Welcome to Edition 8 of The CAIO.
One question ran under almost every post this month. When a model writes the code and anyone in the company can start it, what is left that a person has to own? The two posts that reached furthest answered it from opposite ends. One showed a company where people with no engineering title ship to production. The other showed an engineering organisation where execution got so cheap that deciding became the constraint. Put them together and the control you thought you had, knowing who wrote it, is gone.
I joined the adorsys Tapas & Pretzels podcast for a conversation with co-hosts Tim and David, fellow Chief AI Officer, about the question every leader is now asking: how do you move AI from isolated experiments to a company-wide capability? We talked about token economics, what the Chief AI Officer role actually demands, why capability beats tools, the trust gap that governance exists to close, and why most companies are speeding up broken processes instead of rethinking them.
Although AI has moved fast, many organisations haven’t. Most leaders we speak to aren’t short on ideas, proofs of concept, or vendor demos. The challenge is turning AI into something repeatable, a capability you can trust, scale, and steer without creating new risks or bottlenecks.
Welcome back to The Cybernetic CxO, a monthly newsletter for CTOs, CIOs, and digital transformation leaders navigating the AI era.
93/7: The Budget Split That’s Killing Your AI Program # This number hit a nerve. My post about the 93/7 split (93% of AI budgets going to technology, 7% to people and process) reached over 10,000 people and sparked a real debate.
AI is everywhere, but clarity, strategy, and real impact are often left by the wayside. We live in the era of what Romano Roth has dubbed ‘AI idiots’, an era of flashy demos rather than genuine long-term value. But a smarter way forward is possible. Discover the Cybernetic Enterprise and the business value it offers for industrial organisations.
