#leadership · 12 essays
AI Leadership — the Calls Committees Can't Make
Every stalled AI portfolio I have seen shares a feature: decisions that belonged to a person were given to a committee. Whether to kill a pilot, who owns the outcome, what the freed capacity becomes — these are leadership calls, and these essays are about making them on purpose.
Start with Do You Need a Chief AI Officer?, then Change Management Is the Project — the announcement email is not a rollout — and The AI Capacity Fork for the two honest destinations of AI-created capacity.
You Can't Write a Five-Year AI Plan. Write a Five-Year Commitment.
AI capability turns over in months while strategy plans run five years. The fix isn't a shorter plan — it's sorting every line by how long it stays true, and committing only to the half that survives.
Whose Number Is It? Why IT Should Never Own the AI Value Line
When the AI benefit line in the strategy plan belongs to IT, adoption stalls and finance can't audit the claim. The value is only real when business units own the number.
The AI Capacity Fork — More Throughput or a Different Team Shape
If AI creates capacity there are two honest destinations for it, and most organisations pick neither. On reconfiguring the unit of delivery, and cutting elastic capacity in the right order.
Rationing Tokens Is Not an AI Cost Strategy
Uber burned its 2026 AI budget in four months, then capped spend per engineer. The rationing cycle is predictable, and a uniform cap taxes exactly the people who found the value.
Your Business Unit Became an AI Pilot Factory — How to Govern It Back Into Production
Monthly workshops, showcase meetings, thirty agents that are really system prompts, nothing live. How a business unit governs its own AI work into production.
Applause Is Not an Operating Model — How AI Demos Get Declared "Ready" Before the Real Work Starts
The demo was flawless because the data was frozen. How AI demos get declared "ready" at exec meetings — and the intake process that would stop it.
Change Management Is the Project, Not the Postscript
McKinsey tested 25 attributes; workflow redesign moved EBIT most. Why the announcement-email rollout fails, and what shipping the change actually looks like.
AI in Name Only — How Enterprises Pick Flagship AI Projects That Aren't AI
Enterprise AI portfolios fail before day one — at selection, where every incentive rewards relabeling analytics as AI. Here's the test, and the fix.
The Hackathon-to-Production Gap — A Paved Road for the AI Agents Your Business Units Already Built
Business units built AI agents at a hackathon. Now they're stalled at IT. Why the fix is a paved road: tiered access, published SLAs, and real dates.
Kill More AI Pilots. Seriously.
Gartner says 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. Good. Killing pilots early and on purpose is how winners fund what ships.
Do You Need a Chief AI Officer?
76% of organizations now have a Chief AI Officer, up from 26% a year ago. When the role earns full-time headcount, when fractional wins, how to decide.
5 Mistakes Enterprises Make With AI — the Same Five, Year After Year
Five mistakes that show up in enterprise AI portfolios again and again — unowned pilots, vendor-written strategy, governance procrastination — and the fix for each.