The Human Intent Stack: how intent moves from human purpose to machine execution, and the world-readiness test most organisations are not yet running.

AI costs are rising even as token prices fall. This side piece explores why the real issue is not just usage-based pricing, but the hidden cost of unclear intent: every vague prompt, retry, and agentic loop turns poor articulation into spend.

The 1980s Chief Information Officer was the right answer to the 1980s question. The 2026 question is different. Same three letters, new word in the middle: Chief Intent Officer. Why the existing C-suite cannot quite reach the gap, and what changes when intent moves into the boardroom.

The title is deliberately paradoxical. Humans will continue to do things - that is not what is changing. What is changing is what makes them professionally valuable. This fifth article in the series explores why most AI-skills advice misses the deeper shift, and what humans actually contribute when work is…

AI feels unprecedented. Organisationally, it is surprisingly familiar. Twenty years of cloud computing taught us that governance lags technology, and that the organisations that thrived restructured around it rather than retrofitting it. The same pattern is now unfolding with AI, only faster.

For over a century, work has been the unit around which organisations were built - the tasks, the roles, the workflows, the methodologies. As AI takes on execution, that unit is dissolving. Not the doing of things, which continues, but work as the organising principle of enterprise life. The fourth…

For over a century, organisations have been built on a single premise: that they exist to optimise human work. From Taylor's scientific management to Kotter's Dual Operating System, every major theory has been a variation within that frame. The third article in the Human Intent series explores why agentic AI…

For two decades, Agile was the right answer. Sprints, standups, story points — all of it built to coordinate slow human execution. But agentic AI is changing the constraint. The methodology that grew up around the Manifesto is dying. The spirit that drove it has never been more alive. The…

For most of the last century, organisations have been built to coordinate human execution. But as AI systems take on more of the work, across every function, not just technology, the constraint shifts. It is no longer how fast we can build. It is whether we actually know what we…

For decades, organisations were structured around the work humans had to do manually. But if agents can write code, run tests, deploy systems, and operate platforms, then organisations may no longer be structured around execution at all. Humans define intent. Agents enact it.