Practical writing on AI governance and deployment.

Enterprise and government deployment experience, translated into plain language for executives and decision-makers.

I keep thinking about how much we're all carrying right now, in school, at work, at home. AI is one more thing on that pile, not the whole of it. What's mattered, for me and for everyone I've watched push through hard change, is simpler: keep learning, keep showing up, keep getting a little better. And if you're in a position to share more of what you know, your time, or just patience with someone a few steps behind you, share it. It adds up faster than you'd think.

Essential articles.

Audiences Don't Trust AI-Made Ads. Marketers Think They Do.
AI Strategy

Audiences Don't Trust AI-Made Ads. Marketers Think They Do.

IAB, Emplifi, and NIM data from 2026 show a widening gap between how positively marketers believe audiences feel about AI-generated creative and how audiences feel. What's driving the distrust, and what specifically closes the gap without giving up AI's production advantages.

3 Sept 2026 · 14 min read · ▶ Audio

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An AI Management System Is Not a Policy Binder. It's the Machine ISO 42001 Actually Audits.
Governance & Risk

An AI Management System Is Not a Policy Binder. It's the Machine ISO 42001 Actually Audits.

An AIMS is the clause-4-to-10 system ISO/IEC 42001 certifies, not a written AI policy: risk assessments, impact assessments, roles, internal audits, and a statement of applicability an auditor can test. What gets checked first, and how to generate that evidence from day one instead of reconstructing it before the audit.

2 Sept 2026 · 17 min read · ▶ Audio

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AI Is Now the Weapon and the Shield in Cybersecurity. Most Organisations Are Behind on Both.
Security

AI Is Now the Weapon and the Shield in Cybersecurity. Most Organisations Are Behind on Both.

94% of security leaders say AI is the biggest driver of change in cybersecurity this year, and it is reshaping both sides of the fight at once. What the 2026 data shows, what defenders can deploy today, and the skills gap standing between here and a defensible position.

1 Sept 2026 · 15 min read · ▶ Audio

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Latest articles.

Governance & Risk12 Sept 2026 · 19 min read · ▶ Audio

Nobody Has Proven We Can Control a Smarter-Than-Human AI

A viral podcast argues artificial superintelligence will kill us all. The actual research behind that claim is narrower and more useful: no one has proven a smarter-than-human system can be controlled, and almost no one outside a handful of labs and governments has a say in whether we build one anyway.

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Governance & Risk8 Sept 2026 · 11 min read · ▶ Audio

Why Autonomy Readiness Should Cap Your Agentic AI Score

A project can score 9 on five dimensions and 2 on autonomy readiness and still win the ranking on a straight average. That is the flaw in treating all six scoring dimensions as equal inputs, and the fix is a gate, not another weighting tweak.

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Agentic AI7 Sept 2026 · 15 min read · ▶ Audio

How to Score Your First Agentic AI Project

Most companies pick their first agentic AI project on instinct or whoever spoke loudest in the room. Here is a six-dimension scoring method, built for agentic AI's biggest wildcard: autonomy, that gives you a ranked answer instead of a guess.

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AI Readiness6 Sept 2026 · 21 min read · ▶ Audio

Who Does What in Your First Ninety Days of AI

The ninety-day AI plan tells you when. This is the companion piece that tells you who. Exactly what the executive sponsor, data owner, frontline user, governance owner, and technical lead each need to do, at every one of the seven stages.

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Future of Work4 Sept 2026 · 17 min read · ▶ Audio

What CHROs Are Worried About With AI and How to Respond

Six concerns show up consistently across the 2026 CHRO surveys: reskilling, governance exposure, employee trust, unproven ROI, unredesigned jobs, and the CHRO's own AI fluency. A practical, sourced response for each one, drawn from Gartner, Mercer, Deloitte, McKinsey, SHRM, and the Conference Board.

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Future of Work4 Sept 2026 · 14 min read · ▶ Audio

Orchestrating Agents Was Supposed to Be the New Job. The Agents Are Catching Up.

METR's data shows the length of tasks AI agents can complete alone doubling roughly every seven months, and companies are already cutting the management layer that 'you'll orchestrate the agents' was meant to fill. What's left for entry-level, mid-level, and senior knowledge workers, and why the honest answer is a design choice, not a reskilling roadmap.

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AI Strategy3 Sept 2026 · 14 min read · ▶ Audio

Audiences Don't Trust AI-Made Ads. Marketers Think They Do.

IAB, Emplifi, and NIM data from 2026 show a widening gap between how positively marketers believe audiences feel about AI-generated creative and how audiences feel. What's driving the distrust, and what specifically closes the gap without giving up AI's production advantages.

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AI Strategy29 Aug 2026 · 24 min read · ▶ Audio

AI Companies Actually Printing Revenue in 2026

Not cloud infrastructure, not copilots bolted onto existing software. A benchmark of the AI-native companies whose entire business is the AI product itself, what they charge for, and why the pricing model is the real signal to watch.

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Security28 Aug 2026 · 18 min read · ▶ Audio

An OpenAI Model Escaped Its Sandbox and Hacked Hugging Face

17,600 recorded actions, a self-respawning fleet across eleven Kubernetes nodes, and zero human operators. OpenAI and Hugging Face's own technical disclosures reconstruct the July 2026 incident in detail. Here's the evidence, and the concrete controls that would have stopped it.

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Agentic AI25 Aug 2026 · 17 min read · ▶ Audio

Vibe Coding Is Over. Orchestrating Agents Is the Job Now.

Andrej Karpathy renamed his own term within a year of coining it. Google's code is now 75% AI-generated. The data shows unstructured AI assistance doesn't reliably save time, but orchestrating agent loops and graphs produces results no solo prompt ever could. What the director's job looks like, with real examples and a way to prepare.

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Governance & Risk23 Aug 2026 · 25 min read · ▶ Audio

The Black Box Problem and How to Engineer Around It

Opacity in machine learning is not one problem but three, and only one of them, opacity by construction, resists a fix by disclosure. What the technical origins are, what it costs when it goes wrong, and the architecture that lets an organisation ship opaque components without depending on explaining them.

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Governance & Risk23 Aug 2026 · 21 min read · ▶ Audio

The Need for an AI Stability Board

Global AI governance is fragmenting exactly as frontier capability crosses new risk thresholds. What the Financial Stability Board, the IAEA, and the Montreal Protocol got right that the current run of voluntary AI declarations does not.

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Governance & Risk22 Aug 2026 · 24 min read · ▶ Audio

Outcome as a Service: What the Contract Has to Do

Outcome-based AI pricing is sold as a full transfer of delivery risk to the vendor. Sixty years of performance-contracting history, from Rolls-Royce's Power by the Hour to a £467 million probation contract failure, says otherwise. What moves, what stays with the buyer, and what the contract has to specify.

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Security18 Aug 2026 · 18 min read · ▶ Audio

What Stops a Rogue Agent You Never Catch

Human-in-the-loop assumes someone sees the bad action in time. The 2026 evidence, including Anthropic's own research, says that assumption fails. What containment looks like when detection isn't the plan.

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Security18 Aug 2026 · 16 min read · ▶ Audio

What Keeps Me Up at Night Once AI Is Actually Running Things

Not the sci-fi fear. The mundane one: an agent that trusts the wrong instruction, a credential nobody's watching, a tool description that lies to the model reading it. Four real 2025 incidents, and what the security model has to look like once an agent gets write access.

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Future of Work17 Aug 2026 · 14 min read · ▶ Audio

How Do I Prepare for a Future I Can't Yet See?

The question sounds the same from a graduate, a manager, a business owner, and a CEO, but the anxiety underneath it is different for each. A close look at what's driving it, and what seems to steady people while the picture stays unclear.

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Agentic AI10 Aug 2026 · 9 min read · ▶ Audio

Foundations of Dependable Agentic AI

Reliability in agentic systems comes from the engineering around the model, not the model's capability. Ten requirements, from bounded task specification to trajectory-level observability, that determine whether an agentic deployment holds up in production.

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Future of Work9 Aug 2026 · 13 min read · ▶ Audio

Why Experience Alone No Longer Guarantees Higher Pay

For decades, more years on the job meant fewer mistakes and a bigger paycheck. AI now does in seconds what used to take a career to learn. Here is what earns you value now, and the entry-level problem nobody has fixed yet.

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Governance & Risk26 Jul 2026 · 13 min read · ▶ Audio

Local Governments Are Using AI Without Rules to Guide It

A 2026 survey found 55.7% of governments use AI, but only 42.9% have a written policy for it, a 12.8-point gap. Here's which places are closing that gap, and why copying an existing policy works better than writing one from scratch.

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Governance & Risk16 Jul 2026 · 7 min read · ▶ Audio

Why You Need AI Assurance Now

AI is going into production faster than most organisations can build guardrails for it. AI Assurance is how you close that gap, with evidence, not good intentions.

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AI Strategy25 Jun 2026 · 10 min read · ▶ Audio

Why AI Transformation Requires Discipline

Enterprise AI transformation fails not because the technology is flawed, but because organisations suspend discipline in response to ambition. The fix is structural, not motivational.

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AI Strategy14 Jun 2026 · 7 min read · ▶ Audio

Stop Chasing AI Agents. Learn the Tools First.

Agent frameworks are engineering infrastructure, and deploying them without a validated process baseline transfers accountability to a system that carries none. The correct sequence is tool fluency before agent deployment.

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Future of Work18 Apr 2026 · 9 min read · ▶ Audio

The Human Advantage in the Age of AI

For most of my career, the unspoken rule was clear: accumulate expertise, build a deep knowledge base, and stay ahead through technical competence. The more...

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AI Strategy5 Apr 2026 · 6 min read · ▶ Audio

Stop Treating AI as an Add-On

Many SMEs are being pushed to “adopt AI” through grants, vendor pitches, and digitalisation roadmaps. They deploy a chatbot on their website, bolt an AI...

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AI Readiness5 Mar 2026 · 13 min read · ▶ Audio

Why Team Design Is the Bottleneck

An effective AI team is not a monolithic engineering squad. It is a multidisciplinary unit spanning strategy, engineering, data, operations, and governance.

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Implementation27 Dec 2025 · 8 min read · ▶ Audio

Why Prompt Engineering Matters

Last quarter, I watched our team burn through $8,000 in API costs because nobody bothered to write good prompts. We were getting useless outputs, running...

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All 122 articles.

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Terence Kok
Before You Go

Most of what's on this page started as a note to myself after a project went a way I didn't expect, written mostly so I wouldn't forget the lesson before the next one. I publish the ones that are wrong sometimes too, because pretending every call I've made was right would make this page useless to you. If something here saves you a mistake I already made, that's the whole point of writing it down. Read the one that annoys you most.

Terence Kok