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Essays from the delivery seat.

Long-form writing on enterprise AI delivery, programme governance and what absorption actually costs. Published here first, then on LinkedIn.

Latest · Field Note

The Symmetric Value-Gate Rule

Your process asks one question, and it is not what a thing costs or commits you to. It asks whether the thing presents the trigger, and almost nothing consequential has to answer that. So audit what makes your gates fire, not what they were written to cover.

Read the essay →3 September 2026 · 3 min read
  1. Field Essay

    The software you just decided to own

    Nearly a third of organisations have stopped buying software they would previously have bought, and built it instead. That is a portfolio decision, and almost nobody made it as one. The build clears every threshold the purchase would have tripped.

    Read →28 August 2026

  2. Field Essay

    The frontier gap is a definition, not a finding

    OpenAI ranked enterprise customers by tokens per active user, called the top ten percent frontier firms, then reported that frontier firms use more tokens. The skills and plugins numbers in the same report are the ones that hold, because their denominator is fixed.

    Read →17 August 2026

  3. Field Essay

    Cancelled AI projects signal discipline, not a failing technology

    Three enterprise AI numbers read as evidence the technology is stalling. Read them again and they show buyers finally pricing AI on proof of value. The gap worth worrying about sits in the platform bets nobody gates.

    Read →22 July 2026