AI Could Redefine Enterprise Systems, But Where Do We Begin?

With successive waves of technology innovation and adoption, the initial applications tend to be those that make our current ways of working slightly better, and we measure their success in terms of marginal cost reduction or productivity improvement. Sometimes, like...

Asking Better Questions

Two very impressive demonstrations of GenAI capabilities have caused a stir in recent days, and they both challenge our assumptions and precepts about the art of the possible. Playing the classic video game DOOM on devices is the new ‘Hello World’ of programming, and...

Visibility and Legibility in the Connected Company

One overlooked benefit of AI and smart technology is its potential to solve the problem of coordinating work and related communications in large, complex organisations. We have studied better alternatives to the cascading hierarchy for decades, and in the hands of...

How Could AI Agents Improve The Co-ordination of Work?

In large organisations today, the dominant form of work co-ordination is still old-fashioned ‘manual’ management and meetings, despite the existence of accessible, simple technologies that could solve this problem more effectively. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson...

Small is Beautiful: Cats vs Megamind

In Don’t Fear the Coming Trough of AI Disillusionment, in January, I wrote: “I believe what is emerging in enterprise AI has the potential to accelerate the path towards smart organisations that go beyond the limits of the C20th corporation. But first, we will need to...