Link*Log
AI: Cautionary tales from early adopters – by Paul Sweeney
For a year or two now, the rhetoric from the big consulting firms is that if you’ve not already adopted AI, you’ll be too late to the game, and your competitors will have an unassailable lead. Luckily, that’s rubbish. If anything, competitors will have wasted a ton of...
The hidden politics of AI in the Digital Age | Digital Leaders
As someone who has spent considerable time at the intersection of technology and organizational change, my work over recent years has become dominated by two interconnected themes: The Technology of Business and the Business of Technology. The first examines how...
‘Generative inbreeding’ and its risk to human culture | VentureBeat
Inbreeding refers to genomic corruption when members of a population reproduce with other members who are too genetically similar. This often leads to offspring with significant health problems and other deformities because it amplifies the expression of recessive...
The Evolution of AI: From Models to Agents to Social Intelligence
AI is evolving from models to systems to agents—autonomous entities that act, adapt, and collaborate. As intelligence emerges from interactions, the future of AI depends on context, trust, and workflow integration. How we design social AI today will shape its role in...
Johnson & Johnson Pivots Its AI Strategy – WSJ
The company is making a shift to focus on only the highest-value GenAI use cases and shut down pilots that were redundant or underdelivering Go to Source
Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI∗
We present evidence on how generative AI changes the work patterns of knowledge workers using data from a 6-month-long, cross-industry, randomized field experiment. Half of the 6,000 workers in the study received access to a generative AI tool integrated into the...
The shift from talent intelligence to work intelligence – Fast Company
Become proactive instead of reactive by moving away from skills identification to work redesign. While talent intelligence platforms (TIPs) serve an important purpose in identifying skills, they are inherently limited and never designed to address the fundamental...
Fish Food: Episode 639 – How to innovate like Amazon
Amazon's innovation system, the evolution of the marketing operating model, Deep Research, A2A, and snail mail newsletters Go to Source
US Officials Target Nvidia and DeepSeek Amid Fears of China’s A.I. Progress – The New York Times
China’s success in artificial intelligence has the Trump administration and lawmakers weighing rules and investigations to slow Beijing’s progress in the industry. Go to Source
L&D Leaders, Prepare for AI Disruption
If you found transitions like LMS to LXP, micro-learning and gamification disruptive as an L&D pro, the next chapter will prove even more transformative. Go to Source

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Recent Briefings
How can AI Help Accelerate Europe’s Industrial Renaissance?
Industrial AI is starting to transform the way we make things, and the cost model for doing so, which could provide a much-needed boost to the industrial renaissance that Europe needs in the face of growing geopolitical risk. But whilst AI will play a role in products...
AI-led Transformation of the Professional & Financial Services Ecosystem
I recently gave a keynote talk at the Innovate UK / ESRC UK National Showcase: Next Generation Professional & Financial Services event in London, which brought together funded innovation projects in fintech, legal, accounting and insurtech with other practitioners...
AI Coding Means We Need Service & Experience Design More Than Ever
We are witnessing what looks like a major transition in the way we approach software development, and this brings both potential benefits and risks for organisations. But we should not think about this only as a new way to build apps and products. In a world where...
Who’s the Bot Now?
The launch of ChatGPT 4.5 last week was not so much a ‘breakthrough’ release as an expensive incremental improvement or consolidation of existing capabilities before the hotly anticipated GPT5. Simon Willison has a good roundup of reactions and testing,...
Beyond Simple Office Automation: The Rise of Super Operators
As always, there is a lot going on this week - or at least being announced - in the field of AI that is relevant to firms and other organisations who are still working out their own use of the technology, from OpenAI’s promise of GPT4.5 leading to a multi-model...
Destruction, disruption, change and transition strategies
The words ‘change’ and ‘disruption’ are seen by many within the tech sector as unalloyed good, but there are many situations where seeing a problem and breaking down the old system are easier by orders of magnitude than building something new in its place. And of...
Enterprise AI: Lessons from Social Media
Recent hints by AI researchers that they believe AGI is now within reach have fuelled an increasingly polarised debate about AI harms vs benefits. Ethan Mollick recently wrote up a useful overview of developments that considered where the water is rising (LLM...
AI World Building & The Value of Boring BizOps
The roaring AI train didn’t slow down at the end of the year as many of us humans needed to; and as 2025 gets underway, major players are still throwing coal into the furnace: OpenAI has been heavily hinting that they think they are moving beyond AGI (but what does...
Will We See the First Programmable Organisations In 2025?
This long-form piece is an example of the content we share in the premium edition, which we are making available to all subscribers - HNY! What Lies Ahead for Enterprise AI? 2024 was an extraordinary year for ‘AI’ - from the rapid improvement of LLMs to new...
Wrapping up 2024
What a year it has been for those of us interested in the future of work and smart organisations! We have seen incredible developments in AI tools and LLMs, culminating in the preview release of OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model last week. The tech is developing faster...