Seeing over the horizon

Executing, Management, Strategy

Why Drive Straight into a Traffic Jam?

It’s a traffic-Jam in the making, and hiding in plain sight. The Cloud computing landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, one that can upend the carefully laid plans of UK SMEs who have come to rely on its seemingly limitless capacity, flexibility and predictability. The foundations of Cloud infrastructure are being stress-tested in ways few…
Organisation

Can AI Do a Shakespeare or Only Lucky Hallucinations?

The question of whether machines can replicate the creative genius of a William Shakespeare is intriguing and contentious. How do the nuances of creative genius stack up against lucky hallucination? Can systems ever be trained to achieve genius? Creative Genius vs. Lucky Hallucination Creative genius is often attributed to individuals who produce works of exceptional…
Investors, Management, Organisation, Trend Spotting

Will CxOs have to navigate a re-run of 1848?

The year 1848 saw a wave of revolutions sweep across Europe, toppling monarchies and reshaping the continent’s political landscape. Nearly two centuries later, some observers are drawing unsettling parallels between the tumultuous events of that era and the growing unrest of our own time. As social, economic and technological forces converge in potentially explosive ways,…
Organisation

Are these unprecedented times for CxOs?

In recent years, it has become increasingly common to hear people remark that we are living through unusually turbulent times. From the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change, political polarization, technological disruption, and geopolitical tensions, it can feel as though we are facing an unprecedented convergence of crises and rapid changes. But how unusual is our…
Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Does AI have a Best Before date?

Irony or prescience? On July 24, 2024, as tech stocks plummeted in a sudden AI-related market rout, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh published a groundbreaking study in Nature. The paper, titled “AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data,” revealed a critical flaw in the development of artificial…
Entrepreneurs, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Trust and survival are intertwined for tech firms

Trust has been a big issue for all of time, or at least the 300,000 years humans have been around. Trust sensitivity has been baked into our DNA by selection, simply because the people most likely to survive and reproduce were those who were skeptical and mistrusting of anything that they didn’t already know. Change…
Organisation

Cloud Challenges for the C-Suite in 2024

Most organisations now live in the digital world and many connect, store and process data and information, and run their operations in Cloud and other IT infrastructure. Usage is accelerating and causing important business issues and challenges. 2024 is shaping up to be a year of opportunity and challenge for firms using Cloud and connected…
Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Latest News Reveals Business Risks in Cloud

The latest estimates show that the world market for Cloud infrastructure has grown by almost 20% in the last year, to $66.5bn in Q1 2023, and that’s 60% higher than two years ago. AWS is very much the leader with its Cloud revenues estimated at well over $25bn. All the leading hyperscalers have grown significantly…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Cloud gives tech firms a skills shortage

It’s almost twenty years since AWS publicly launched its first infrastructure service. Those early days of Cloud were chock full of promise: no more hardware ownership to worry about; scale infrastructure up and scale down, paying only for what you use. In many ways that headline promise has been realised. Much of the last two…
Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Three ways Cloud may be holding back your Business Plan

Cloud has become embedded in many firms as the weapon of choice for accessing computing power and storage without needing to own hardware. However, while Cloud has many advantages, there are some important disadvantages that business decision makers must navigate. Sometimes, the underlying disadvantages of Cloud can be overlooked and only become apparent when real…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why we can’t ask ChatGPT if it’s the future of technology

I’ve often wondered whether insight is simply a particular kind of logic. Did Steve Jobs visualise the visionary Walkman by joining the dots and seeing an area where plenty of human activity took place yet recorded sound was missing? Was the iPhone an obvious step to take five years after Blackberry had proven the appetite…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Operational people dominate the new Cloud era

Cloud technology has captured the headlines for years, and development teams have delighted in all the new services and capabilities that have been added. Rightly so. The race has been on to build new applications and get them running in the Cloud. Yet the emphasis has been shifting steadily, largely overlooked, and this shift has…