Written from inside the work.
Field notes from live operations, and what's actually worth knowing from the AI industry, operations practice, and business management. No hype, no reprinted press releases — and every industry claim carries its source.
Don't saw off the middle rung
Gartner: 63% of senior procurement leaders expect AI to significantly improve performance within three years — only 25% have redesigned jobs or roles because of it. AI lands on the standardized middle of the work, the same middle where people learn judgment. Take the typing, keep the call on the rung.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · OCT 2026 · 4 MINThe cheaper it gets, the more it costs
McKinsey, 120 enterprises: 93% blew past their planned AI budget while the price of a fixed unit of AI fell roughly tenfold a year. Agents burn 5 to 30 times the tokens of a chat, and a "zombie agent" runs only because nobody measures it. Price per step is the vendor's number. Cost per outcome is yours.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · OCT 2026 · 4 MINBuilt for you, not by you
Gartner: by 2028, 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built by vendor forward-deployed engineers, trapped by costs and unable to evolve it — and fewer than 20% of those engagements ever feed the vendor's product. If you didn't map it, you don't own it.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · SEP 2026 · 4 MINCounted, not measured
Dataiku and Harris Poll, 685 CIOs: 90% say they track every agent, 72% can't confirm the agents deliver, 81% lack oversight of the ones built outside IT, 47% already scrapped 20+. A count is not a baseline.
Read → AI INDUSTRY · SEP 2026 · 4 MINLabel the work before you hand it over
IBM, 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees: only 26% have defined which work is human-led, AI-assisted or AI-executed. 80% say AI created invisible work, and 43% of employees say the blame lands on them. The label is the control.
Read → MANAGEMENT · SEP 2026 · 4 MINEveryone uses it. Nobody measures it.
Gartner, 161 chief audit executives: 93% use AI, 60% have no strategy, 54% never started measuring the return. The most controlled function in the building is running AI ad hoc — the gap is a map nobody drew.
Read → MANAGEMENT · SEP 2026 · 4 MINRehired at a premium
Gartner: by 2029, 30% of employees laid off because AI replaced them will be rehired, often at a significantly higher cost. You didn't cut a task — you cut the person who knew why the process works.
Read → MANAGEMENT · AUG 2026 · 3 MINTake the pain, not the job
The other half of the Chief AI Officer role is people skills: knowing where the pressure lives, and pointing intelligence at the residue around the job — never at the person doing it.
Read → OPERATIONS · AUG 2026 · 3 MINTwo-thirds of the budget, no idea what came back
67% of supply chain digital spend now goes to AI, and 55% of the officers signing it off can't state the return. That's not an investment problem — it's a baseline problem.
Read → OPERATIONS · AUG 2026 · 3 MINPlanned versus reactive: the ratio that runs your operation
Every operation splits work into what it chose to do and what happened to it. Almost nobody can state their ratio out loud — and that pause is the finding.
Read → FIELD NOTE · AUG 2026 · 3 MINThe seam nobody owns
Between any two teams sits a handoff with no owner, two systems, and the work that slips through. Start your AI there.
Read → FIELD NOTE · AUG 2026 · 3 MINSo-so automation is the real risk
The dangerous tool isn't the one that fails loudly. It's the one just right enough to trust and just wrong enough to cost you.
Read → FIELD NOTE · AUG 2026 · 2 MINWhy I got burned and didn't change
Experience said trust people less. I never did. Why some values shouldn't be optimized away.
Read →Nothing filed under that heading yet — it's coming.