Serial innovator, entrepreneur and coffee addict. Innovation at Burns & McDonnell. (Tweets are my own.)
Kansas City, MO
Joined March 2009
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Five things every production agent needs: a name on the register. A written lane and a record of every action. An owner who can pause it. A cost ceiling. An expiry date on every permission. With all five, you can prove what it did with the room it had. #AIFirst
BCG: 42% of companies expect agents to/ act autonomously by 2030. Just 5% have "the full set of critical controls in place today." An agent earns autonomy the way a manager earns signing authority: an owner, a clear job, a record of what it did. #AIFirst
It’s not even close.
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Jeff Danley retweeted
This might be a hot take, but the real AI divide will not be rich versus poor or young versus old. It will be curious versus afraid. The tools are nearly free and getting better every month. The only thing standing between most people and that leverage is a decision.
Opening the Minnesota IT Symposium today. Five questions for any agent footprint: Can you name every agent running? How would you know one went off course? Who owns the decision when the AI is wrong? What does year two cost? What will we stop doing? #AIFirst
. @ServiceNow asked 550 C-suite execs about their AI. 81% believe more is running than they can account for. Only 20% keep a live, self-updating inventory. Most companies are governing from the design drawings. Your AI footprint needs as-builts. #AIFirst
Every company has an approved AI stack. The agents doing the interesting work were often built off it, by people doing their jobs well. Read each one as a free requirements document: map it, name an owner, then make the governed path the shortest one. #AIFirst
Next Thursday I open the Minnesota IT Symposium. Companies fully aligned on purpose, strategy and culture grew revenue 44.5% in three years vs 10.7% for the rest. My take: AI is the biggest alignment test of the decade. See you in Minnetonka Oct 29. #AIFirst #MNSYM @EFMEvents
Been saying this for a while now. Wild times ahead! Big, comfortable, lazy companies will be prime targets for disruption.
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Gartner: only 4% of CIOs have plans to redesign roles for a human-agent workforce. The AI bill lands this quarter. Role redesign has no invoice, so it waits. Meanwhile agents take the first drafts juniors used to learn on. Who's rebuilding the bottom rungs? #AIFirst
@Gartner_inc #GartnerSYM
Procore's SVP of product, on his own stage yesterday: "We don't earn the right to talk about digital coworkers, until we've fixed the basics."
Best line of the week. Agents build on whatever slab you poured.
What basic would your org fix first? #GBK26
Room one done. Three days with CIOs at @Gartner_inc now at Groundbreak with the builders. Same question in both rooms: who owns the call when the AI is wrong? I want to hear how the jobsite answers it. #GBK26
#GartnerSymposium #ai #aifirst
🤖 Made with AI
Gartner asked 2,002 CIOs. The ones with a written rule for stopping AI pilots were 2.3x more likely to be capturing real value. Only 31% have one.
The differentiator isn't a better model. It's permission to stop, which is the only exit from Pilot Purgatory.
#GartnerSYM
Alicia Mullery of Gartner put it in four words today: volume is not value.
Use cases are up 400% year on year. Only 13% of CIOs report significant AI value.
If an AI-first organization cannot name what it would stop, it cannot name what it is worth. #GartnerSYM
Gartner's opening keynote put AI value and AI risk on one flywheel with two forces: momentum and drag.
86% of CIOs say risk is growing faster than value. On average, four times faster.
That is the gap an AI-first organization closes. #GartnerSYM #CIO #AI
Gartner: $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spend could be impaired by 2030. The industry needs $8.5 trillion of revenue to earn a 12% return.
An AI-first organization asks a different question: what did we commit to before we had evidence?
#GartnerSYM
#ai
#AIFirst
What a great morning at @UnivOfKansas for the Falling into AI event!
Thank you to Melanie Farmer and Lisa Dieker for coordinating the summit and inviting me to be part of it!
My session focused on something I live every day: what it's actually like to work alongside a team of AI agents. Not one chatbot answering questions, but a group of agents with defined roles, handing work to each other and to the people they support.
One of my favorite parts of events like this are the hallway conversations. I ran into colleagues I hadn't seen in a while and met AI practitioners doing thoughtful work across education, healthcare, and industry. Those conversations are where the real learning happens!
Happy to see #KU driving the #AI conversation with students, faculty, and industry practitioners.
Learn more about the summit: ai.ku.edu/
#AI #AIAgents #FallingIntoAI #UniversityOfKansas #EnterpriseAI #AIFirst
Your Workers Are Already Superhuman. Your Organization Is Still Built for Mortals.
#Ai #Leadership #Innovation #AIFirst
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