The Prudent AI Series: A Field Guide for the Next Era of Enterprise Strategy
Recently, I completed a ten-part series on AI strategy and operations on this blog about Prudent AI. It grew out of a simple observation: most corporate conversations about artificial intelligence are trapped in a false binary.
On one side, vendor hype…
Specification Sovereignty
Why You Can Outsource Execution But Never the Definition of Success
One of the great attractions of generative AI is that execution keeps getting cheaper. Work that once required scarce professional time can increasingly be delegated to a model, an agent, a vendor, or some combination of all three. That can be a…
In the adoption of almost every useful technology, there comes a quiet turning point when the fundamental question shifts from whether the system can do the work to whether it should be allowed to do it. Early on, you…
Shadow AI and the Proof Problem
Making AI Output Look Finished Is Easy. Proving It’s Right Is the Hard Part.
There is a familiar, weary conversation happening inside organizations about shadow AI: Which tools are allowed? What data can employees upload? What security controls should IT impose?
Those are legitimate governance questions, but they miss…
The End of the Standardization Bargain
Decoupling Scale from Uniformity in the Age of AI
For most of the last century, sameness was the price of scale: if you wanted to deliver a product or service to thousands of people, you had to standardize it. Litigators didn’t draft custom interrogatories or complaints from scratch for…
Kill Criteria and Exit Mechanics: An Option You Cannot Bring Yourself to Abandon Is Not an Option at All
Real-options reasoning sounds clean in a corporate slide deck, promising a cheap trial where you evaluate evidence before deciding whether to commit real capital. But an experiment only works if its main job is to…
The Semantic Anchor: You Can Own All Your Data and Still Lose What It Means
Your organization can own every document, database, and piece of intellectual property it has ever created and still lose something far more difficult to reconstruct: namely, what all of it means. If you need a specific AI model or…
The Shortstack Model; Software Architecture as Strategic Optionality
Walk into almost any legal department or enterprise IT steering committee today, and you will find a group of smart people quietly maintaining a museum of recent enthusiasm.
Three years ago, as generative models began showing real promise, the immediate institutional instinct was to convene a…
Options, Not Pilots: The Mechanics of AI Capital Allocation
The AI proposals arrive at your executive committee one at a time. Knowledge Management wants to test an agentic research workflow. The corporate group wants automated first-pass diligence. Business Development has found a tool that promises to identify cross-selling opportunities from the firm’s relationship data.
Your goal is to keep AI-driven change from outrunning your capacity to govern, validate, and adapt to it. If you are thinking only about slowing AI down, you are focusing on the wrong problem.
During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, public health officials introduced a concept that quickly entered the common…
