Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
Large organisations have always struggled with having an agreed, corporate-wide set of data for things that cross organisational boundaries: customers, products, locations, assets etc. A dedicated multi-billion-dollar software market, master data management (MDM), grew up to address this issue. Why is it so hard to get a single list of customers or products? The average…
More than three years after the generative AI explosion that started with ChatGPT, we are seeing a distinctly mixed picture in terms of AI adoption and productivity. In February 2026, the Goldman Sachs Chief Economist assessed the effect of AI on US productivity as “basically zero”, and multiple studies have found that the failure rate…
When an AI agent is asked to keep an email secret from another user, you would hope that it would find a way of doing this without destroying the email server, but you would be disappointed. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to “agentic AI”, whereby AI…
A series of studies have now shown that corporate AI projects are failing at a disturbingly high rate. MIT in August 2025 found that 95% of AI projects fail to deliver any economic return. The same was found at the same 95% failure rate by Boston Consulting Group in September 2025. Similar, albeit slightly lower,…
We are living through an AI paradox. Three years on and hundreds of billions of dollars into the AI boom, the impact on productivity is, according to Goldman Sachs, ‘near zero.’ Yet corporate and VC investment in AI has never been higher. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and generative AI has become a buzzword.…
Agentic AI is the most fashionable area of AI at the moment. Moving beyond chatbots that answer questions or generate text or images, the idea of agentic AI is to equip AI with resources and a degree of free will (“agency”). A chatbot can advise you on planning a holiday and recommend flights, hotels and…
A sign that most of us barely understand the way that LLMs work is illustrated by the trend for “prompt engineering”, where merely rewording a prompt to a large language model (LLM) would produce a better answer. There is lots of advice on this subject. Be as detailed as possible in your prompt, give context…
Large language models (LLMs) are noted for their fluent and confident answers. They increasingly perform well in a range of tests and benchmarks. For example, LLMs score highly on benchmarks like MMLU-Pro, which was specifically designed to challenge LLMs in a range of around 12,000 general knowledge tests. LLMs these days also score well on…
The technology media tends to focus on the latest foundation models for AI, products like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek etc. These are general-purpose models that can be adapted to specialist uses. What gets less attention in the press is that a whole industry of such specialist tools has sprung up to take advantage of the…
The Black Mirror TV series explored dystopian futures, and one of its recurring themes was the idea of a digital life after death. This was the theme of no less than three episodes: Be Right Back (2013), San Junipero (2016) and Eulogy (2025). As often with science fiction, life is not far behind, and there…