Access or subscribe to our live feed of curated need-to-know articles and links that inform our briefings and analysis
Link*Log
From 70/20/10 to 90/10 – by Dr Philippa Hardman
This week I want to share a hypothesis I’m increasingly convinced of: that we are entering an age of the 90/10 model of L&D. 90/10 is a model where roughly 90% of “training” is delivered by AI coaches as daily performance support, and 10% of training is dedicated...
AI Talent Dilemma: Do We Need More Coders or AI-Literate Leaders?
The AI talent gap isn’t just technical. Learn why leaders fluent in AI are key to long-term success. Go to Source
Former Microsoft execs launch AI agents to end Excel-led finance | TechCrunch
Despite millions spent on financial software, many finance teams still rely on Excel to close their books and reconcile numbers while preparing them for audit. Two former Microsoft executives view it as a problem — and they have started Maximor to replace spreadsheets...
Taming AI agents: The autonomous workforce of 2026 | CIO
By 2026, AI agents will run workflows — but only if we stop chasing 'super agents' and design them to stay in their lanes. Go to Source
The dawn of the post-literate society – by James Marriott
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one. — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death Go to Source
Real AI Agents and Real Work – by Ethan Mollick
Last week, OpenAI released a new test of AI ability, but this one differs from the usual benchmarks built around math or trivia. For this test, OpenAI gathered experts with an average of 14 years of experience in industries ranging from finance to law to retail and...
ChatGPT: The Agentic App – by Nathan Lambert
If OpenAI is positioning itself to be The Agentic App, this also opens the door to the near future where many applications we use today shift to an agentic era5. Want to schedule a meeting with someone? Let the Google Calendar agent handle that (or some startup that...
Explainability and Transparency The Go/No-Go Criteria for Enterprise AI Adoption | by Abex Beheshti | Sep, 2025 | Medium
Enterprise AI adoption is increasing. Yet adoption depends not only on accuracy but on whether outputs can be understood and defended. Explainability and transparency are adoption gates. Go to Source
AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Go to Source
(1) Agentic AI Goal Manipulation Risks: A Deep Dive into Subversion Pathways
This blog explores how adversaries exploit goal manipulation in agentic AI systems, categorizing risks into three distinct pathways: Gradual Goal Drift, Malicious Goal Expansion, and Goal Exhaustion Loops. Each represents a fundamentally different method by which an...
- A hype-free feed of need-to-know links and articles curated and summarised daily by our research team
- A bi-weekly intelligence briefing on enterprise AI and emerging tech developments from a buy-side perspective
- Monthly guides, such as implementation recipes, e-books and capability maps, to support cross-functional initiatives
- Practical guidance & support calls to solve specific problems
Try the Shift*Academy experience
Subscribe now for a free trial of the premium service
Recent Briefings
Doing the Work: Why Learning is Key to Agentic AI Success & Avoiding Workslop
Agentic AI is starting to demonstrate real capabilities and promise. In the consumer space, OpenAI seems to be moving towards specific agentic apps as a way to popularise and monetise its underlying models, as Nathan Lambert covers today. But in the enterprise,...
Enterprise AI is a Social Technology, Not the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Magical Realism Humans appear to use some very primitive sorting algorithms when presented with new discoveries, such as is it a God? … and … could this magic kill us all? In debates around AI, this tendency is creating increasingly polarised viewpoints and judgements...
Collaborative Architectures for Agents, People & Machines
We are working on some innovative learning projects to help leaders understand what agentic AI could mean for their roles and their organisations, and to help with readiness for adoption; so I have been reading about overcoming barriers and blockers relating to...
The Growing Importance of Context Engineering for Leaders Adopting AI
We have been thinking a lot recently about how to help business leaders understand, direct and deploy AI in their organisations without needing to become technical domain experts. Traditional approaches to learning, change and technology adoption increasingly feel...
Will AI be ‘Winner takes it all’ or General Purpose Technology?
In a week where more than one leading LLM seems to be creaking at the seams, suffering capacity issues or even going backwards in terms of output utility, it is worth re-stating why we think it is worth focusing on enterprise AI over consumer AI, and why we think it...
Codifying Rulesets in the Explainable Enterprise
The launch of Kimi’s K2 model was perhaps the most noteworthy AI-related news item of the past couple of weeks, and an indicator of the growing investment efficiency gap between China and the United States. Azeem Azhar’s coverage of the model and its implications,...
Is Enterprise AI Ultimately Less Risky than Consumer AI?
The debate about AI risks and potential harms is starting to bifurcate into the kind of toxic polarisation we are now used to seeing in politics, economics and other areas of life, amplified by online echo chambers. In addition to technical critics like Gary Marcus,...
Can Learning Help Overcome the AI Capability-Absorption Gap?
We are reaching a curious time for enterprise AI adoption. Organisational AI readiness is advancing far slower than the technology, and yet more and more large firms are warning employees that their jobs are likely to disappear or be transformed by automation and...
Agentic AI Needs Strong Foundations
The respected American venture capitalist Mary Meeker recently shared her first internet trends report since 2019, focused on AI and its future. It runs to 340 slides (with center-aligned text … grrr!), so it takes time to absorb. But in addition to its meta-level...
New Models and Old Challenges
It has been a busy couple of weeks for analysts covering new AI launches, with some impactful new models and agentic systems being announced that add up to a significant advance in capabilities. Hot on the heels of announcing Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google announced AI Mode...