Zen Ex Machina

The tools are deployed. Copilot licences are seated, an internal chat model has been running for a year, and three or four departmental pilots have moved from proof-of-concept to whatever comes next. The AI program budget has held steady, or grown. And yet the operating numbers look almost identical to the year before the investment began: cycle times, cos...

In July 2026, Australia announced sweeping new rules for AI in government decision-making. The most forensically documented automated decision-making failure in recent public sector history — a thousand pages of Royal Commission evidence — shows what those rules cannot prevent, and what can.

In Brief

You approve the third AI program this year. The board paper looks the same as the last two: discovery phase, build phase, run phase, each with a nominated project manager, a defined budget, and a clean hand-off. It clears governance without much debate.

In Brief

The paper on your desk this quarter proposes teams, reporting lines, an executive sponsor and a committee structure for a new AI capability. A group product manager reports to the CIO. A model risk officer reports to the CFO. A data platform lead reports to the CTO. Deployment is contracted through the delive...

Gartner reports that 85% of organisations have adopted, or plan to adopt, a product-centric application delivery model (Gartner, 2019). Most of them have changed how they talk about the work. Very few have changed how they fund it, how they hold teams accountable for it, or how they decide what belongs on the backlog, so the vocabulary has shifted while th...