Insights

Ideas on AI capability

Practical thinking on moving organisations beyond access to AI, towards measurable capability — the gap between logging in and doing deeper work.

Insight · 10 August 2026

AI Summer School #4: On the Lookout for Wild Boar

Carrying on the way we always have is the easiest thing in the world. A Tuscan hillside on why it is worth taking the long way round.

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9 August 2026

Access Is Not Capability — The Most Expensive Gap in Enterprise AI

Most organisations measure AI by who can log in. The value is in who can actually use it to think, decide and do deeper work. That gap is where the money is lost.

8 August 2026

August Education Special: A Good Tech Childhood

Socrates hated writing, the bell won't stop ringing, and my son does press-ups with Claude. On what we owe our children this summer.

8 August 2026

Ask a Midwife What She Wants AI For, and She Won't Say Robots

For most people AI won't be the job. It'll be part of how they do the job, and that is what technical education is still missing.

7 August 2026

AI Summer School #3: Talk, Don't Type

One of the simplest ways to get more from AI: stop typing and start talking.

5 August 2026

AI Summer School #2: Naked AI

Most people judge AI on its default settings. That is like judging an assistant you have never briefed.

4 August 2026

AI Summer School #1: Making AI Work for Me, Starting with Clearing the Faff

Start with the job you have been avoiding forever. That is where ninety seconds of AI effort feels like magic.

28 July 2026

Groundwork: The firms preparing for agentic AI right now are doing three things that will put them years ahead

Something is happening in a small number of organisations this summer that I think we will look back on as the beginning of a very large gap.

27 July 2026

The Person Least Qualified to Build an AI Company

Thirty years in communications, no computer science degree, fifty-six, and exactly the person AI adoption actually needs.

22 July 2026

The Last Mile: Smallpox, Refrigeration, and where AI value is actually decided

Smallpox was not defeated in a laboratory.

14 July 2026

The 5% Club: how to tell if your AI rollout is building capability or just burning tokens

What's the difference between AI access and AI capability?

3 July 2026

Leading AI: A motor where the steam engine was, and how task replacement is the least interesting thing about AI.

Despite capturing headlines, task replacement is - to me - the least interesting thing about AI.

25 June 2026

A Chicago Mayor, a Crash Historian and an AI Researcher Walk Into a Room

The markets have been busy, and AI is now almost universally used in professional settings (even where it isn't approved; over 90% of people are using AI for work despite many continuing bans). Which raises the question: who's using it well, and what does all this mean for our portfolios, our jobs and our children's futures?

16 June 2026

There Are Two Futures for Jobs in an AI Era

PwC's 2026 data shows the labour market splitting in two. Which side you land on is a choice, not a fate.

26 May 2026

Half Term Special - Your child and AI: are they using it like a violin or a radio? Plus a step by step how to guide.

Most students, the research is starting to show, use AI badly.

18 May 2026

How the Breakaway Pulls Away

On the small group of organisations breaking away from the Peleton and winning at AI. What they're doing differently, and why the gap is getting harder to close

5 May 2026

So Here We Are: Two Middle-Aged Female Founders in AI

After two years of building, Atheni's Accelerator goes live, moving teams from owning AI tools to actually using them.

4 May 2026

Am I driving, or are you?

On what AI offloads, what it can free us up to do, and how to get into the driver's seat

20 April 2026

Human Instinct Is to Keep AI at Arm's Length

To ski, you lean down the mountain, the thing every instinct fights. AI adoption asks the same of us.

17 April 2026

The Dam, the Washing Machine, and the Ferrari

Why AI will lead to an era of unprecedented abundance and human flourishing. (It must).

30 March 2026

Retirement Was Invented When Life Expectancy Was 45

We've added decades to our lives and updated none of our assumptions about when people stop being valuable.

30 March 2026

AI - The Greatest Equaliser Since the Printing Press?

Why I'm So Optimistic About AI, and Why It Might Matter a Lot That We All Are

23 March 2026

The Most Expensive Line in the Budget Is What You Don't Know About AI

PwC told its partners this month that AI sceptics "have no place" in professional services.

28 January 2026

How Perfect is YOUR Information?

On what waste a £25 LLM licence can eliminate in 15 minutes, how one use case configured correctly in 15minutes can yield millions in annual value, and why measuring AI "usage" might be the worst KPI to adopt

20 November 2025

Want to Be Part of the <5% of AI Projects That Work? Here's What Two Years of Research Shows