Schrödinger’s Optimism: AI and Productivity Signals

Schrödinger’s Optimism Reading news stories about the US stock market dip at the end of last week, you might think that serious economic and technology analysts are uncertain about the impact of AI on business and productivity. Selling or buying stocks is quite a...

How We Survived the Agent Apocalypse

An Agentic False Dawn? If you are reading this, then the agent apocalypse didn’t happen, or perhaps my disembodied brain is being used as an agentic personality source connected to the mainframe in Vault 0. I am old enough to remember the heyday of Moltbook –...

Is Enterprise AI Ultimately Less Risky than Consumer AI?

The debate about AI risks and potential harms is starting to bifurcate into the kind of toxic polarisation we are now used to seeing in politics, economics and other areas of life, amplified by online echo chambers. In addition to technical critics like Gary Marcus,...

Enterprise AI: Lessons from Social Media

Recent hints by AI researchers that they believe AGI is now within reach have fuelled an increasingly polarised debate about AI harms vs benefits. Ethan Mollick recently wrote up a useful overview of developments that considered where the water is rising (LLM...

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...