Quick note from the editor’s desk: this week’s mix is heavy on enterprise reality, agent plumbing, and a couple of good grins to keep us sane. Same format as last time: Executive Picks up top, then the rest grouped by theme, each with a single-line takeaway and a Read post → link. Onward.
⏱ If you only have 15 mins… Executive Picks
📈 ROI of AI 2025 (Substack deep-dive)
Agents are real, budgets are moving, and integration is the boss fight, plus an operator’s playbook you can steal.
Read post →🇬🇧 UK’s M365 Copilot trial: vibes vs value
High satisfaction, thin measurable lift; go vertical, wire into systems of record, and measure outcomes not minutes.
Read post →🔐 Voice AI fraud is just old telecom fraud with a new UI
Treat agents like payments flows: verify inputs, cap spend, rate-limit, detect anomalies, and fail safe.
Read post →
📚 The rest of this week’s posts (thematic)
🚀 Agents, architecture, and the invocation economy
🧪 Supporting Our AI Overlords (Berkeley) - Don’t buy IQ; buy retries, reuse, branches, and rollback discipline.
Read post →⚖️ Agents can make markets better… and weirder - Sharper prices and coordination gains meet tacit cartel dynamics.
Read post →🎯 Agents sculpt choice - Generic narrows to the crowd, personalised narrows to your cluster; design in exploration if you want a moat.
Read post →
🧩 Adoption, ROI, and enterprise reality
🧭 OpenAI’s adoption guide, minus the box-ticking - Pair each neat verb (Align, Activate…) with its tension or you’ll ship compliance cosplay.
Read post →🧷 Is OpenAI coming for LinkedIn? - More “exam board for work” than new network; the labels expose bottlenecks that become products.
Read post →🧾 Consulting about consulting about AI - Use it, show it, own the outcome; everything else is optics.
Read post →
🧠 Human experience, research signals, and culture
🩺 AI support at scale is not therapy - Name it precisely, blend with humans on purpose, and invest in credibility.
Read post →🌌 Echo chambers as gravity wells - Confirmation bias deepens traps; deliberate diversity is escape velocity.
Read post →🔦 Saturday Morning Musings: the tyranny of light - More information, less understanding; choose a smaller light, pointed at what matters.
Read post →
🛠️ Product craft, expertise, and strategy
🧵 If ChatGPT writes, why hire a strategist? - Generation isn’t direction; the edge is judgment in context.
Read post →🧠 “Democratise expertise” just pushes cost downstream - I pay the thinking cost at 4am so you don’t pay it in the boardroom.
Read post →
🎙️ Podcast
Unhype AI Podcast - Episode 9 - Clarity beats hype; workflow over vibes.
and I are not crying in a corner yet.
Listen on Spotify → • Watch on YouTube →
🎉 Weekend fun
😂 Advanced spiritual prompting - Promptless Thought Leadership™, magnetic north, and meditations on Clippy.
Read post →👶 4-month product review: Baby v1.0 - Release notes remain strong.
Read post →
If something here made you pause, good - that’s the point. And if it made you laugh, even better. If your leadership team needs clarity, not theatre. I run briefings, workshops, talks, and fractional advisory to turn this into outcomes.
Seen something here you want to unpack with your execs?
Let’s work together →