Latest thinking
Ideas on AI, leadership, the future of work, and the human dimensions of technological change.
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The zeroth world is forming. Which side is your organisation on?
The gap you fear is real, but it does not open because of a tool you missed. It opens when you build strategy around the noise of the hype cycle instead of the steady capability curve. Which side of the divide you land on is a choice about how you lead the work.
The scarcest resource at work is attention. AI can rebuild it or wreck it.
Average attention on a screen has collapsed from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today, and refocusing after an interruption takes 23 minutes. AI is a fork in the road: it can absorb shallow work and restore deep focus, or fragment the day further. Which one is a leadership choice.
AI's real limit isn't the model. It's the power, water and chips behind it.
Most AI strategies assume compute is a limitless utility. A 2026 WEF report and IEA data say otherwise: energy is a choke point, water an overlooked limiter, and data-centre power demand is set to double by 2030. Treat AI as resting on a real, finite supply chain, and plan accordingly.
My staff are frightened about their jobs. How do I lead this change honestly?
When staff fear AI will take their jobs, reassurance backfires. The change-management move that rebuilds trust is candour paired with a visible, named reskilling path.
How do I know if my organisation is actually ready for AI?
The pressure to move faster on AI and the readiness to move are two different things. Readiness is a people, data and decision-rights question long before it is a tooling one. Here is a plain check you can run before you spend a penny.
Half my team already uses AI in secret. The other half is terrified. Now what?
You have a split workforce you never sanctioned: one group already running its whole job through AI in secret, another frozen with fear. The divide is a permission failure, not a tooling gap, and your secret users are the demand signal hiding in plain sight.
AI can double your team's output. The bottleneck just moves to who checks the work.
A real company doubled engineering output with AI (2.09x). But per-reviewer load doubled and automated review overtook human review. AI lifts production faster than inspection, so the bottleneck moves to review. Scale the checking with the producing, or you just ship unreviewed work faster.
Will AI dull your team's creativity? A study of 125 high-tech firms found the opposite.
The fear is that leaning on AI makes people less creative. A 2024 study of 125 US high-tech firms found the opposite: AI enhanced employees' innovation, creativity and willingness to experiment. Whether you get that dividend is a leadership choice.
Should we build our own AI or buy it? How do I decide?
Your engineers want to build it; your board wants to buy. The technology can be built either way, so stop arguing capability and decide by ownership: where can your organisation actually carry the maintenance, governance and adoption load? MIT's 2025 data shows buying from specialists succeeds rough
AI won't automatically improve your strategic decisions. A few conditions decide whether it does.
Generative AI does not automatically sharpen your strategic decisions. A 2025 systematic review finds the effect is conditional, on your data, environment and culture. Build those conditions, and the same tool becomes an advantage rather than confident noise.
Your AI pilot didn't stall on the technology — it stalled on the infighting
If your AI pilot quietly went nowhere, it didn't die on the technology — it died on the infighting we politely call politics. That is where AI strategies go to stall.
AI is learning to act on its own. Staying the one in control is now a discipline, not a given.
The world's largest scientific assessment of AI finds agents growing more autonomous. The real risk is not a takeover but a quiet slide from deciding to deferring. Staying meaningfully in control is now a discipline, and the report's message is that the outcome is still yours to choose.