ai
AI’s Hidden Extraction Economy
We can’t unring the bell: How Labour and Knowledge Power “Intelligent” Machines
future
ai
Context and control: the real future of AI in the enterprise
The AI conversation is shifting. What began as a fascination with generative tools is rapidly evolving into something far more consequential: AI as an enterprise execution engine. The real challenge is no longer producing outputs, but delivering reliable, governed outcomes at scale.
ai
The coming AI jobs-pocalypse
The story we tell ourselves about technology and jobs has almost always been wrong, at least in the short term.
ai
Beyond AI hype: building new institutions for AI and the Digital Revolution
In history I saw how the English working class responded to upheaval of the industrial revolution by building new institutions Today’s AI disruption raises a similar question: what new institutions do we need for the AI age?
ai
AI is now infrastructure: Why that changes everything
AI is no longer just a clever feature bolted onto apps - it’s fast becoming a core piece of digital infrastructure, as fundamental as electricity, networks and cloud.
agentic ai
AI Agents Are Here: How Memory, Emergence, and Governance Will Make or Break the Agent Era
The Agent Era Isn’t Coming. It's here and it’s Already Messy. I spent an interesting evening at an agentic AI meetup with old friends Mark Pesce and John Allsop in the wilds of Waterloo in a brewery the other night. It really got me thinking about
data governance
Data Governance needs a rebrand
I have long thought that data governance has a brand problem. Inside many organizations it still sounds like control, cost, and constraint, not value. Even when the underlying work is critical, the label “data governance” often lands with executives as bureaucracy: steering committees, policies, and standards that slow things down.
ideas
After 10 Years as a CDO: What I’ve learned about excellent jobs
Back in late 2024, after a decade as Chief Data and Insights Officer at UNSW Sydney, and more than a decade working at UNSW, I decided it was time to leave. It was a big step. It was scary to leave the comfort of a role and place I'
ai
AI and autonomous everything
I spoke at the Front End of Innovation (FEI) Conference in Boston the week of 10 June about AI, innovation and the future. This post is part of a distillation of my thoughts. The future direction of Artificial Intelligence is not just AI in and of itself. It is as
ai
AI Changes Everything
I spoke at the Front End of Innovation (FEI) Conference in Boston this week about AI, innovation and the future. This post is part one of a distillation of my thoughts. The very first thing we need to understand is, to misquote Churchill, is that the stage of the development,
data governance
Data governance - the time is now
For many years, since late 2014 to be precise, I have been thinking about and doing data governance. But now with the advent of popular AI it is even more important. It has always been seen as boring stuff and nobody was really that interested. But in recent times – thanks
data
Data Revolution Podcast
Well I’m about to launch a new podcast. It’s going to be all about the intersections between business intelligence, data analytics, AI, privacy, data protection, cyber and information security. As I keep saying data and cyber are the two biggest growth industries that we have now. I have