Category: trends
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Technology, functional drift, and collective blind spots
I recently came across a news article which reported that Health New Zealand, the primary publicly funded body set up by the New Zealand government to oversee their healthcare system was using a single Excel spreadsheet to track $28 Billion of public money. An independent report by Deloitte found that the reliance on a single spreadsheet to…
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The Agentic Organisation (redux)
I really believe that AI agents are going to upend everything from organisation design, to strategy formulation and execution, to workflows, to how we interact with data, to how people get stuff done. It’s going to bring such fundamental change that we need to start thinking now about how we can take a more deliberate…
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The progression of AI agents
I truly believe that with AI agents we are on the cusp of huge change – in organisation design, strategy, operations, staffing, customer experience – just about any and every area of the organisation will be impacted. And as I wrote a few weeks back, the agentic organisation will operate a lot differently to the businesses and…
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Brands, and Latent Space
Reading Jack Smyth’s reflections on the recent BRXND Marketing x AI conference in LA I came across the idea of ‘latent space’ as it relates to brands and LLMs. I confess I’d not heard the term before so I did some digging to find out more about what it means, and I think it’s a…
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On the Agentic Organisation
The next wave of AI innovation is already upon us, and it’s the era of agentic AI. In fact, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has already said that ‘agentic’ will be the word of 2025. The pace of progression has been remarkably fast from simple chatbots that were primarily designed to engage in conversation, answer questions,…
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On misinterpreting the diffusion of innovations curve
The diffusion of innovations curve, developed by Everett Rogers, has become a pretty iconic tool in understanding how new ideas, products, or technologies gain traction within a market. Its simplicity is compelling: a bell curve that categorises adopters (or a population) into five groups — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Yet,…
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Can we learn effectively from AI?
Many have hailed LLMs as excellent tools for learning but is this really the case? Dr Philippa Hardman has done some interesting research to find out if these AI tools can genuinely impact the learning process. And her findings were quite revealing. She fed one of her own research papers into ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5…
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On technology acceptance models
One of the critical aspects of navigating technological change effectively is understanding more about how users accept and adopt new technologies. For leaders trying to drive technology acceptance and adoption, and to introduce new ways of working within organisations, or consultants and strategists looking to understand changing contexts and capabilities, it can be really useful…
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Moravec’s Paradox
I came across Moravec’s Paradox via a talk which Stephen Fry gave, titled ‘AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?’, and given as the inaugural ‘Living Well With Technology’ lecture for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute. The concept was first articulated by AI researcher Hans Moravec in the 1980s.…
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Emotion AI
The latest version of Gartner’s hype cycle for Digital Marketing has an interesting addition which they’ve placed almost at the top of the peak of inflated expectation: ‘Emotion AI for marketing’. Gartner VP Nicole Greene describes Emotion AI as using: ‘…AI techniques to analyze the emotional state of a user (via computer vision, audio/voice input,…