Latest thinking
Ideas on AI, leadership, the future of work, and the human dimensions of technological change.
Showing 65 articles
My CEO wants ROI numbers on AI. How do I measure that?
The board stopped accepting hours saved as proof. Here is how to measure AI ROI in the financial language a CEO and board actually read: payback, NPV, IRR and total cost of ownership, with revenue and margin as the headline, and why most cases stall in the 70% that is people and process.
My board asked for an AI strategy and I don't know where to start
Start with the outcome, not the technology. Name the two or three business results you want this year, attach a pilot to each, give it an owner and a measure. That one page is your strategy.
How to tell a real AI advisor from someone who discovered ChatGPT last month
A real AI advisor makes you more capable of deciding for yourself; a repackager makes you dependent on them. Everything else — the jargon, the demos, the deck — is noise.
How do we govern AI across teams and stop shadow AI?
Shadow AI is not a workforce going rogue; it is a trust and visibility signal. Why approved alternatives, not bans, are what bring AI use back into the light, and the three moves that restore clear governance across your teams.
When AI can do the work, what is actually left for the humans?
When AI takes the analytical middle of knowledge work, the human work moves up, not out: to judgement, empathy, presence and meaning. A workforce-redesign guide for leaders who want a confident answer to what their people are actually for.
Why your AI strategy keeps failing on broken hardware
Your AI strategy keeps stalling and you are quietly exhausted before it has even properly started. The research is clear: the bottleneck is no longer the technology. It is the human system running the rollout. An AI leadership mindset begins with upgrading the operator first.
We bolted AI onto the old org chart. Why does everything feel more chaotic?
You dropped AI into the roles you already had and the org got noisier, not calmer. The reason is structural: AI value appears only when you redesign the jobs, decision rights and processes around it, not when you bolt the tools onto the old org chart.
How do I build a 90-day AI risk action plan?
A 90-day AI risk action plan turns the diffuse "I do not know what we are exposed to" anxiety into four time-boxed workstreams a leader can take to the board next quarter: inventory, governance, exposure and ownership.
Are we quietly outsourcing our ability to think?
The real AI risk at work is not machines replacing human judgement; it is capable people quietly de-skilling their own. The evidence, and how to use AI consciously so leaders keep their thinking sharp.
AI gave my team back hours. So why is nothing actually better?
The dashboards show thousands of hours saved, yet nothing in the business is demonstrably better. The hours are real; the dividend is not, because nobody decided where it would go. Here is why AI time savings leak away, and how to reinvest them on purpose.
APRA just put your board's AI literacy on the supervisory agenda
On 30 April 2026 APRA told every bank, insurer and super fund it regulates that AI governance is lagging adoption, and put the board's own AI literacy on the supervisory agenda. A board can delegate the build, but not the understanding.
The futurist who died: what dying taught me about leading through AI
At twenty-one, I died. I came back with one knowing: the part of you that matters most is the part no machine can reach. In the age of AI, that stopped being a spiritual claim and became an economic one.