Thinking in public.
Occasional pieces on the distance between what technology can do and what a business is worth. Written by me, from work I've done, and revised when I change my mind. Some go back a few years and are kept as they were.
Notes
The bit of AI I actually know about
Everyone has a view on AI now. Mine is narrow on purpose: what happens after the demo, inside a business with customers, a budget and a board.
aiFive questions I ask before any digital investment
Every piece of work starts with the same five questions. They sound simple. Most organisations can't answer them, and the ones that can tend to fund the right things.
valueTwenty years of being early
Predicting the technology is the easy part. Predicting the lag is where I have spent most of my career. For the first time in twenty years, I am not confident I know how long that lag is any more.
aiTechnology was never the constraint. Now it really isn't.
Most ideas never fail; they just cost too much to try. AI has collapsed the cost of finding out whether an idea works, and the constraint has moved to imagination, judgement and execution.
aiThe future of work is not about jobs. It is about outcomes.
AI is not replacing people so much as replacing assumptions about how work gets done and where humans fit. The question that follows is accountability: if an AI makes a decision, who owns the outcome?
aiDigital transformation is dead. Long live digital courage.
Digital transformations fail because they are passive, externally driven and about technology. Real change needs the clarity to say what you will no longer be, the nerve to own the work internally, and an obsession with what customers need.
leadershipFrom the archive
Decoding digital value creation: the IDEAS framework
A way of developing new propositions that is consistent, teachable and worth investing in: five stages, with a structured, measured risk decision at each. Written in 2023; the stages still hold.
KEPT AS WRITTEN · 2023The week ChatGPT arrived
Written two weeks after ChatGPT launched, with a worked example of what it could and could not do. Kept as it was, including the part at the end where I ignored the AI's advice on my punctuation.
KEPT AS WRITTEN · 2022