THOUGHTS ON AI

From 286 machines to bulletin boards. From dial-up to ADSL to broadband. From the birth of the internet to the world wide web. From Perl and C to Java and JavaScript. From closed source to open source. From physical server rooms to virtualisation to cloud. From waterfall to agile. From monoliths to microservices to serverless. From big data to machine learning. From mobile apps to remote-first everything.

I was there for all of it. Building, leading, shipping. Across seven countries and more than 80 organisations.

AI is not a revolution that appeared from nowhere. It is the next wave in a pattern I have watched unfold for four decades. And the people who will get the most from it are the ones who understand what the previous waves taught us. How to separate the signal from the noise. How to know when something is real and when it is just well-marketed hype.

Here is where I see it differently. To me, AI does not stand for Artificial Intelligence. It stands for Augmented Intelligence and Additional Income. That is not a tagline. It is a lens. Does this tool, idea, or breakthrough help you get more done for less? Does it create real additional income? As a founder, business coach, leadership consultant, and six-time CTO, that is the only question I care about. If the answer is no to both, it is noise. If the answer is yes, you need to know about it.

That is what this is. One person's view, shaped by 40 years of building things that had to work, applied to an AI landscape that moves faster than most people can keep up with. You will hear from me when I have something worth your time.