Beyond
the pilot.
Short, useful, written from working systems rather than slideware.
Writing on AI strategy, governance and delivery. New pieces arrive through the Beyond the Pilot newsletter, published on LinkedIn. A few a month at most.
Latest pieces
19
28 July 2026
Everybody is an AI expert now, and nobody carries the can
The barrier to calling yourself an AI consultant has fallen to about the price of a monthly subscription. The bill arrives later, and it lands on the operations team.
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28 July 2026
The models are eating what the models wrote
A year ago I thought this was how it ended. A paper published in May has changed my mind about the mechanism, though not about the mess.
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28 July 2026
Brain in a jar, please standby
The same model gets zero-trust architecture at work and absolutely nothing at home. Nobody decided this. It just settled that way.
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28 July 2026
Thirty spelling mistakes and you bin it, thirty wrong facts and you sign it
We judge documents on the errors we can see. Automated systems make only the other kind.
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28 July 2026
Fix the brakes before you fit the new engine
Transformation programmes are sold as revolutions. The friction that actually costs you money has been sitting in the backlog for eleven years.
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28 July 2026
The best automation idea in your business is already in the building
It belongs to whoever spends three hours every Monday rebuilding a report the system should have produced. Nobody has asked them.
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28 July 2026
If you think AI is coming for your job, you are the person best placed to take it
Twenty years of enterprise development taught you something a model has only read about. That turns out to matter more than anyone expected.
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28 July 2026
One pair of brackets, four hundred thousand pounds
Everyone examines how clever the agents are. Almost nobody checks whether what went into the tank was petrol.
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28 July 2026
Stop asking it to write the thing, start asking it to take the thing apart
The system message is the most useful control in the whole toolkit, and most people have never touched it.
Read the articlePublished here first.
New pieces land here, then travel through the Beyond the Pilot newsletter on LinkedIn.