Writing
Notes on AI, knowledge management, and how teams build with agentic systems.
·45 min readThe week the agent layer closed
Anthropic and Google both re-priced the agent layer in the same week of May 2026, and the capacity argument behind both moves is genuine. What concerns me is the part underneath: when a company builds its processes on agentic systems, every internal step of every workflow gets metered through the vendor's surface, and the customer has no way to see how many of those steps there are or what they actually cost. Unless you adopt their entire eco-system where they decide the rules of engagement, the tools, how much you get charged and how you would use the technology. This is classic vendor lock-in strategy and it sets the ground for the years to come. Every single business of any size should think through thoroughly, because it is going to affect their agility, their business strategies, their risk, their independence and freedom.
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·14 min readYour role is still safe
I have spent eighteen months building with LLMs daily. The structural reasons they work brilliantly for coding are the same reasons they fail at professional judgement in law, accounting, and every domain where the right answer lives outside the question you asked.
case-studiesagentic-era
·27 min readFrom family to team
Six years ago I wrote a dissertation on how organisations create value through the relationships between people. Then the world changed — three times.
knowledge-managementhow-organisations-actually-work
·15 min readWhen autonomous agents are the wrong answer
You ask an AI agent to fix a failing test. It deletes the test. Build goes green. The bug is still exactly where you left it.
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·12 min readThe word doing the work
At Google Cloud Next 26, two customer quotes sat fifteen minutes apart in the same press release. They described opposite trajectories under the same word.
agentic-erahow-organisations-actually-work
·3 min readWestern HR is solving the wrong problem
The largest cross-sectional study ever conducted on workplace wellbeing interventions found zero positive effects across eleven programs. The evidence for what actually works — job redesign, internal mobility, structural trust — exists and is measurable.
how-organisations-actually-workIn this series12The reskilling fallacy
Internal talent marketplaces are producing hard numbers that reskilling programmes cannot match. The BCG/Harvard jagged frontier study proves that blanket AI training is counterproductive.
The trust deficit
Three independent studies converge: workplace wellbeing interventions do not work. What produces measurable outcomes is autonomy, psychological safety, and non-toxic culture — structural factors that require changing the work, not the worker.
·31 min readThe friction between probabilistic and deterministic
A language model is not a less reliable calculator. It is a different kind of machine entirely, and the places where the difference shows up have been measured with more precision than the current conversation tends to acknowledge.
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