As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
Ask permission, or ask forgiveness?
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Last week I was on a governance call with the general counsel of a hedge fund. The call was part of a firm kick off for the AI program. One of our first topics was: do we give people access to Claude Cowork or Claude Code? Here's how I reframed it. Cowork is an "ask for permission" environment. You pick the folders it can touch. Code is "ask for forgiveness." It was built for developers, and it starts with broad access to your machine. It related to a conversation a few days later around security and how leadership can manage risk in these systems. We opened Claude and talked through 3 settings every Claude admin or leader should know. 1. Computer use. This is the setting that lets AI operate your desktop apps. Turn it off unless someone has a named use case. 2. Blocked domains in your browser agent. If you use Claude in Chrome or something similar, add blocked domains: banking, payroll, password manager, HR systems. I block my own bank and password manager. 3. Connector permissions. At this firm, every connector was set to "always allow." Change anything that writes, sends or deletes to "needs approval." Read-only tools can stay on "always allow." Then write the three choices on one page and share it with the team, so everyone knows what's on and why. That page does more for adoption than a ban, because people stop guessing what's allowed. A caveat: product menus change often, so the exact names may differ by the time you look. The three questions stay the same. Can it drive my computer? Which sites can it visit? What can it do without asking me? Which of the three did you find set wide open? Alex |
AZAI Advisory
As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
This week I went to a lunch at Stanford Law with Ethan Mollick and Kevin Roose. If you haven't read them: Ethan Mollick is the Wharton professor behind Co-Intelligence, the book that showed readers how to use AI productively. His latest, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI, is about working well in the uneven zone where AI's abilities and ours overlap, the jagged frontier. Kevin Roose wrote Futureproof, and his new book, The AGI Chronicles, draws on more than 150 interviews to tell the story...
Last week I was in a session with the operations lead at an investment fund. Her quarterly investor capacity calculation was due that day. She had saved a skill for it a while back. She had her doubts, and said so out loud. She fully expected it to fail. She ran it anyway. Midway through, the skill paused and asked her a question. Was a new investor exempt from the limit? It also picked up transfers that hadn't been booked into the capital activity tab yet. Something she would likely have...
This week I spent a session with a consulting firm. Their clients care a great deal about confidentiality, so the firm doesn't record or transcribe client meetings. Someone types notes live in Notion instead, in one long running page for each client. Then the typing starts again. After the meeting, a person re-enters the takeaways into Asana as tasks. Then a person writes them out a third time in a follow-up email. Same information, three rounds of typing. I'm tired just thinking about all...