The big thinkers I'm following this month.

A brief overview o Ethan Mollick's book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

The badge I'm wearing proudly these days is "AI Pragmatist".   It started with a post I wrote in December about the gap between what companies say publicly about AI ("We're investing heavily!") and what they admit privately ("Honestly? We're experimenting but we don't know what's working yet"). The response told me I'd struck a nerve.   That gap—between rhetoric and reality—is where most of the industry is living right now. But here's what's shifted in the past few weeks: The

AI Thought Leadership   Owain Evans   is a Berkeley AI researcher and founder of Truthful AI. In an era of hype and hand-wringing, he's focused on what actually matters: making AI systems that don't lie to us. His work on AI honesty is technically rigorous but genuinely accessible. You can watch his interesting Hinton Lectures here . Agent Provocateur The inimitable Mark Ritson  is the marketing professor you either love or love to hate—but either way, you're reading him. His

I just finished Abundance  by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and it is full of food for thought.   The book is ostensibly about why we've stopped building things in America—housing, infrastructure, clean energy, all of it. But the real argument runs deeper; we've become a society more comfortable saying "no" than saying "yes." Permitting processes, regulatory capture, NIMBYism, vetocracy—the mechanisms we built to prevent bad things have calcified into systems that prevent al

Hard to believe it is January 2026!  The new year brings a predictable flood of prognostications. Every firm has their "Top 10 Trends for 2026" post queued up. I'll spare you mine and my jaundiced view that most of these lists wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of good researchers!  Sadly, many “predictions” lean more towards self-serving wish lists than data-informed insights. (Wow!  A company marketing synthetic data predicting that this is going to be the year of the digita

I posted a POV about the shift happening in our industry—from selling projects to enabling decisions. Just my opinion, I thought. But within 48 hours, hundreds of people had weighed in, and what struck me wasn't the volume. It was the substance.