Insights
Writing on AI readiness, organisational diagnostics, and the patterns that keep showing up inside professional services firms trying to make AI work.
-
The question to answer before you spend anything
Most firms starting on AI ask what their AI strategy should be. It’s the wrong first question, or at least the wrong first question in the wrong order.
-
Democratising confident wrongness at scale
AI puts powerful methods in the hands of people who couldn’t previously use them. Run a complex simulation, build a sophisticated forecast, produce an analysis that used to need a specialist. Connect...
-
AI governance is arriving whether firms are ready or not
For a while, AI governance was something firms could treat as a future problem. Write a policy eventually, once things settled down. That window is closing, because the regulation now has dates...
-
What should stay human judgment
AI has a particular flaw that makes it dangerous when it’s handed too much. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and it produces a confident, coherent answer anyway. There’s no moment...
-
Who's accountable when the model is wrong?
Ask an organisation what happens if an AI system produces a consequential error tomorrow, who’s accountable, and through what process. The length of the pause tells you most of what you need...
-
The quietest person in the room usually knows why it'll fail
In most organisations there’s someone who understands why things fail. Where the real dependencies sit, what the customers actually need, why the last three initiatives didn’t deliver. And in a lot of...
-
Your data isn't ready, and AI won't tell you
Feed a person bad data and they’ll usually notice. Something won’t add up, a column will be missing, the numbers won’t match what they know to be true, and they’ll stop and...
-
AI can't fix a deployment pipeline. It just runs into it.
There’s a comforting version of AI adoption where the technology sweeps in and makes everything faster. Leaner development, quicker delivery, less friction. It’s a good pitch. It runs straight into a wall...
-
The decision that still takes six weeks
Ask a leadership team who owns the AI decisions in their organisation and you’ll get a confident answer. The CTO. The head of data. The steering group. Ask a level or two...
-
Why "our pilot went well" is the most expensive sentence in AI
A pilot going well is not evidence that AI will work in your organisation. It’s evidence that AI worked in the conditions you built for the pilot. Those are different things, and...
-
Decision rights: what they actually mean and why they're the domain most organisations get wrong
Ask a leadership team who owns the AI decisions in their organisation and you’ll usually get a confident answer. The CTO. The Head of Data. The AI Centre of Excellence.
-
Why the 95% AI failure stat is real, and what's actually behind it
MIT’s 2025 review of enterprise AI initiatives put the failure rate at 95%. RAND landed somewhere above 80%. These numbers get cited in boardrooms and conference talks, usually to make a point...
-
56% of firms get nothing back from AI. It isn't the technology.
PwC asked 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries how AI was performing for them. 12% were getting both revenue growth and cost savings. 56% were getting neither.
-
We did this with agile. Now we're doing it with AI.
There’s a specific moment I started recognising in agile transformations. Usually around month four or five. The teams were running sprints. The retrospectives were happening. Someone had bought a Jira licence. And...