · May 25, 2026
Why Robotics Is Suddenly Possible | Deepu Talla, VP of Robotics & Edge AI at Nvidia
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