Sharing our thinking in the open helps connect with others trying to advance the future of digital working. Our archive of articles and links is open and available below.
Reasoning, Context and the Agentic Enterprise AI Beyond LLMs
The end of 2024 is seeing a flurry of announcements and releases that will shape the way organisations use AI tools and tech in 2025. We will look ahead to what that might mean in practice in our final newsletter of the year, a couple of weeks from now. But first,...
The Age of Abundance Depends on Continuous Learning at the Heart of Technology Change
Marc Benioff wrote this week in TIME magazine about “how the rise of new digital Workers will lead to an unlimited age”: I’ve always believed that business is the greatest platform for change. Today, as we stand at the brink of this new Agentic Era, I’ve never been...
Towards the Smart Digital Workplace
The spread of AI tools and technologies within the workplace will have a big impact on enterprise software and how organisations build, buy and rent the systems that support their operations, as we have written about previously. But it could also lead to a new wave of...
AI Use Cases: Shifting Focus From Personal to Organisational Productivity
In the past couple of weeks, we have seen some interesting developments in AI with the potential to improve both personal and organisational productivity; but the former category seems to be moving a lot faster than the latter. On the personal productivity...
AI Reasoning Is Cool, But First How Can We Tackle Organisational Debt?
It is great to see AI tools develop reasoning abilities, and this suggests an exciting future for how we work, but let’s start small and pay down organisational debt first
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...
Strawberry (Da)Queries, Machines and Possibilitarianism
Strawberry (da)queries are more sophisticated than single shot prompts The big news in GenAI this weekend was the launch of GPT o1-preview, aka Strawberry, which is capable of limited reasoning and thinking through problems from different angles before trying to solve...
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...
Don’t Let the AGI Soap Opera Overshadow the Practical Applications of Enterprise AI
I ran a small GenAI teaching experiment last week, asking 9 groups of South African executives to develop detailed customer personas for a finance product through dialogue with Anthropic's Claude LLM. The results were genuinely interesting, and some groups were able...
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...