From reactive to predictive: AI in industrial operations

The dominant conversation about enterprise AI focuses on knowledge work. Chatbots that answer customer questions. Copilots that draft documents. Assistants that summarize meetings. This bias makes sense given who writes about AI for a living, but it distorts the picture of where the technology is actually creating economic value. The largest opportunity for AI in … Read more

The European AI stack: from political talking point to operational reality

For most of the past three years, European AI sovereignty has been discussed primarily as a political aspiration. EU regulators talked about it. National governments funded research programs around it. Industry conferences featured panels on it. But for the vast majority of European enterprises actually deploying AI in production, the operational reality was that the … Read more

Defense as a software business

For most of the postwar era, defense has been an industry apart. It operated on different procurement timelines, with different incumbents, on different cost structures and with different innovation cycles than the rest of the technology economy. The major defense primes, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Thales and Saab, built complex hardware platforms … Read more

When AI meets the physical world

For most of the past decade, the most consequential advances in artificial intelligence have happened in software. Language models, recommendation engines, image classifiers, predictive analytics: the defining products of the AI era have been things you interact with on a screen. The physical world, by contrast, has remained largely resistant to the same transformation. Robots … Read more

The case for small: why specialized language models will define the next phase of enterprise AI

For most of the past three years, the conversation about enterprise AI has been dominated by a single assumption: Bigger is better. Each successive generation of frontier models has been larger than the last, more expensive to train, more capable across a wider range of tasks and more central to the strategic positioning of the … Read more

From building software to building learning systems

For most of the history of software engineering, we’ve operated under a deceptively simple model. Engineers specify behavior. Systems execute it. When the behavior is wrong, engineers fix it. When requirements change, engineers rewrite it. Between releases, the system is inert. It doesn’t learn from what it observes in production. It doesn’t adapt to how … Read more

Trusting AI: evaluation as engineering discipline

For decades, software quality has been a solved organizational problem, or at least a well-understood one. Teams write tests. Tests run automatically. When a change breaks something, the pipeline catches it before it reaches production. This discipline, built up painfully over thirty years of software engineering practice, is why modern development teams can ship multiple … Read more

From copilot to colleague: the rise of agentic AI

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence in the enterprise has been fundamentally assistive. AI systems have answered questions, generated suggestions, summarized documents and flagged anomalies. Humans have long remained firmly in control of every consequential action. The AI provided input; the person made the decision and pressed the button. This was a … Read more

Democratizing expertise: when technology removes the gatekeepers

One of the most powerful effects of technology isn’t that it makes things faster or cheaper; it’s that it fundamentally changes who gets access. For decades, access to expertise has been constrained by geography, cost and availability of professionals. If you needed medical advice, psychological support or even something as seemingly simple as a vision … Read more

Becoming an AI-first software-intensive company

Over the past decades, software-intensive systems companies have gone through several major paradigm shifts. We moved from hardware-centric products to software-defined systems, from waterfall to Agile, from projects to products and now superset platforms, and from episodic releases to continuous deployment. When each of these shifts became relevant, it was initially resisted and, intentionally or … Read more