Judgment for AI-assisted work.

The work before this

I won my first sales award at 17, at TIME Magazine. I became the youngest general manager at Electrolux in my twenties, where revenue grew 241 per cent on a KPMG-audited result. Then HSBC, where I was one of five managers selected globally to deliver a service transformation programme reaching 33,000 employees, and where the branding work I led contributed to the bank reaching number 23 on the Interbrand Global 100, ahead of Apple and Nike.

I left the corporate world in 2008 to build my own advisory practice, first in Australia and then across Asia Pacific. Twenty five years in, the useful part of that history is not the client list. It is having watched, at close range, how many sound technology decisions die of ordinary organisational causes.

What changed my mind about AI

For most of that career I sold time. It worked, and it also meant every good month was a month I had personally filled. What changed my thinking was noticing that the AI failures I was being called in to fix were almost never technology failures. They were decisions nobody had clearly made, checked or owned, arriving with a confident paragraph attached.

So I stopped treating this as a technology adoption problem and started treating it as a question about judgment. Then, because an opinion about judgment is worth very little on its own, I started measuring things.

What I do now

I am Founding Director, AIR APAC, the Center for AI Readiness in Asia Pacific. AIR APAC publishes measures of AI readiness in organisations and of how AI systems represent places, along with the methods behind them and a draft standard for managerial judgment in AI-enabled work. I am the author of that method and the teacher of it.

I have delivered keynotes at Google Campus South Korea and the PIKOM GBS Summit, run generative AI leadership sessions for the INSEAD Malaysia MBA programme, and facilitate for The CEO Institute Australia. My perspectives have appeared on TV5 Monde, BFM 89.9, in The Daily Telegraph and in the HubSpot Spotlight Series. I hold a degree in accounting and finance from the University of Strathclyde and a postgraduate qualification from the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

On this site I publish one piece a week from that evidence, including the parts that did not work. I take speaking engagements. I do advisory work inside relationships that already exist. That is the whole list.

The line I hold

Anything that measures, scores, assesses or audits belongs to the institution, is published under its own method, and is free to the organisation or place measured. It is not sold by me personally, in any form, under any name. Advisory and training follow the same published independence rules, including no engagement with an organisation inside an open measurement period.

I am the author of the method and the teacher of it. I am not for hire to improve anybody's score. The rules are published at airapac.org/independence, and they cost me revenue, which is the only reason they mean anything.