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.
Don’t Outsource Agentic Capability Design
For the past couple of weeks, I have been interviewing senior function heads and operational leaders in a large hi-tech firm as part of an AI literacy programme. What struck me most was not their enthusiasm for AI, but the degree to which they already know what they...
Agents are Easy; the Agentic Enterprise is Not
Agentic AI is showing great promise in coding and personal productivity, but the shift from personal to organisational agent usage in the enterprise is harder and more complicated than it looks. It also heralds a profound shift in what we consider to be ‘work’ and...
CHROs as Systems Architects not Programme Owners
Enterprise AI-led transformation is changing the focus of most leadership roles to a greater or lesser extent, but one of the most impacted is likely to be the HR function and CHRO roles in particular. CHROs are being asked to lead AI transformation, ensuring...
Embrace the Human to Overcome the AI Capability Absorption Gap
The Capability Absorption Gap in enterprise AI is widening, not narrowing, as model and tool development outstrips the ability of incumbent business leaders to adapt to what it makes possible. Adoption programmes are not cutting it, and their focus on getting people...
Agents at the Ready? Yes and No…
Agentic AI capabilities are developing within several pace layers at once - economic, infrastructure, capability readiness, and knowledge engineering - and it is getting harder to stay on top of these developments whilst tracking their interdependence. But...
Agents of Progress or Agents of Chaos?
The OpenClaw moment we covered a few weeks ago was a wild ride. But in the age of YOLO, Hodl and r/wallstreetbets, it should come as no surprise that there is an apparently limitless supply of people willing to hand over control of their personal computer to AI agents...
Agents on the Night Shift
Andrej Karpathy’s new autoresearch tool recently ran 700 experiments on his nanochat codebase in two days. It found 20 improvements he had missed, delivering an 11% uplift in output. Tobi Lütke at Shopify tried it on his own hand-tuned model: 19% improvement,...
Humans in the Loop or in the Soup?
Enterprise AI governance, security and safety are challenges that will require a multi-domain approach and imaginative solutions that combine technology, human factors, knowledge engineering and codification. These are issues that cannot just be delegated to CSOs and...
Extraction vs. Redesign: The Hidden Fork in the Road for AI Leaders
This article is published as a free sample of the Shift*Academy paid edition. Every other week, the paid edition explores the structural implications of AI for leadership, organisational design and enterprise capability, with practical deep dives for leaders...
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 -...
Claude Code, but for Management
In the past couple of weeks, more developers have declared that Claude Code, the leading AI model for software development, is now good enough that they no longer need to code manually. This is quite something, and if Claude Code can live up to this promise, this will...