In most companies the people with authority over AI often know the least about it, and the people who understand it have none. Fixing that gap is the actual task today. Last week I were in a meeting where one of our senior executives, my own boss, told a story I did not expect. He…
Some friction is not a problem to be solved. Sometimes the struggle is the whole point, and I want to keep the right to choose it. Two friends recently told me they had stopped using AI. Not because they think it is useless. The opposite. They had both found it useful enough to become uncomfortable…
I spend an unreasonable amount of time on presentations. Not on building them. On making them mine. Half the decks I present started life somewhere else. Corporate templates, a colleague’s version, slides that came down from a regional team with the message already baked in. That is normal in a company of any size and…
When the production system fails at 3am, someone gets called in to fix it. That has always been true. What has changed is whether they understand what they are looking at. Picture Dave. The production system has gone down at three in the morning and Dave is the engineer who gets the call. He drags…
When no human can review everything anymore, the people who draw the lines matter more than the people doing the work. I have a bad habit with permission dialogs. “Yes, yes, next, finish.” Some app wants three things before it’ll open and I’m clicking through before I’ve read a word. Most people do this. The…
We tell ourselves AI frees us for deep work. I am starting to wonder if the act of using it is quietly doing the opposite. I was making an internal slide deck the other day. Copilot in PowerPoint is still hopeless if you ask it to build a whole presentation from nothing, but slide by…
I’m using AI exactly the way I think everyone should. It’s nearly midnight and that turns out to be the problem. It’s 23:30. The kids want to go fishing tomorrow, early, and I should be asleep. Instead I’m writing code for a hobby project nobody asked for and thinking about AI. There’s an old distinction…
I do not use one AI. I use several, deliberately, for different things. Here is why that matters and what I have learned from each one. Most conversations about AI tools collapse into a single question: which one is best? Wrong question. The interesting one, the one serious users eventually land on, is which tool…
Before I ask a new AI tool to do anything useful, I tell it who I am. It is the highest-leverage ten minutes I spend with any of them. Whenever I start using a new AI tool, the first thing I do is write it a master prompt. Not a question or a task, but…
The AI competition between the US and China is no longer just about chips and models. It is about who can keep the lights on. When people talk about the AI race between the United States and China, the conversation usually lands on chips. Export controls, NVIDIA restrictions, Huawei’s response, who gets the best hardware….
