Thinking you can hold us to
Essays, technical notes and function deep-dives on decisions, prediction and proof. Every claim carries its number and its source.
The schedule is obsolete by the morning meeting
Production schedules are rebuilt overnight and overtaken by breakfast: a late truck, a down machine, an absent operator. The failure is not scheduling too little. It is treating the schedule as an answer instead of a decision about which disruptions matter.
You have enough data
The most common reason for postponing AI is that the data is not ready. That is half right, and wholly backwards. Enterprises do not lack data; they lack governed data at the point of decision, and a clean-up programme with no consuming decision never converges.
The promise is a margin decision
Every promise date is a bet about the future and an allocation of scarce supply, yet most companies compute it with an ERP availability check and give it away first come, first served. Order promising is priced like plumbing and behaves like pricing.
Every business case is a forecast nobody scores
Capital allocation runs on forecasts, every business case is one, yet very few organisations go back to score approved cases against what happened. A function that never closes the loop cannot learn, and its optimism bias compounds annually.
Can you defend this number to the audit committee?
Board and investor reporting is acquiring AI-produced content faster than it is acquiring the ability to defend it. Every figure that reaches the board should arrive with its lineage attached, because the question is no longer whether it will be asked.
An evaluation is not a pilot
A pilot proves software can run. An evaluation proves it changes a number you care about, on your data, against a baseline agreed before anyone saw a result. Eight weeks is enough, if the metric comes first.
1.7 trillion dollars in the wrong place
The Hackett Group puts excess working capital across the top 1,000 US companies at $1.7 trillion, with inventory days at a decade high. The cash is not trapped by strategy. It is trapped by thousands of small parameter decisions nobody owns.
One event backbone
A change happens, a KPI moves, a rule fires, an alert reaches an owner, a plan responds, an audit trail records all of it. In most enterprises those are six systems stitched together by exports. Lineage dies in the stitching.
Predicting misconduct before the hotline call
Ethics programmes are built around the hotline, which means they learn about harm after someone was harmed enough to report it. The leading indicators, reporting decay, retaliation signals, third-party blind spots, are sitting in data the function already owns.
Beyond enterprise search
Search finds documents. The job was always answers a person can act on and defend, computed inside their permissions, with the sources cited and the whole thing running where the data lives. That is a different machine from a search box, and from most of what is currently sold as one.
The day-100 AI bill
The first hundred days of an AI programme are paid for by enthusiasm. Day 100 is when the CFO asks what a decision costs and what it returns, and few have kept the books that answer either question.
The 9 percent you agreed to lose
WorldCC research puts average value leakage from contracts at 9.2% of contract value, and most companies do not systematically track the obligations they signed. The contract is a bundle of commitments and predictions. Almost nobody operates it as one.
Follow the thinking
New essays land on LinkedIn first. Follow 3RDi to catch them.