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From Capabilities to Responsibilities – O’Reilly
In my previous article, ”The Missing Layer in Agentic AI,” I argued that AI agents need a deterministic execution kernel—a privileged “Kernel Space” that validates every proposed action before it touches the real world. That article focused on what happens at the...
Not just a bean counter anymore – how AI and digital transformation are the new kingmakers for CFO career ambitions
One in 10 sitting CEOs in Fortune 500 companies came from a financial leadership background. Tech is having an increasingly important role to play in their elevation. Go to Source
Agent Harness Engineering – O’Reilly
A coding agent is the model plus everything you build around it. Harness engineering treats that scaffolding as a real artifact, and it tightens every time the agent slips. Go to Source
Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got “Trendslop” in Return.
Leaders and consultants are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT as silent partners in the boardroom. These tools promise to summarize complex information, produce clear arguments, and offer polished strategic recommendations in...
The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
The profession that runs on documents still can’t agree on who’s responsible when the documents write themselves. These are not questions of technology, but of liability, organization, and capital. Answering these questions can help ensure AI democratizes access to...
Airbnb’s AI-for-HR playbook
Airbnb's AI-for-HR playbook is unlike anything I've seen, and Iain Roberts (their CHRO) walked through it at Stanford yesterday. Here are the five ah-ha moments from his talk at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)'s AI for...
(3) The strategic implications of the Claude for Legal announcement | LinkedIn
The strategic implications of Anthropic’s “Claude for the Legal Industry” announcement are potentially profound for the entire legal ecosystem: law firms, corporate legal departments, legal publishers, legal tech vendors, and even the economics of legal work itself....
Thinking Machines Just Announced More Human Like AI
What if AI models could deliver experiences that were more human like? As an avid user of Voice AI, I’ve often wondered about this. This week we finally got to see what Thinky is up to. Go to Source
How open model ecosystems compound – by Nathan Lambert
In a world where research and development is most of the compute, the Chinese system is designed around quickly learning from your peers and avoiding double-spending research compute — or infra effort. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the closest analog to the OSS...
🔮🇨🇳 Inside Chinese AI labs – American AI sanctions created its toughest competiton
We spent a week on the ground in China, visiting AI and robotics labs and seeing how things operate firsthand. We traveled through Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai to meet representatives from 14 labs, including DeepSeek, MoonshotAI, MiniMax, Z.ai, ByteDance, 01.AI,...
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Recent Briefings
CHROs as Systems Architects not Programme Owners
Enterprise AI-led transformation is changing the focus of most leadership roles to a greater or lesser extent, but one of the most impacted is likely to be the HR function and CHRO roles in particular. CHROs are being asked to lead AI transformation, ensuring...
Embrace the Human to Overcome the AI Capability Absorption Gap
The Capability Absorption Gap in enterprise AI is widening, not narrowing, as model and tool development outstrips the ability of incumbent business leaders to adapt to what it makes possible. Adoption programmes are not cutting it, and their focus on getting people...
Agents at the Ready? Yes and No…
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Agents of Progress or Agents of Chaos?
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Andrej Karpathy’s new autoresearch tool recently ran 700 experiments on his nanochat codebase in two days. It found 20 improvements he had missed, delivering an 11% uplift in output. Tobi Lütke at Shopify tried it on his own hand-tuned model: 19% improvement,...
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Extraction vs. Redesign: The Hidden Fork in the Road for AI Leaders
This article is published as a free sample of the Shift*Academy paid edition. Every other week, the paid edition explores the structural implications of AI for leadership, organisational design and enterprise capability, with practical deep dives for leaders...
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...