Mario Thomas

AI is not the sixth technology wave in a familiar sequence. Desktop, internet, web, mobile, and cloud each changed the tools around the work. AI is remaking the work itself: how organisations think, decide, create, and deliver. I call this The Great Remaking, and it is also the story of my career. I have spent over three decades inside businesses while technology remade them, and leading that remaking is what I do.

A career in three parts

The first was the web. As Head of Group Internet Development (the Chief Digital Officer role of its day) of Regional Independent Media, a £177m media group of more than a hundred regional newspapers, I took a print business into the internet era: new digital products, new revenue, and a new way for a centuries-old industry to reach its readers.

The second was ecommerce, and this time the business was mine. I founded and ran Chapter Eight, a SaaS platform that processed more than £125m of transactions a year for clients including The Coca-Cola Company, and moved over 400 clients onto the cloud between 2010 and 2015. Nothing teaches the difference between a transformation plan and a transformation like owning the result.

The third is AI, and I reached it the way most enterprises did: through cloud. I have spent over a decade at Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the centre of enterprise technology adoption: building the business case and adoption frameworks used with some of the world’s largest organisations, advising their executive teams, and equipping a global field force to take AI to its customers. The industry has now moved to forward deployment, embedding engineers directly inside enterprises to build AI where the work happens. That makes the layer above the engineering matter more, not less: someone still has to decide what gets remade, in what order, and who answers for the result. That is where I work. I am currently Head of Applied AI & Emerging Technology Strategy at AWS.

I am also a Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors (IoD). Chartered Director is the IoD’s gold standard in director education, the discipline of directing a business rather than running it, and it is what makes thirty years of operating experience hold at Board level.

Everything here is written in a personal capacity, and no product or vendor is recommended by name.

Remake

Remake is my own work, built across all three parts of that career. It serves both sides of a remaking: the Board that governs it and the operators who execute it, working from the same questions and the same picture of the work. There are four of those questions, asked in order. What work is being remade? Who is remaking it, and who is accountable for the change? How is it done? And what do you get at the end? The work is one of four essences: thinking, deciding, creating, or delivering. Accountability reaches all the way up to the Board, and it is a gate: if nobody is answerable for a remaking, it doesn’t begin. The how is ADAPT, the staged method that takes a remaking from first idea to lasting change. And the result is an investment case that stands up to scrutiny, a transformation plan, and an organisation that sustains the change on its own.

Alongside the framework sits my Remake Library, the named intellectual property the work draws on: the AI Stages of Adoption, the Five Pillars of AI Capability, the Well-Advised methodology, and Minimum Lovable Governance among them. Each was used with real organisations before it was written down. The framework is built to outlast the wave it currently governs. Quantum and embodied AI are the next tests I expect it to meet.

Finding your way around

The work here is published in layers. Board Briefings gather everything on a single strategic topic into one place; start there if you’ve been handed a subject and need to get oriented quickly. Articles carry the full arguments, Signals flag emerging technologies while the picture is still forming, and Whitepapers take the biggest ideas to full technical depth. The Board in the Machine, my monthly newsletter and podcast, brings the recent work to you with the hype stripped out.

I speak internationally on AI strategy, governance, and The Great Remaking, at industry conferences and privately with Boards, which is where the real thinking tends to happen. To have me speak at your event or with your Board, please get in touch.