"I have been deep underground at the coal face, where if procedures are not followed, people can die."
Monash Business School, Boss versus botThat is where I spent my career, and it is why I talk about AI the way I do. I speak to senior leaders, and to the people who advise them, about what makes an experienced decision-maker trust a machine and what makes them refuse.
Monash University Transformation Office. Fifty-three minutes and questions, capped at 1,000 seats. The argument: AI is not a new category, it is the newest layer on a very old sequence, and most leaders are using it back to front.
Monash Business School, Sky Room, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne. A fifty-minute panel for people still working out what to do with it, followed by drinks.
Monash eSolutions, Shared and Campus Services. Two and a half hours at the quarterly all-hands.
Monash eSolutions extended leadership team. Two and a half hours.
Monash eSolutions. Ninety minutes with the six AI fitness trainers chosen to work with the university's senior executive group: what occupies a senior leader's thinking, and how the first fifteen minutes earn you the next fifteen.
Three things, usually. Why experienced leaders hold AI at arm's length, and what changes it. Why AI applied to a process that does not work only magnifies what is wrong with it, which is Bill Gates's rule about automation from 1996 and binds just as hard now, and why the much older sequence out of Lean manufacturing, stabilise then standardise then mechanise, is the answer to it. And what agentic AI looks like running live in front of a room, which tends to be the part people talk about afterwards.
I take a small number of engagements each year, and I am most useful to a room of senior people who have to make real decisions rather than an audience looking for a demonstration of the tools.