Not long after I stepped back from full-time work in November 2024, I asked myself a simple question: will AI replace what I spent thirty years doing?
The answer that came back, the more I thought about it and the more I wrote, was that AI doesn’t remove the constraints sitting inside an organisation. It speeds everything up around them, until the constraint is the only thing left standing still, and everyone can finally see it.
This series traces that idea across six pieces, a production bottleneck at ANZ, an immunity system deciding which ideas an organisation actually accepts, the steering committees and financial thresholds that govern whether anything moves at all, the undocumented layer of belief and self-interest sitting above it. The last piece turns the lens on myself, a laptop, a comic strip, and what AI exposed about my own process, now that there’s nobody left to blame but me.
Read them in order if you can. Each one builds a little on what came before it, the same way the thinking did for me.
- AI doesn’t remove organisational constraints. It accelerates exposure to them.
- AI inherits the operating system of the organisation.
- AI can generate strategy decks. It cannot create organisational coherence.
- AI speeds up everything except the constraint. And the constraint is rarely the technology.
- AI can read what’s written down. It can’t read the room.
- AI is an extension of me in a machine.