From the journal

Insights

Analysis, reflections, and practical perspectives on strategy, technology, and organisational change.

Insight·21 May 2026·14 min

The Protocol War for Agentic Commerce

The click that proves a human intended to buy something is disappearing. Six layers of infrastructure are fighting over what replaces it. OpenAI and Stripe versus Shopify and Google. Visa versus stablecoins. And your company is caught in the middle.

Insight·10 May 2026·12 min

The Six-Month Window Your Board Needs to Understand

95 percent of enterprise AI initiatives deliver zero ROI. Not because the technology fails, but because companies start with tools instead of processes. Here is what your board needs to decide before Q3.

Insight·26 April 2026·7 min

AI Coding for Real Engineers

Most advice about AI coding is written for people who have never written code. For someone who has been in a codebase for twenty years, the traps are different. Not fewer.

Insight·16 April 2026·8 min

When the Spreadsheet Becomes Intelligent

As a self-employed person, I've been thinking about car leasing for years. Last week I tested Claude in Excel. In fifteen minutes I had a complete model with eight tabs. That's not an improvement. It's a different category.

Insight·9 April 2026·8 min

Why OpenAI Is Spending $600 Billion, and Why Google Is Practically Giving Away Its Best Model

What's happening in AI right now isn't a model race. It's a bid to own something that makes all existing B2B software irrelevant. And most organisations are looking the wrong way.

Insight·2 April 2026·8 min

The bitter lesson: why your AI systems need to get simpler, not smarter

Claude Mythos is a step change, not an upgrade. And it reveals the same truth as every major model leap before it: simpler systems beat complex ones. Four things to audit before the train leaves.

Insight·26 March 2026·7 min

From Vibe Coder to Agent Manager

Vibe coding is about prompting. Agent management is about management. It is a different competency, and you can learn it without becoming an engineer.

Insight·20 March 2026·7 min

Your e-commerce ranks on Google. The AI agent can't find you.

MCP. UCP. AEO. Three abbreviations that determine who the AI agent recommends when a customer asks which bike tyre to buy — and who gets skipped.

Insight·19 March 2026·7 min

Vibe coding gets you 90% of the way. What happens next?

There is a pattern among almost every founder and product manager building their first AI-generated app right now. It starts brilliantly. Then Thursday arrives.

Insight·12 March 2026·10 min

Lights Out: When the Factory Runs Without People

In manufacturing, 'lights out' means the factory runs 24/7 with no one there. That concept is now moving into e-commerce. And it can transform how you run your administrative processes.

Insight·8 March 2026·5 min

Everyone Talks AI. Get Your Own Experience.

D-Congress showed that everyone talks AI, but shared understanding is remarkably thin. The only thing that actually changes your mental model is first-hand experience.

Insight·5 March 2026·5 min

Claude or ChatGPT? Wrong question

Most organisations ask the wrong question when evaluating AI tools. Claude and ChatGPT aren't variants of the same product, they're optimised for fundamentally different behaviours.

Insight·1 March 2026·6 min

Your AI memory is trapped in the wrong system

Claude has memory. ChatGPT has memory. Grok has memory. Yet you start from zero every time you open a new window. That's not a prompting problem. It's an infrastructure problem.

Insight·26 February 2026·6 min

Our IT Processes Are Optimized for a Scarcity That No Longer Exists

Last month I sat in a steering committee meeting. Eight people, two hours, to decide if a feature should be prioritized for the next sprint. The next day I built a working prototype of the same feature with AI. Time: three hours. The meeting cost more than just building what we talked about.

Insight·22 February 2026·5 min

Concept Over Code: The Art of Balancing SaaS with Disposable Software

As AI pushes the cost of writing code toward zero, we must rethink what we buy and what we build. We're moving toward an era of 'Disposable Software.'

Insight·19 February 2026·8 min

Drag Racing or Le Mans? AI Forces You to Choose Your Race.

Most AI discussions miss the point. What's actually happening is that AI is dividing the market into two completely different races. And companies selling software, design, or marketing must choose which one to run.

Insight·15 February 2026·4 min

The Great Software Sell-Off, And Why the Market Is Getting It Wrong

Companies like Shopify, Salesforce and Adobe have been swept into a broad sell-off, treated as if AI makes all software obsolete. The narrative is seductive, simple and dangerously incomplete.

Insight·12 February 2026·5 min

When Your Personal AI Gets the Keys to Everything

YouTube, GitHub and X are exploding with guides on setting up personal agents with full access to your digital life. It's both fascinating and unsettling, and it raises questions about risk, autonomy and what we loosely call AGI.

Insight·8 February 2026·5 min

The Hidden Costs of Letting AI Write All Your Code

AI coding assistants promise dramatic productivity gains, but organisations are discovering steep costs in security, quality and maintainability. Recursive code generation doesn't solve the problems many think it does.

Insight·5 February 2026·12 min

Time to Shift Into the Next Gear

Most people using AI today are sitting in a Ferrari but only using it to buy milk. Understanding the levels of AI automation—from simple chat to orchestrated agent swarms—reveals why this shift isn't a feature, it's a transformation.

Insight·1 February 2026·8 min

Start Slow to Speed Up Later?

Most people want to take it easy with AI. Wait for the technology to 'mature.' Let others test first. It feels sensible. But it's wrong. When the world changes fast, caution is dangerous.