Thirty-six years ago, Harvard Business Review ran an article called “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.”Michael Hammer’s argument was that companies were taking the processes they already had and laying technology over the top, which reliably produced a faster version of the same problem. The instruction was in the title. Don’t automate the existing process —…
My last real coding class was BASIC, back when we were still fairly confident the personal computer might catch on. I never wrote production code after that. What I did instead was use technology hard — build systems on top of it, set up the workflows, and hire the people who could code when code…
I’ve been using Obsidian for note-taking for a while. I’ve built out a personal knowledge management system (PKM) for journaling, project management, and note taking, and I’ve recently started using Obsidian Web Clipper to pull in articles and sources for future reference. So when a wave of YouTube content appeared in April 2026 about combining…
I read something this week that made a light go off — not because of what it said, but because of what it confirmed. Jiaona Zhang, Chief Product Officer at Laurel and a Stanford product management lecturer, described what she’s calling the hottest new role in AI: the AI Ops job. Her framing: “I think…
The numbers being reported right now don’t add up, and they’re worth sitting with for a minute. Global enterprise spending on AI is projected to hit $2.52 trillion in 2026 — a 44% year-over-year increase. Eighty-nine percent of CIOs plan to grow their AI budgets. Average corporate AI allocations have doubled, now running roughly 1.7%…
Everyone is using AI. Almost nobody is getting return on it. There is a reason for that, and it is not the first time the story has been told. MIT researchers tracked enterprise AI deployments in 2025. Ninety-five percent of pilots produced zero measurable P&L impact. The RAND Corporation put the AI project failure rate…
Ask five AI vendors what an “agent” is. You’ll get five answers. Ask five practitioners who just finished an AI training program — five more. None of them will be wrong, exactly. They’ll just be describing different things with the same word. That’s not a communication problem. It’s a structural one. And if you’re an…
Here’s a number that should make you uncomfortable: 55% of knowledge workers use AI weekly. That sounds like transformation underway. It isn’t. According to Section AI’s 2026 AI Proficiency Report, only 15% of those use cases are generating any meaningful business value. The rest? People prompting their way through tasks that look like productivity but…
I’ve heard this story before. The last time a “this changes everything” technology rolled through finance and operations, I was the one in the room translating the slide deck into the production environment. The internet, RPA, the cloud, and now AI all share the same dynamic: the technology is real, the timeline is wrong, and…
There’s no shortage of articles telling you to use AI more. Adopt faster. Prompt better. Automate everything. The advice is relentless, and some of it is even good. What you almost never hear is what goes wrong during adoption — not because you refused to try, but because you tried badly. I’ve been watching a…