Category: AI
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The Future of Learning and Development
Since leadership training is a part of what I do my network and reading overlaps somewhat with the L & D community, where there is currently something of an existential debate going on about the future of learning. In fairness this is probably justified since AI is about to steamroller through traditional L & D…
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Business Critical Thinking
On the risks of blindly following technology in the age of AI In the summer of 2009, 28 year old nurse Alicia Sanchez was driving through Death Valley National Park with her six-year-old son Carlos when her GPS directed her onto an unmarked road. She followed it for 20 miles, continuing even when the road…
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Re-imagining the corporation in the age of AI
Alex McCann has been doing some interesting writing around the current and future state of corporate work over the past year. He wrote that well-shared (I refuse to say ‘viral’) post on the death of the corporate job which seemed to resonate with a huge number of people. It added in a small way to the growing momentum around…
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Using AI to Ask Better Questions
I wanted to go deeper on a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work – how do we genuinely break out of assumptions that can hold us back (including those we don’t even know we have). And ultimately, how can we ask better questions? I’m increasingly minded to believe that, with AI capability…
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The Clown and the Editor in Creative and Strategy Workflows
It being the end of one year and the start of another I wanted to use this as an opportunity to pull together several strands that have dominated my thinking over the last 12 months notably the heightened value of critical thinking and intellectual curiosity, and how AI can be a true thought partner and…
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What comes after LLMs?
Last week I wrote about the fundamental differences in the way that large language models and humans learn, and I noted that many of these differences speak to some integral limitations of text-based language models. This is particularly true when thinking about where AI may go from here and the potential of LLMs to form the basis…
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The differences between how LLMs and humans learn
I’m not a technical AI expert but I have tried hard to learn more about how LLMs work, mostly so that I can better understand the role that AI can play, its potential and its (current) limitations, and how humans can best work with AI in a 1 + 1 = 3 kind of way.…
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AI Transformation and ROI: Bottom-up trap, top-down fantasy
Last week I was asked to take part in a Cambridge Judge Business School panel on AI transformation. It was a pretty wide ranging discussion but there was a useful lens on this given by the latest McKinsey State of AI 2025 report which had just come out. There were some interesting findings about enterprise adoption of…
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The Future of Agencies in the Age of AI
Last week I spoke at the Google Partner Summit in Dublin about managing agency change in the era of AI, and then moderated a panel of exceptional agency leaders including Pats McDonald, Christina Lemieux, and Liam Wade. In my talk I spoke about the need to combine optimisation and efficiency focused efforts with transformational thinking to reinvent processes, workflows and…
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Systems and Empathy
Way back in 2017 (crikey) I wrote a report for the IPA on the Future of Agencies. One of the key frameworks that I used described how agencies could succeed in the future by focusing on combining systems (which I defined as data, technology, efficiency, delivery at scale) and empathy (human insight, creativity, relational connection). Given…