Latest thinking
Ideas on AI, leadership, the future of work, and the human dimensions of technological change.
Showing 114 articles
Australia wants AI leadership by 2028. Is your business ready to capture the upside?
Australia's leaders are being told to lead the world in AI by 2028, and the economic prize is real. But national ambition does not become your advantage automatically; the upside flows to the organisations ready to absorb it.
When agents do the work your juniors learned on, how do you still build senior talent?
AI agents are absorbing the entry-level tasks juniors used to grow on, and the career ladder is losing its bottom rungs. PwC's 2026 predictions and Stanford's payroll data show the workforce changing shape, and why the shape is now a leadership choice.
AI has quietly become the CEO's job. Nearly three-quarters of them just admitted it.
AI moved from the CIO's roadmap to the CEO's desk: BCG's 2026 survey finds 72% of chief executives now call themselves their company's main AI decision-maker, double a year ago. But owning AI is not doing AI, it's the handful of decisions only the CEO can make.
The more your team leans on AI, the worse they get at the job. That's now measured, not theoretical.
Leaning on AI can quietly erode the skills your people still need. A 2025 Lancet study found doctors got 20% worse at spotting tumours unaided after using AI. Deskilling is measured now, not theoretical, and keeping skill alive is a leadership choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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