Sessions
I work with enterprise leadership teams on the decisions in The River Doesn't Wait. I come into the room with no agentic AI product to sell and no platform to recommend, which is usually what lets the people in the room say what they actually think.
A talk
For conferences, leadership meetings, offsites, and internal summits. The frameworks from the book, shaped to the industry and the audience in the room: why agentic AI is a strategy question rather than a technology question, where the current is genuinely moving, and what that means for the outcomes the people in the room already own.
I also join interviews, panels, and moderated conversations. In a recent one with Erick Mott of Creatorbase, I work through the frameworks against some real-world examples. These are collected on the Conversations page.
A working session
The discussion guide in the book, Reading the Water Together, is built for a room of senior leaders to work through on their own. In it I note that an outside facilitator helps keep the strongest voices in the room from setting the answer for everyone else. This is that session, with me in the room.
The session runs on the team's own situation and work. Each leader takes one outcome they personally own, a real number on their scorecard, not "our AI strategy," and works out where that outcome sits in the water, how far toward reimagine it needs to go in the next year, and where the three Tension settings land for it. The room then takes the one shared outcome that crosses two or three people and works it live, together.
Most of the time goes to where the room disagrees about the water. Resolving that disagreement is often the most useful thing the session produces.
A team leaves with:
- Each leader holding a position on an outcome they own, and the reasoning that got them there
- One shared outcome carried through to a first move, with a named owner
- A clear map of where the room actually disagrees - and how to bridge that disagreement
- Three watch questions per outcome, and a date in the calendar to do it again, with or without me
Where this comes from
As a former Gartner analyst, strategy consultant, and senior business executive, I have spent the last two decades running working sessions with large enterprise clients, including Ford, SoftBank, ABB, and China State Grid, usually as the integration point across a wide group of stakeholders who each owned part of the problem. I now apply these skills to the challenges and opportunities of strategy formation in the age of agentic AI.
More on my background is on the About page.
Independence
I don't sell, endorse, demo, or recommend any AI vendor's product. I work across the agentic AI ecosystem on a non-exclusive basis. In my 'day job' I operate as the CEO of the Human Intelligence Institute, which works on verifying and protecting the provenance of human-created content. It doesn't sell agentic AI solutions, and it doesn't come into these rooms. Where an engagement is sponsored, that is disclosed, and it doesn't change the frameworks or the conclusions.