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Jobs and AI: Chains of work – by James Ransom
Today AI is mostly augmenting, rather than replacing, tasks. Humans are in-the-loop. But my sense is that, for many tasks, augmentation is a pit stop on a journey where full automation is the final destination. And as we chain these tasks together, humans begin to...
The Price of initiative just collapsed – by Martha Lane Fox
Gutenberg’s revolution wasn’t just speed; it changed what was scarce. The bottleneck moved from copying to comprehension. Society had to reorganise around a new constraint. It’s happening again. The question is no longer “Can this be built?” but “Who realises it...
The Thinking Tax: AI’s Real Cost Is Shifting from Training to Inference.
The shift from a training-centric to an inference-centric world has profound implications for the frontier labs that have dominated the AI landscape, such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. These organizations have built their reputations and business models on...
How AI Literacy Shapes GenAI Use – NN/G
Using generative AI often doesn’t mean using it well. AI literacy requires both prompt fluency and the ability to assess outputs. Go to Source
Conductors to Orchestrators: The Future of Agentic Coding – O’Reilly
AI coding assistants have quickly moved from novelty to necessity, where up to 90% of software engineers use some kind of AI for coding. But a new paradigm is emerging in software development—one where engineers leverage fleets of autonomous coding agents. In this...
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It (via) Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a "U.S.-based technology company". This...
From chatbot interactions to operational agents – what enterprise deployments reveal about AI readiness today
Databricks’ latest research shows rapid growth in agentic AI deployments, but enterprise progress remains shaped by data visibility, governance, and operational oversight. EMEA CTO Dael Williamson explains what organizations are learning as AI moves into production...
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
Cognitive debt is likely a much bigger threat than technical debt, as AI and agents are adopted. Peter Naur reminded us some decades ago that a program is more than its source code. Rather a program is a theory that lives in the minds of the developer(s) capturing...
An AI wrote a hit piece on the dev who rejected it – Boing Boing
Shambaugh calls this "an autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper" — an AI trying to bully its way into widely-used software by smearing the person who said no. In Anthropic's internal testing, AI models employed similar coercive...
Finbarr Taylor on X: “In Defense of SaaS” / X
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Recent Briefings
Schrödinger’s Optimism: AI and Productivity Signals
Schrödinger’s Optimism Reading news stories about the US stock market dip at the end of last week, you might think that serious economic and technology analysts are uncertain about the impact of AI on business and productivity. Selling or buying stocks is quite a...
How We Survived the Agent Apocalypse
An Agentic False Dawn? If you are reading this, then the agent apocalypse didn’t happen, or perhaps my disembodied brain is being used as an agentic personality source connected to the mainframe in Vault 0. I am old enough to remember the heyday of Moltbook -...
Claude Code, but for Management
In the past couple of weeks, more developers have declared that Claude Code, the leading AI model for software development, is now good enough that they no longer need to code manually. This is quite something, and if Claude Code can live up to this promise, this will...
Re-Focusing Leadership on AI Readiness & Enablement
Why Focus on AI-Enabled Organisational Change Rather Than Just Technology? As we look ahead to another year of rapid technology-driven change in business and society, it is a good moment to separate the wood from the trees and focus on medium-term goals. Generative AI...
Can AI Help Reverse the Oversimplification of Management?
As we look forward to a new year, it is worth zooming out momentarily from the frenetic race between AI models to focus on some of the enablers, blockers and wider changes that will determine whether organisations are able to use this technology effectively. We now...
Context Plumbing, Intent Sensing and an AI Reverse Uno on Social Media Feeds?
The Enterprise Strikes Back Fears of the AI investment bubble potentially crashing the US stock market have abated slightly, despite AI revenues not yet looking like they will be able to repay the vast sums being invested for some considerable time. But OpenAI is...
Metamorphoses: “Of Bodies Chang’d to Various Forms, I Sing”
In the programmable organisation, leaders need to think less like bureaucrats and more like architects and coders to provide the context and instructions needed to operate smart systems. Or perhaps poets? Poetry and coding are both forms of language that act as...
AI Agents & Skills, Plus What Games Can Teach us About Adoption
Enterprise AI Adoption Signs of Life There are some promising signals emerging around enterprise AI adoption and its impact on companies who are using it. Last month’s Accountable Acceleration: Gen AI Fast-Tracks Into The Enterprise report by Wharton Human-AI Research...
Enterprise AI Needs Leadership Ambition to Move Beyond the ‘Faster Horses’ Stage
Adoption vs Adaptation Constellation Research held their annual Connected Enterprise event last week, and unsurprisingly, enterprise AI was very much top of mind for many of the CIOs and analysts in attendance. But as Jon Reed reported for Diginomica, there are signs...
AI Round-up: Both Destroyer and Maker of Worlds?
Large, small, tiny & nano model developments After the recent release of GPT-5-Codex, Anthropic picked up the AI-enhanced coding baton at the end of September with the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5. Since then, results seem positive for both models, which means we...