Old enough to know better

Practical thinking on AI, business process transformation, and the technology decisions that matter — from a practitioner with 40 years of scar tissue.

1 March 2026

AI: The Answer to a Business Process Re-engineer's Prayer

For thirty years, two stories have been running in parallel in the world of business technology. They started in different places, spoke different languages, and for a long time, seemed to have nothing to do with each other. One was a story of diagnosis. The other was a story of...

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1 February 2026

Whose Problem Is AI, Anyway?

When a mature organisation first confronts the reality of Artificial Intelligence, the reaction is often a kind of paralysis. It is not a paralysis born of ignorance, but of abundance. There are too many questions, too many stakeholders, and too many perceived risks. The result i...

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1 January 2026

Your New AI System Has a Secret: You Don't Own the Brain That Built It

For the first time in my career, the speed at which we can now build sophisticated, custom software systems is genuinely astonishing. The promise of AI is not a future prospect; it is here, and the competitive advantage it offers is enormous....

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1 December 2025

Sovereign AI: A Practical Architecture for Confidential Workloads

One of the most persistent and difficult questions in AI adoption is confidentiality. For government, for regulated financial services, for any organisation handling sensitive information, the standard cloud-based AI model presents a fundamental problem: you cannot use the tool w...

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1 November 2025

The Confidentiality Dilemma: AI's Impossible Choice

Here is the fundamental dilemma of Artificial Intelligence in any professional setting: you cannot use the most powerful AI tools without putting your data into them, and you cannot put your data into them without risking its confidentiality. This is not a bug; it is a feature of...

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1 October 2025

On-Premise vs Cloud AI: Why the 250g Drone Gets Blamed for the Warship Killer

There is a dangerous category error at the heart of the current conversation about Artificial Intelligence. We are using one term – AI – to describe two fundamentally different things. It is like using the word “drone” to describe both a 250-gram quadcopter used for taking weddin...

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1 September 2025

Keeping Hold of the Tiger's Tail

For most of my career, my reaction to the Next Big Thing in technology has been a well-honed mixture of worried, dismissive, and slightly intrigued. Artificial Intelligence was no different. My initial thoughts ran a predictable course: it’s dangerous, it’s overhyped, the world m...

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1 August 2025

How to Start With AI: A Practical Guide for the Perplexed

In the last article, we diagnosed the state of paralysis that grips most mature organisations when they confront AI. Faced with a dozen valid questions about ownership, strategy, and risk, the safest-seeming option is to do nothing. To wait for clarity. To form a committee....

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1 July 2025

AI in Government: Riding the AI Tiger

The previous articles in this series looked at how any mature organisation can begin to navigate AI — who should own it, how to break the paralysis, and how to take the first practical steps. Government is the most demanding test of all those principles. The stakes are higher, th...

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1 June 2025

AI for the Regulated: A Guide for Jersey's Finance Industry

For a regulated financial services business in Jersey, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence feels different. It is not just a question of opportunity and risk, but of compliance and public trust. The principles of AI adoption are universal, but for a trust company, a bank, a fu...

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