Writing
Essays on how companies hold together as they fill with abundant intelligence. Written for CEOs, enterprise leaders and executives navigating the organizational impact of AI and agentic AI.
AI and agentic systems are changing organizational design, operating models and the way companies work. The problem isn’t simply redesigning the organization for AI. It’s keeping the redesigned organization coherent as AI accelerates complexity.
Looking for something else? My academic publications and my Concentric AI writing live elsewhere.
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The Machine Proved It. Did It Do Mathematics?
A digression. This blog is usually about enterprises. This one is about mathematics, and about a question I have been fascinated with. In May, an OpenAI model disproved a conjecture that Paul Erdős posed in 1946. The problem is easy…
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Good AI Governance Is Not the Same as Coherence
Australia’s directors just got the best AI governance guide I have read. The Australian Institute of Company Directors, with the Human Technology Institute, published an updated director’s guide this year, and it is genuinely good: careful, current, honest about agentic…
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The Moat Is Coherence
For most of my career, the systems I built were valuable because they were hard to build. At research labs and then inside large enterprises, my teams and I built machine learning systems that took months of work, rare expertise,…
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Your AI Usage Exhaust Is Someone Else’s Moat
Two arguments about AI landed within days of each other this month. They look unrelated. They describe the same event from opposite ends, and read together they close a loop that neither closes alone. Satya Nadella published a short piece…
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McKinsey Is Right About the Moat. Here’s the Half It Misses.
McKinsey published a piece this month that gets the hardest part right. Its argument, in one line: the advantage in AI is not the tools, it is the operating model, and the operating model is the one thing a competitor…
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The AI Jobs Debate is Not Asking the Right Question
In May, Meta laid off roughly 8,000 people, about ten percent of the company, in a restructuring built around AI. The memo called the cuts the price of leading the most consequential technology shift of our lifetimes. Six weeks later,…
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Intelligence Is Becoming Cheap. Coherence Is Not.
Early in my career, at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, I watched a team solve a hard problem in a way that has stuck with me ever since. The task was automatic highlight reels for baseball games. Real effort had gone…
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Introducing Coherence: The Competitive Advantage AI Can’t Buy
For thirty years, the fastest company usually won. I think that is about to stop being true. Agentic AI is making execution cheap. When anyone can build, automate, and deploy in an afternoon, speed stops being an edge, because everyone…