by Wayne Pales | Aug 30, 2026
When we began scaling GenAI, I described the challenge as a duality: risk on one side, opportunity on the other, and leadership as the act of navigating between them. Most organisations I’d worked in resolved that tension with control: heavy-handed access...
by Wayne Pales | Aug 23, 2026
Most of the AI conversation inside organisations is about our own program: our tools, our people, our processes, our governance. But step back and look at where your spend actually goes. Managed services. System integrators. Software development partners....
by Wayne Pales | Aug 16, 2026
For a decade or more, “cloud first” was the responsible answer, and “SaaS first” its natural extension. I’m now convinced that, as a default, it should be dead. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a strategy and became a habit. If...
by Wayne Pales | Aug 9, 2026
When I say our AI program is about amplifying our people, not replacing them, I mean it. But, such an outcome cannot be guaranteed. Our software engineers now use AI to hunt defects in production code. Much of what it finds, the team already knew about: weaknesses...
by Wayne Pales | Aug 2, 2026
I’ve argued before that you should give your AI agents a name. I stand by it. Naming works because it forces clarity: once an agent is “Alex” rather than “the tool”, you have to decide its job, what it can access, what good output looks...
by Wayne Pales | Jul 26, 2026
I’ve spent a good part of my career around digital transformation, and there is a question AI has forced me to reopen: what is a digital business now? Some things haven’t changed. Transformation was never really about technology; it’s about...
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...
