Category: trends
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Technology, inflection points and cascading impacts
In the late 19th Century sharpshooter Annie Oakley was one of the most popular acts within Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Annie would demonstrate her skills performing tricks like shooting the flames off candles and her grand finale, shooting the end off a lit cigarette held in the mouth of a brave volunteer from the…
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Are we having the wrong conversation on AI and jobs?
Given all the hype you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re on the cusp of an AI-driven apocalypse in the jobs market. But are we? Last year Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, described what was called at the time a ‘white-collar bloodbath’. Up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, he said, could be wiped out by…
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Organisational knowledge in the age of AI
I’m not a fan of trendy neologisms like ‘prompt engineering’. Marvin Minsky once described how ‘suitcase words’ (high-level and abstract terms) often contain a variety of different, sometimes jumbled meanings. And there’s a lot of suitcase words around AI right now. But confused as they might be, these terms can also carry with them a…
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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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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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The Future of Strategists and Planners
The latest WARC Future of Strategy report is just out and makes for interesting reading. 80% of strategists think the discipline is at a crossroads. Agency jobs in decline, and yet client demand for strategy skills needed more than ever in a volatile world. There also seems to be a split on whether AI will erode the…
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The Future of Strategy in the Age of AI
A couple of weeks ago I ran a session with a large agency strategy team focusing on integrating AI throughout the planning workflow. It reminded me of how much I love working with strategists – naturally curious and open people. Towards the end of the session we had an interesting discussion around where this is…
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Separating fads from trends, and the second and third order effects of AI
‘Don’t be the dog that barks at every passing car’ Richard Wheldon How should we separate major underlying shifts in technology from the fads that come and go? How do we identify which trends will be long-lasting and high-impact, and which are over-hyped and will change little? The characteristics of a general purpose technology are that…
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On AI model collapse and the era of experience
Will AI end up eating itself? What happens when AI models run out of human generated inputs and are trained on content created by AI? Is there a risk that AI models trained on AI slop become ‘inbred’ and get into a self-reinforcing death spiral of reducing quality? So many questions. AI model collapse refers…