# Category 17 — Industry Blogs and Case Studies

**Last updated:** April 2026.

This category traces how humanizing AI output has been deployed, measured, and debated across five distinct evidence layers: peer-reviewed field experiments, company engineering blogs, open-source code, vendor marketing, and practitioner forum posts. Together they run from controlled-trial effect sizes to revenue-recovery stories from solo founders.

## Angle Files

- [A-academic.md](./A-academic.md) — 23 academic and institutional case studies (NBER, JAMA, HBS, Stanford SCALE, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Wharton) with published effect sizes on humanized AI in customer support, sales, healthcare, education, and knowledge work. Updated April 2026 with Stanford Enterprise AI Playbook (51 deployments), Wharton 2025 adoption survey, and Salesforce 500K Agentforce conversation analysis.
- [B-industry.md](./B-industry.md) — 27 engineering-blog case studies (Intercom Fin 3, Klarna reversal confirmed, Anthropic Claude 4 anti-sycophancy, OpenAI GPT-4o sycophancy crisis, Duolingo, Character.AI, Cresta, Spotify, Airbnb, and others) documenting the concrete humanization mechanisms teams shipped and the numbers they reported. Updated April 2026.
- [C-opensource.md](./C-opensource.md) — 14 core OSS repos plus 2025–2026 additions covering staged-rewrite humanization skills, stylometric transfer, detector-bypass research code (DIPPER baseline; TempParaphraser EMNLP 2025 as current baseline), Anthropic Petri sycophancy eval tool, and vendor cookbooks from Anthropic, OpenAI, and LangChain. Updated April 2026.
- [D-commercial.md](./D-commercial.md) — 39 vendor-published case studies plus 2025–2026 platform-level updates (Salesforce Agentforce milestones, Fin 3, Sierra $150M ARR). Audits what "human-like" actually means when supporting metrics are deflection, latency, and CSAT. Updated April 2026 with empathy-as-product-metric and AI-slop-backlash gaps.
- [E-practical.md](./E-practical.md) — 17 practitioner posts from Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, and SaaStr with real detection scores, conversion deltas, and revenue figures. Updated April 2026 with new patterns: sycophancy as practitioner-visible product dimension, "AI slop" cultural inflection, confirmed detector arms-race decay rate.

## Synthesis and Legacy

- [SYNTHESIS.md](./SYNTHESIS.md) — the distilled synthesis across all five angles. Updated April 2026.
- [INDEX.md](./INDEX.md) — category summary — superseded by SYNTHESIS.md for depth, preserved for traceability and quick navigation.
