by Wayne Pales | Jul 19, 2026
Those of us who lived through the SaaS era carry scar tissue about lock-in. Data hostage in proprietary formats, integrations wired so deep that leaving costs more than staying, renewal negotiations conducted from a position of engineered weakness. We learned,...
by Wayne Pales | Jul 12, 2026
In the early ’90s I was just entering the workforce. I can’t recall why but I was fascinated with the whole management theory space. I consumed everything I could from the likes of Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, and Michael Hammer. Hammer, in...
by Wayne Pales | Jul 5, 2026
Every conversation about AI risk eventually reaches the exotic scenarios: model manipulation, adversarial attacks, agents behaving in unintended ways. Real topics. But I keep dragging our conversations back to something far less interesting, because the boring truth...
by Wayne Pales | Jun 28, 2026
There’s a sentence in our AI governance I’d defend above almost all the others: if an agent takes action, a human owns it, and that ownership is never transferable to the machine. It sounds obvious written down. In practice it cuts against a drift you can...
by Wayne Pales | Jun 21, 2026
One of our more interesting experiments: we built an agent to evaluate proposals, and then, rather than letting it replace human evaluation, we made it argue with our humans. The obvious design would have been substitution. The agent reads submissions, scores them...
by Wayne Pales | Jun 14, 2026
We’ve had a run of success giving agents well-defined work: drafting, checking, summarising, monitoring. The pattern behind those wins is no mystery. Where we can specify inputs, outputs and what good looks like, agents perform. The harder lesson came when we...
by Wayne Pales | Jun 7, 2026
Here’s an uncomfortable pattern I’ve seen across two decades of technology investment, sharpened by everything AI has taught us recently. Most large software projects are described as technology projects. They mostly aren’t. Strip away the platform...
by Wayne Pales | May 31, 2026
Something has been quietly taken from our people over decades, and I think AI, oddly, is giving it back. Watch the arc. Industrial-era process design made each of us a cog: responsible for a step, blind to the whole. Then enterprise software and SaaS arrived, and the...
by Wayne Pales | May 24, 2026
Everyone warned me that AI would expose our data problems. That prediction turned out to be true and, in the way it usually gets discussed, completely misleading. Yes, when we pointed AI tools at parts of our data, the cracks showed. Inconsistent records, duplicated...
by Wayne Pales | May 17, 2026
I learned that people in my organisation were using AI to help write performance and development documents. My reaction split cleanly down the middle: thrilled, and worried, in equal measure. Thrilled, because this is exactly the maturity we’d been building...
