Category Archives: Artifical Intelligence

In 1987, Robert Solow looked at two decades of corporate IT investment and wrote one of the most quoted lines in economics. “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Nearly forty years later, replace “computer” … Continue reading →

In the previous posts I argued that most companies think about AI linearly. Make the process faster. But keep the layout the same. Bolt the electric motor onto the old belt-and-shaft system and call it AI-progress. But there is a … Continue reading →

You have seen the pattern. A 45-second video of someone typing a prompt into ChatGPT. A flashy demo at a conference. A LinkedIn post with a before-and-after screenshot and the caption “AI just changed everything.” Three thousand likes. Zero production … Continue reading →

In 1881, the first factory switched from steam to electricity. You would expect a productivity revolution. It did not happen. For nearly 50 years, factories replaced the central steam engine with a central electric motor and kept everything else the … Continue reading →

Henry Ford probably never said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The quote first surfaced in a 2001 marketing magazine letter, 54 years after Ford died. No historian has found it in … Continue reading →

Many organizations treat AI like a coachman treats a combustion engine. They strap it to the old cart. These series of posts each expose a different version of that fallacy, building from the individual mental model to the organizational operating … Continue reading →