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.
Welcome to Edition 7 of The CAIO.
I have argued for years that the model is the small part and the discipline around it is the work. It is a claim that is easy to nod along to and easy to dismiss as a consultant’s line. In July it stopped being a line. A research group tested it on 5,000 codebases and put a number on it. A systems engineer took apart a viral “37,000 lines a day” boast and showed what that volume actually costs. Both posts reached far beyond my usual audience, one of them among the highest reach I have had all year. The audience is not tired of the argument. It wants the evidence.
Welcome to Edition 6 of The CAIO.
June had one lesson that kept landing on a desk where it had rarely landed before: finance. For two years we treated AI tokens as free and competed on how many we could burn. In June the bill arrived. The price of each request had fallen, which is exactly why usage exploded and the total cost climbed past what anyone had budgeted. AI cost control became a CFO topic as fast as it became ours.
Welcome to the first issue of The CAIO. The newsletter you knew as The Cybernetic CxO has a new name, and the reason is on the cover of this issue. From 1 May, I am Group Chief AI Officer at Zühlke. The job is the same work I have been doing for years: getting AI past the pilot phase through transformation across organisation, process, and technology, not by tuning the model alone. The newsletter title now says that out loud.
Welcome back to The Cybernetic CxO, a monthly newsletter for CTOs, CIOs, and digital transformation leaders navigating the AI era.
April delivered the most-read post in this newsletter’s history: a Swiss medical professional vibe-coded a patient management system, put it on the open internet, and an engineer needed thirty minutes to get full read and write access to every patient record. The post travelled because the story is concrete, the legal damage is real, and the lesson applies to almost every organization I talk to.
Welcome back to The Cybernetic CxO, a monthly newsletter for CTOs, CIOs, and digital transformation leaders navigating the AI era.
March was a breakout month. My reach nearly tripled compared to February. My post about the 750 billion dollar fear narrative became a high-performing post. And out of 32 posts this month, 6 of the top 7 were about the same topic: AI and jobs.
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.
Welcome to the first edition of The Cybernetic CxO. A monthly newsletter for CTOs, CIOs, and digital transformation leaders navigating the AI era.
Each month, I’ll share patterns I’m seeing in the field: what’s working, what’s breaking, and what it means for how we build and run technology organizations. Expect honest takes, practical frameworks, and one thing you can do this week.
