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AI adoption

// ai strategy · jul 28, 2026

Give your AI permission to disagree with you

A year on from Butler and Advisor, the models have hands. Following a bad instruction well no longer costs you a paragraph, so I now ask my assistant to challenge me - with a threshold, and with evidence.
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// ai strategy · jun 21, 2026

Don't bet your strategy on what AI can't do

Here's a bet I see businesses make without realising they're making it. They look at what AI can't do today, they build their plans around those limits, and they treat those limits as fixed. It's an unspoken bet, and it's a losing one. It loses because the thing you're betting against keeps moving. Two forces […]
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// ai strategy · jun 21, 2026

The best AI work is boring

The AI work I trust most is the work that looks boring. There's no clever prompt, no amazing inspiration, no surprises. It does the same boring thing every time, and that is exactly why I trust it. Most people reach for AI's cleverness first and its dependability second. I strongly believe you need it the […]
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// ai strategy · jun 20, 2026

The most useful AI works when you're not watching

The most useful AI works while you're not watching - and the barrier usually isn't a cleverer model, it's permission. A plain-English guide to the Permission Ladder: how much autonomy you give an AI, the access it costs, and why onboarding it like a new hire is the right mental model.
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// ai in practice · apr 18, 2026

AI just came for design

Anthropic just launched Claude Design yesterday. Before I say what I think about the tool, I want to tell you about a story I read earlier in the week from BEFORE the launch. The story came from a designer called Nurkhon, writing on Substack. A product manager walked into a meeting, typed one sentence into […]
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