Blog
Notes & ideas
What the research actually says, what breaks when you put these tools on real work, and what to do about it.
Tools & Techniques
Learn faster than you commit
AI is being adopted faster than PCs or the internet were, and measured productivity gains are still modest. Kevin Boudreau's explanation for that gap comes with four rules for deciding where to spend.
4 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
Case Study
They spent $40 million. The computer time cost $450,000.
Thomson Reuters built its own AI model and published what it cost. The compute was about one per cent of the budget. Everything else was people and the material only they held.
3 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
Professional Practice
Nearly half your team would rather not tell you they used AI
The thing blocking AI adoption in most departments is not capability. It is that people do not want to be caught. That makes it a management problem, and it has a management fix.
2 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
Case Study
We launched a website with two pages switched off
The AI Practitioner site soft launched on 14 August with the blog and the booking page deliberately hidden. Here is why, and what the fortnight since was actually spent on.
1 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
Professional Practice
The median company spends $11.95 a year per person on AI
Ramp's August AI Index puts the median firm at $11.95 per employee per year and the top 1% at $7,400. The gap is not between you and the average. It is between the average and a handful of outliers.
31 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Case Study
Uber spent its whole year's AI budget by April.
Uber put its engineers on leaderboards ranked by AI usage and burned the 2026 budget in four months. Its CTO has now called the end of that approach, and said why.
28 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Tools & Techniques
The free tier your team researches on is about to carry ads.
OpenAI is taking ChatGPT Ads into 31 European countries. Ads appear on the free plans only, which turns a deferred licence decision into a question about your team's information quality.
27 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Professional Practice
Nobody pointed the AI budget at contract review, risk or compliance.
Harvard Business Review argues the middle office is where AI spending has failed to look. Exception-heavy work survived the last automation wave for a reason that no longer holds.
26 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
Tools & Techniques
The experts got five different ideas. Everyone else got one.
New research finds AI search tools only produce more creative thinking in the hands of a domain expert. With ordinary search, the expert advantage disappears entirely.
25 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
Professional Practice
Legal grew 108 times. Engineering grew five.
OpenAI's enterprise adoption reports show AI use growing fastest in legal, sales and recruiting. The gap between leading firms and everyone else has tripled since January.
24 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
Tools & Techniques
I built an agent to read the AI news. It kept handing me year-old stories.
The agent was not broken and it was not hallucinating. It did exactly what I told it to do, and what I told it was subtly wrong.
21 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Professional Practice
The agent was never wrong. It just never finished.
The most common way AI fails at real work is not hallucination. It is an agent that is entirely correct and never done. Managers already know this pattern by another name.
20 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Professional Practice
It solved ten problems maths had not moved in a decade. Its maker cannot clear it on cyber.
The same model, in the same fortnight, produced the most impressive and the most concerning results the field has seen. That is not a contradiction.
19 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Professional Practice
86% of finance executives now rate AI skills above an MBA
PwC asked 1,004 finance executives what they value. The thing they are paying for is a skill you can still acquire, not a credential you needed twenty years ago.
18 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
Case Study
They ran it as a change programme, not a software rollout
A German tax and law network got 84% of its people using ChatGPT every week. What they did had almost nothing to do with the software.
17 Aug 2026 · 4 min read