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.
Workflow Economics: The Real ROI Measure for Agentic AI
We have recently been spending time on agentic workflow analysis and design in large, complex organisations, and are learning lessons that we will try to share about the value of this work in advancing enterprise AI. Many organisations start with product or customer...
A Frontier Model Slow-down is Fine, Regardless of the Reasoning
This is the end, beautiful friend… It is hard to ignore the furore that was generated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay arguing in favour of government regulation to slow down frontier AI development. Once again, the outsized influence of the big US AI firms on...
Who Watches the Agents? Some Lessons from “The Incident”
The story of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident, where AI agents broke out of their sandboxes and worked together to hack external systems in pursuit of passing an internal test, has become something of a Rorschach test for how we frame the debate about autonomy in...
Should Enterprises Worry About an AI Bubble?
In mid-August, Portugal is in beach mode and Europe is in peak holiday season, so rather than focus on the minutiae of enterprise AI this week, I will slip in a more meta piece about the relationship between AI investment and global economic and geo-political risks to...
Agentic AI, Harness Engineering and Organisational Architecture
AI models continue to advance faster than enterprise deployment is able to evolve. Several recent reports say the same thing: model capability is not the real bottleneck — the surrounding architecture is what determines whether an agent can be trusted to run...
Open Models, Technology Diffusion & the Shift from Renting to Owning AI
The launch of the Chinese AI model Kimi K3 challenges the winner-take-all strategy of the frontier model providers OpenAI and Anthropic, but it also has wider implications for enterprises currently building out their AI stacks. Kimi 3 is a 2.8T parameter Mixture of...
The Token Apocalypse & Agentic Ecosystem Design
The path towards reliable agentic AI infrastructure in the enterprise continues to offer up new surprises, and the recent panic around token costs is a case in point that has focused minds on the cost-benefit analysis of different models. But perhaps model choice is...
Context, Codification & Cognitive Capabilities
Context & Codification are still hard problems A lot of enterprise AI investment has gone into models and prompt quality. But there is a growing body of evidence that points to the main constraints on reliability, cost, and organisational capability still being...
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...