Ideas on data, AI, leadership and the parts of work that get messy.
I write about the problems that tend to show up after the presentation is finished: AI projects that stall, data teams that need to prove their value, difficult leadership decisions, and career situations nobody really teaches you how to handle.
Everything in one place.
Search by topic, phrase or problem, or browse the full library.
AI Adoption Metrics: What to Measure After the Pilot Goes Live
How to tell whether AI has become part of useful work: a fictional 1,000-seat adoption funnel, five metric layers and a review cadence from pilot to scale.
Executive KPIs: Which Metrics Deserve Leadership Attention?
Six tests that decide which KPIs deserve executive attention, applied to a fictional 36-metric dashboard, with leading and lagging pairs and an AI investment check.
AI Agent Cost: What an Agent Has to Save Before It Pays for Itself
A cost model for a fictional supplier-confirmation agent showing cost per successful task, payback, break-even volume and why review policy matters more than token prices.
Data Team KPIs: How to Measure the Business Value of a Data Team
Why dashboards and pipelines are poor measures of a data team, and a value ledger and scorecard that a CFO will accept without invented attribution.
AI Prioritization Framework: Which AI Project Should You Fund First?
A practical AI prioritization framework that ranks AI projects on value that survives exceptions, review time, adoption and missing baselines, then tests whether the ranking holds.
AI Agent Evaluation: How I Test an AI Agent Before I Trust It
The same AI agent scored 0%, 79% and 93% on the same 14 business questions. Here is the evaluation method I use to see what the score…
Semantic Layer for AI: Prompt Rules vs Governed Metrics in Databricks
A semantic layer AI setup improved Databricks Genie’s performance on the same 14 business questions from 79% with prompt-based rules to 93% with governed metrics. My manual…
AI Agent Observability: What to Watch After an Agent Says Done
AI agent observability becomes useful when a run reports success and the business record says otherwise. Imagine a purchasing agent checking a supplier confirmation for 100 industrial…
What Is an AI Agent Harness? A Business Example of How Agents Work
What Is an AI Agent Harness? A Business Example of How Agents Work An AI agent harness is the software around an AI model that lets it…
Managing Managers: How to Lead Data Teams Without Taking Over
Managing managers becomes difficult the first time two capable leaders bring you opposite answers to the same problem. A data platform manager wants engineers focused on a…
Shadow AI at Work: What Managers Should Do About Unapproved Tools
Shadow AI often starts with a reasonable work problem. Someone needs to sort customer tickets before a service review, but the approved tool cannot read the export.…
Enterprise AI Agent: How to Choose a Business Workflow Worth Building
An enterprise AI agent sounds appealing when a team is drowning in follow-ups. It can read records, compare them, prepare a next step, and sometimes act through…
AI Business Use Cases: How to Choose Your First Project
AI business use cases are useful only when they connect a business problem to suitable data, a real workflow, a measurable result and a person who remains…
Human in the Loop: Where People Should Review AI Decisions
Human in the loop means placing a person at a defined point in an AI-supported process to review evidence, make a judgment, approve an action, correct an…
What Is MCP? A Plain-English Guide for Business Leaders
What is MCP? Model Context Protocol is a common way for an AI application to discover and use approved tools, data and services. It can help an…
How to Build an AI Agent in ChatGPT: A No-Code Experiment
If you want to learn how to build an AI agent, the easiest place to start is not with code. Start with one recurring business task, give…
AI Agents for Business: A Non-Technical Guide
AI agents for business are being presented as the next major change in how work gets done. Some descriptions make them sound like digital employees capable of…
AI Operating Model: How Teams and Decision Rights Scale
An AI operating model determines who selects AI opportunities, who owns the business outcome, who builds reusable capabilities, who accepts risk, and who keeps the product working…
AI Maturity Assessment: Where to Start at Every Level
An AI maturity assessment should tell leaders what the organization can do reliably today, what is holding it back, and which action deserves funding next. It should…
AI Governance Framework: What Four Business Experiments Taught Me
AI GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS LEADERS An AI governance framework becomes real when an output can change a payment, a contract decision, an inventory order or an…
AI Strategy: A Practical Framework for Business Leaders
An AI strategy is a set of choices about where artificial intelligence should change the business, what role it should play, and what evidence must exist before…
Data Governance Best Practices: What Actually Makes Governance Work
Data governance best practices should help a company settle important data decisions, prevent recurring failures and prove that agreed controls are working. If governance mainly produces meetings,…
Data Governance Framework: How to Build Ownership and Decision Rights
DATA GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS LEADERS A data governance framework earns its place when it helps the organization make a decision. If it produces a large glossary,…
AI Governance Framework: Eight Practical Controls for Business Leaders
AI GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS LEADERS An AI governance framework becomes real when an output can change a payment, a contract decision, an inventory order or an…
Databricks Genie Tutorial: Build Your First AI/BI Agent
BEGINNER DATABRICKS TUTORIAL Databricks Genie gives business users a familiar chat interface for asking questions about company data. Instead of starting with SQL, they can ask a…
Databricks Genie Tutorial: How Business Context Improved Accuracy From 0% to 93%
This Databricks Genie tutorial tests a simple question that matters far more than whether an AI tool can write SQL: does the agent understand what the business…
AI Inventory Management: I Tested ChatGPT on Reorder and Overstock Decisions
Inventory reports have a habit of looking simple until you actually have to decide what deserves attention. A product can be below its reorder point and still…
AI Contract Review: I Tested ChatGPT Against a Contract Playbook
Vendor contract review can involve a surprising amount of repetitive comparison work. A reviewer reads a clause, checks the company’s contract playbook, decides whether the position is…
AI for Accounts Payable: I Tested ChatGPT on Invoice and PO Matching
Accounts payable has a lot of work that is individually quite simple and collectively quite annoying. A vendor sends an invoice, someone finds the purchase order, and…
How to Deal With a Toxic Coworker (And What to Do If You’re the One Managing Them If You’re Managing Them)
How to Deal With a Toxic Coworker (And What to Do If You’re the One Managing Them) You know the feeling before you can even name it.…
Professional Presence Isn’t Just About the Room You’re In
Professional Presence Isn’t Just About the Room You’re In Most advice on professional presence covers the same three things. Gravitas. Communication. Appearance. Stay composed under pressure. Speak…
How to Build a Data Team: The Roles Nobody Hires For
How to Build a Data Team: The Roles Nobody Hires For and the Trap That Breaks Most Teams Monday morning standup. One team member had called in…
Why Am I Not Getting Promoted? The Six Signals Committees Look For
Why Am I Not Getting Promoted? The Six Signals Committees Actually Look For Four performance reviews. Two reorgs. The same phrase from three different managers, delivered with…
CDO CTO Responsibilities: What Your Reporting Line Actually Means
CDO CTO Responsibilities: What Your Reporting Line Actually Means for Your Budget and Mandate The email arrived in Matt’s inbox at 7:22 on a Wednesday morning, forwarded…
Managing Up: A Data Leader’s Guide to the CDO, CTO, and Peers Who Test You
Managing Up: The Three Relationships That Decide Whether Data Leaders Get Funded, Trusted, and Promoted On a Tuesday in October, a data engineering director named Matt learned…
Building Data Culture
A Data Driven Culture Framework That Actually Changes Behavior A data driven culture framework is not a dashboard, a data catalog, or a training program. It is…
AI Pilot with Guardrails: From Demo to Business Workflow
An AI pilot should test what happens when a useful model meets a real business process. In a small accounts payable experiment, I asked ChatGPT to compare…
AI Change Management
AI Change Management: What to Do When the Technology Works but People Don’t Change AI change management gets difficult at the exact point where most project plans…
AI Product Design
Designing AI Products People Actually Use The demo went perfectly. Clean visualizations showing predicted demand for the top 100 products. Confidence intervals indicating forecast reliability. Historical accuracy…
AI Adoption Playbook
The AI Adoption Playbook: How Enterprises Turn Pilots Into Business Results The AI system was working perfectly. Model accuracy at 89%. Zero downtime. Response times under 200…
Data driven Decision Making
Data Driven Decision Making: 7 Decisions Leaders Get Wrong Data driven decision making does not mean letting a dashboard make the decision for you. It means using…
Data Readiness for AI
Data Readiness: The Hidden Ingredient of Every Successful AI Project You can have the best data scientists, the most sophisticated algorithms, and unlimited budget. But if your…
Why Most AI Projects Fail (and How to Beat the Odds)
Why AI Projects Fail: 7 Mistakes Leaders Can Fix Why AI projects fail is usually less mysterious than it looks. A team can have capable engineers, a…
The Complete AI ROI Roadmap: Turning Artificial Intelligence Into Measurable Business Value
AI Return on Investment: How to Build Numbers Your CFO Can Defend AI return on investment gets interesting the moment somebody from Finance asks a very simple…
No articles matched. Try another search or filter.