LinkedIn·Friday, 14 August 2026·12d ago

Part 2 of the Friction Layer series is here, by Markus Bernhardt, PhD, Principal at Endeavor Intelligence, in collaboration with TechWolf.…

TechWolf

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Part 2 of the Friction Layer series is here, by Markus Bernhardt, PhD, Principal at Endeavor Intelligence, in collaboration with TechWolf. The finding that catches people off guard: the most AI-exposed function isn't the most strained. Software engineering is the biggest technical function, and the first place AI shows up. Yet rank the functions by structural strain, and it only lands seventh. Spread pressure across that much work, and it thins out. So why does it still matter? As our CTO Jeroen Van Hautte 🐺 puts it, engineering writes the shared layer everyone else runs on. When it lets an AI merge code without a human reading it, that becomes the rule for functions that were never in the room. The defaults travel. So do the mistakes. That's the diagram below: Marketing, Finance, Operations and Product, drawn identically, each inheriting the same defaults. Which leaves a gap worth sitting with: where the strain lands and where the defaults get set are two different places, and usually only one of them is on the agenda. Full analysis in the comments 🔍