Skip to main content

What I write about

Emerging Technology

My work on emerging technologies that could change the choices available to organisations, while being honest about how little is settled.

My take

I am comfortable being provisional about emerging technology because that is what the evidence usually requires. The timelines are unreliable, the path to adoption is unclear, and some promising ideas will remain interesting rather than consequential. The useful work is not pretending otherwise. It is deciding which developments deserve a place in the organisation’s field of view, and what would change if they mature.

I don’t think a Board needs a position on every new technology. It does need a way to distinguish a new capability from a new label, and to recognise the point at which waiting for certainty would leave too little room to act. A watching brief earns its place when it names the assumptions, the decisions that might move, and the evidence that would trigger a closer look.

My Remake framework is built for technologies that change the essence of work, not for AI alone. Quantum and embodied AI are the next tests I expect it to meet. The work gathered here follows those and other technologies while the picture is still forming, asking what they could change before trying to predict when they will mature.

Latest writing (12)

Filter articles

Narrow by tag

No articles match that filter. Clear the filter.

Concepts

The ideas that underpin my writing

Ideas I’ve named and matured writing about Emerging: what each one means, and where it started.

Chart of Entities

The governed set of core entity definitions that, like a chart of accounts, determines what every AI system in the organisation treats as true.

Read the article →

Compound Loop

An agentic system that coordinates several AI disciplines running in parallel within a single loop, so their interaction effects multiply value and governance happens once at the coordination layer rather than per technology.

Read the article →

Innovation Ratchets

Structural mechanisms, such as escalating success metrics and mandatory talent rotation, that make backward movement difficult and keep an AI CoE focused on innovation rather than drifting into administration.

Read the article →

Board Briefings

For directors who want to go deeper, my Board Briefings bring the related writing, evidence, and practical questions together in one place.

Newsletter

The Board in the Machine

Signals

My early reads on technologies that may matter to Boards, published while the evidence is still forming and the strategic implications remain open.

Emerging

Quantum Computing

Quantum error correction has crossed important experimental thresholds. The Board question is how to time readiness against evidence, not vendor roadmaps alone.

Emerging

Automated Reasoning

Formal logic and mathematical proof, industrialised. For some precisely specified, high-consequence controls, testing is no longer the strongest assurance available.

Emerging

Embodied AI

AI that acts in the physical world, from factory humanoids to autonomous machines. The liability, capital, and workforce questions are already Board-level.

Questions Boards ask about Emerging Technology

Are the assurances the organisation provides its Board based on probability, or proof?

Board assurance often rests on testing, sampling, and statistical confidence. The useful test is whether an assurance covers the complete, formally specified population or only the cases examined. Where a Board-approved constraint has been encoded and exhaustively verified, the answer is proof. Elsewhere it remains probability, however polished the presentation.

How do we audit decisions made by swarms of interacting agents?

Traditional audit expects an identifiable decision-maker, a decision point, and a traceable rationale. Interacting agents can blur all three. The audit capability therefore has to be designed into the system through bounded authority, interaction and decision logs, and escalation triggers tied to anomalous outcomes. Once the swarm is operating, an audit layer added afterwards cannot reconstruct evidence that was never recorded.

When an employee trains a personal agent on the job, whose intellectual property is it?

The boundary has never been clean, but personal agents make it operational. Judgement and expertise developed at work can be encoded in a system that is reusable, portable, and capable of being refined elsewhere. A credible answer covers the model and data used, the organisation’s employment and assignment terms, what may leave with the individual, and what uses remain permitted afterwards. Contracts written for documents and inventions may not settle the position on their own.

Who is liable when embodied AI operating in physical space causes unintended harm?

Liability does not move to the machine. Before deployment, the organisation needs a clear account of which decisions the system may make in physical space, where human intervention remains available, what legal duties and insurance cover apply, and who owns the consequence. The Board does not need to perform the legal analysis itself, but it should require that the answer exists before an incident forces the question.

Does Remake apply beyond AI?

Yes. Remake is designed for technologies that change the essence of work, not for AI alone. AI is the first instance, and quantum and embodied AI are the next tests I expect it to meet. Other technologies belong in scope only if they pass the same test. The technology may change, but the framework’s questions do not: what work changes, who has agency, who remains accountable, and how the change is carried through.

I use cookies to understand how my website is used. This data is collected and processed directly by me, not shared with any third parties, and helps me improve my website. See my privacy and cookie policies for more details.