Articles
What it takes for software to understand an organisation well enough to be trusted with a decision. Published first on X, collected here. Numbered in the order the argument is built, newest first below.
010 / DANGEROUS WORK
The follow-through from 009. Some jobs should feel like progress when they disappear: not because people became obsolete, but because sending a person into radiation, fire, toxic environments or structural collapse stopped being acceptable once machines could go instead.
009 / HUMANOID ROBOTICS
The series takes a body. Why build Optimus-shaped robots instead of TARS? Because stairs, doors, tools and shelves already form an API, and civilisation was built around the human form. The governance problem follows the intelligence into the physical world.
008 / DIGITAL TWINS
A machine can be perfectly healthy while the system around it is failing. A twin that stops at the asset cannot answer the question the business actually cares about, which is what happens next.
007 / OPERATIONAL SEMANTICS
Arc II begins here. Ask five systems the same question and you may get five different answers, all of them real. Operational truth is the discipline that decides which one an organisation can act on.
006 / DETERMINISTIC SYSTEMS
Generative AI is probabilistic by design. Money, inventory, permissions and state transitions cannot be.
005 / AGENT GOVERNANCE
Giving AI tools is becoming the easy part. The harder question is authority. What may an agent actually change, spend, approve or execute?
004 / AI EXPLAINABILITY
A polished explanation can still be wrong. Trustworthy enterprise AI needs evidence that can be inspected, challenged and reconstructed long after the model has finished speaking.
003 / OPERATIONAL MODELLING
An organisation chart explains who reports to whom. It says very little about how the business actually works. Operationally a company is a graph, and the edges are where the intelligence lives.
002 / OPERATIONAL TRUTH
An enterprise AI can be an extraordinarily powerful interpreter of operational reality. The reality itself needs firmer foundations: authoritative state, evidence, provenance and governed authority.
001 / ENTERPRISE AI
A company is not just its data. It is a network of dependencies, and before a machine can operate one intelligently, somebody has to teach it what the company actually is.
