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.
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...
How Apple’s late entry could advance multi-agent AI in the enterprise
Enterprise AI Adoption Update Last week saw the publication of an interesting research report from the Asana Work Innovation Lab and Anthropic, which surveyed 5000+ individuals in the UK and USA to assess the current state of AI adoption in the enterprise. The report...
0.48kWh Should be Enough for Anybody
Exciting and Stupid Google has embarrassed itself once again with hasty roll-out of generative AI features, serving up ‘AI overviews’ for search topics that include glue in Pizza recipes, health suggestions such as ‘eat rocks’ and a whole host of confused, basic...
(Don’t) Hail the Chief!
When a new technology or way of working emerges, the first instinct of many organisations is to appoint a Chief X Officer, which provides the comfort of knowing somebody has ‘got this’ and also that there is ‘one throat to choke’ in terms of accountability. And of...
From prompt whispering to model sommeliers: how best to think about the ‘atomic’ nature of LLMs in the AI evolution story?
The controversial investor Chamath Palihapitiya last year re-told a story about the rise of refrigeration that concluded it was not the fridge makers who captured the value their invention created, but firms like Coca-Cola who used the technology to build a global...
Centaur service teams and the role of narrow AI in organisations
In deploying AI and automation to upgrade our old organisational systems of work coordination, we should embrace the fact that we are still in the Centaur chess stage, that it might last a while, and that this is probably a good thing. Enterprise AI is built on the...
Accelerating the Map → Change → Learn loop to guide enterprise AI adoption
Welcome to our revamped newsletter, which we are expanding into a learning companion for leaders and practitioners working to advance real-world applications of AI and emerging digital workplace technologies. We will continue to publish this free edition every other...
Designing hybrid human-AI use cases for the enterprise
GPTs: fun, but also useful? Azeem Azhar is doing a great job of documenting and analysing the rapid development of GenAI in his excellent newsletter Exponential View, and last week he shared a discussion with one of the co-authors of the original Transformers paper...
Four Areas of AI Readiness We Need to Improve
We all have high hopes for the impact of AI and smart automation on the enterprise, but without urgent action on organisational readiness, the biggest improvements and productivity gains will likely be out of reach. As Dave Wright and Brian Solis wrote for CIO...
Could AI Be A Catalyst For Wider Organisational Change?
Productivity Hopes and the Solow Paradox Away from the breathless excitement about GPTs and their latest impressive content creation tricks, there has been some thoughtful discussion recently about the impact of AI on work and the organisations we build to coordinate...
Don’t Fear the Coming Trough of AI Disillusionment
2024 looks set to be a big year for enterprise AI adoption, but we need to think long-term and not be driven by the hype or the backlash. It looks like 2024 will be the year when GenAI, automation and smart systems gain a strong foothold in the enterprise. But...