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.
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...
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...