Most AI adoption plans are built around access — which tools, which licences, which training programme, which rollout timeline. These are the variables that appear in budget conversations and Board updates — but they are not the whole picture. What rarely makes it into the plan is friction. Not resistance, which gets plenty of attention and there are workshops for that, change management frameworks, and communications strategies designed to move people from sceptical to willi

I was the Emcee at PX Live last Friday and I intentionally held back from mentioning AI — and it came up anyway. When it did, it was through the familiar ‘tool lens’ — which from a room full of People Leaders, was slightly surprising — but, at the same time, not so surprising. That’s where most People Leaders are heading at the moment — the obsessive search for use cases, practical skills, and the latest frontier model functionality that will provide them with an army of agen

The cost of not trying is higher than the cost of trying and failing. That’s the tension sitting underneath every AI conversation I have with people in organisations right now — and most of them haven’t named it yet. Time is one of the most consistently cited blockers I hear when delivering AI training and workshops; whether it’s time to learn, initial set-up time, or a general sense of having no time to dedicate to learning, experimenting or exploring. Without dedicated time

I get asked three questions quite consistently about AI, and they all focus on one theme — “Will AI replace us?” The three questions are: 1. Which LLM is the best for the type of work I’m doing? 2. What AI course do you recommend? 3. Which jobs will be replaced by AI in the next 12 months? That last question is the one where I feel the most anxiety and tension emanating from the person asking it, and I understand why. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, entry-level job p

This is the eleventh post in a series I write for People Leaders who want clarity, not hype. My aim is always the same: to take the parts of the AI conversation that feel technical, abstract, or simply overwhelming, and translate them into something a people leader can actually use. This post is about a decision that has almost certainly already been made in your organisation, either with you or without you. It is about what that decision really commits your people to — and w

There is a growing narrative that “building AI agents” is the next step for progressive People teams, and that if you are not experimenting with agents you are somehow lagging behind. I’m hearing this in leadership conversations, it’s all over LinkedIn and it’s certainly filling vendors sales pipelines. I call this the Agent Illusion . The Agent Illusion is the belief that deploying AI agents will unlock productivity on its own, without redesigning workflows, cleaning up data