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.
Everybody, calm down
Yesterday a Chief Commercial Officer at a tech company told me about the week he almost lost control of his own roadmap. One of his team members was buried in pricing math and contract paperwork, so she built herself a Claude tool to handle it. Nobody asked her to. She just noticed the friction and fixed it for herself. Within days, a few colleagues spotted the tool and got excited. They wanted to bend it toward bulk pricing quotes, a job that depends on forecasting and optimization data the original tool never touches. If they'd pulled it off, real pricing decisions would have quietly rerouted around the systems built to protect the business from exactly that kind of drift. He caught it in time. His team runs a monthly call where anyone who's built something with AI shows it to the room. Someone demoed the tool. Someone else got ideas. Because he was in that room, paying attention, he saw what was happening. His own line: "If I hadn't seen this, I wouldn't have known to say, hey, there's something coming, everybody calm down." I hear a version of this fear from almost every leader who's nervous about giving a team real AI access. They frame it as "what if they build the wrong thing." We all know that people building things on their own initiative is actually a good sign. But what happens when things are being built, without proper review or guardrails and we, as leaders, have no idea? A review board on an html site catches some of those builds; a live meeting catches more. If you're worried about errant behavior, consider a regular meeting for AI review. Put a recurring call on the calendar, even 20 minutes, where anyone can show what they've built with AI. No pitch deck required, just a screen share. In that room, ask two questions every time: what data or software does this use, and who else here already needs this. And resist gating the sharing behind an approval step before the meeting. Approval after the meeting works fine. Approval before the meeting teaches people to stop telling you. The best AI tool in your company might already exist. Somebody just hasn't demoed it yet. Alex |
Alex Talks AI
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.
Last week a client texted me a screenshot of her Claude usage meter, hit her limit by 2pm, and said “I asked like ten questions today. How is this possible?” I went looking for the answer, and it led me to a piece by a builder named Nate who tracks his own AI token usage obsessively. He opened his tracker after a long day and found 3.77 billion tokens. Most of it was “reused” input: material he never typed. Why? Because every time you message the model, the LLM is reloading all the previous...
Yesterday I saw the survey results from a room full of executives with some surprising results. A conference organizer had polled about a hundred attendees ahead of an AI focused event. Eighty three percent said AI had improved their work. Thirty percent said the investment had actually paid for itself. I think we're all experiencing this right now. I call it "modern day magic". AI delivers on so much so quickly. Not always the best, but faster and sometimes better than on our own. So the...
Yesterday I told you about the panic that hit me the night before my son's SAT. I'd given an unidentified company access to my Google account. I had no idea what it could see or do with it. I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but I'd built this before. The agent I built took hours of trial and error to wire up and lived inside Telegram, a messaging app. I gave it access to my Gmail and my Calendar. It could read, draft, edit, and delete emails. It could create and cancel calendar invites. All...