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Why enterprise design has to come before the model is trained AI is an office full of ghosts. Most AI models are trained on the past and the present.On historical data.On legacy systems.On the observed behaviours of today’s employees and customers. In other words, they learn how things have been done — not how they should be done, and certainly not how they could be done if we were starting again today. That’s the paradox. For a technology we describe as futuristic, AI doesn’

Automation Is Easy. Replacing Judgement Is Expensive. One of the least discussed risks in AI-led transformation is not technical - it’s organisational. Most AI programs automate decisions that were previously made by people. That’s the point. But in doing so, they often remove institutional memory  before it has been properly understood, codified, or stress-tested. In many portfolio companies, critical judgement lives in informal places: the finance manager who knows which in

AI Platforms Don’t Just Enable Value - They Claim It AI is often sold to portfolio companies as leverage: faster decisions, better insight, lower cost. And initially, that’s often true. But over time, many AI implementations quietly shift from being enablers to becoming intermediaries. The early phase looks attractive: rapid deployment minimal internal capability required impressive demos variable cost instead of fixed investment For PE, this is seductive - speed to impact ma

Most transformative innovations follow the same quiet underlying pattern. A straight line becomes a triangle. Then the triangle collapses back into a line. Originally, a commercial relationship looks simple: company ↔ customer. Customer service agents are critical to maintaining that relationship, but they are experienced as part of the company, not as a separate node. It’s only when that internal component is recognised as a distinct element - with its own constraints, incen

“History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Probably Mark Twain If my LinkedIn feed is anything to go by, we may already be at -or just past - peak ChatGPT. If so, I’m probably late to the party. I’m not a technical expert on large language models. I can’t tell you whether GPT-4 is one release away from escaping onto the internet and going full Skynet, or whether the proposed AI “moratorium” from Elon Musk and friends is really just excellent tech PR—designed to

I grew up in the mid-Hampshire countryside, in a small village, and attended the local Church of England primary school in the late 1980s. It wasn’t an exceptional start to an education and probably lacked much in the way of cosmopolitan outlook, but after nearly twenty years living in a capital city, I find myself looking back on it with increasing fondness. One long-running school tradition was the Friday morning assembly. All the classes would gather in the main hall to be