For Practitioners

September 22, 2026 · Anthony Franco

He automated the invoicing, then the reports, then the proposals, one piece at a time, each only after it proved it wouldn't embarrass him. Six months later the company ran fine without him, and he had a small identity crisis. He wasn't automated out of a job. He was automated out of a job description.

September 15, 2026 · Anthony Franco

The pilot worked, the demo dazzled, and then it sat in 'pilot' for eighteen months and died. The pilot didn't succeed despite being unrealistic; it succeeded because it was. Clean data, a motivated volunteer, a babysitter, no angry Tuesday. Write the production criteria before you run the pilot.

September 8, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Everyone worries AI will be wrong. The scary part is that it's wrong in the same calm, fluent, authoritative tone it uses when it's right. We spent our whole lives reading confidence as a signal of reliability. AI severs that link, so stop grading it on how sure it sounds.

September 1, 2026 · Anthony Franco

The billing integration retries three times and nobody knows why, because the person who knew left eighteen months ago. That's amnesia, and the dead wiki makes it worse by looking like knowledge. A Playbook is different: living, used, current, and it's the test of whether your knowledge is real.

August 25, 2026 · Anthony Franco

I handed my inbox to an AI for a week. It was brilliant at the mechanical 80% and quietly reckless exactly where judgment mattered, and those failures were silent because a smooth wrong reply looks identical to a right one. Let it draft. Keep a human on send for anything with a relationship or a dollar attached.

August 18, 2026 · Anthony Franco

That recurring status call is a database with terrible latency. The org stores its state by convening humans and having them read it aloud on a schedule, because it never built anywhere to keep it. Ask each meeting one question: is this a decision, or a readout?

August 11, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Companies buy AI tools the way people buy gym memberships in January: the purchase feels like the change. A license is not an outcome, it's a permission slip. Don't approve an AI purchase until someone can state the outcome, the baseline, and the owner in one sentence.

August 4, 2026 · Anthony Franco

The AI approved a $4,200 refund on a $40 order, and in the post-mortem everyone pointed at the machine. That's the accountability vacuum. Adding AI doesn't remove roles; it scatters them. Nine accountabilities, and the ones you leave unowned are where the next incident is already waiting.

July 28, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Your calendar says 'strategy sync.' What you actually did was chase three people for a status and hunt forty minutes for a file. The calendar records intentions, not work. And you can't automate a job you've never honestly watched, starting with your own.

July 21, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Six weeks of interviews, 90 slides, a phased roadmap, and six months later the org runs exactly as before. A slide is not a system, and a recommendation nobody has to run is just a wish with a footer. Judge every engagement by one question: what still runs on Monday?

July 14, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Every team has a Dave. The one who just handles it, knows the workaround, owns the spreadsheet nobody else understands. You love Dave. Dave is also your single point of failure with a good attitude, and AI just made it worse.

July 7, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Most AI efforts die the same way: someone buys a Stage 4 platform while their people are still at Stage 1. You can't buy your way past a stage you haven't lived through. Five stages, and the one move each one actually allows.

June 30, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Most corporate meetings are theater. We nod politely, wait for the highest-paid person to speak, and agree. AI introduces a new form of the same cowardice: deferring to "what the AI says." The fix is structured conflict.

June 16, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Ask ChatGPT who you are. If you're unlucky, it hallucinates a biography mixing your achievements with a convicted felon. AI search doesn't index your content. It synthesizes it. You need to control the source code.

June 2, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Most founders build products for imaginary customers. AI makes it even easier to skip customer contact entirely. But AI amplifies whatever inputs you give it. If those inputs come from assumptions, AI scales your guesses.

May 19, 2026 · Anthony Franco

49% of employees waste time on manual processes that should be automated. The problem isn't technology. It's that most processes are designed from how work should happen, not how it actually does.

May 5, 2026 · Anthony Franco

A founder walks into a pitch meeting with three years of product development, twenty customers, and solid unit economics. Fifteen slides in, the investor checks their phone. Not because the business is weak, but because the deck failed its job in the first thirty seconds.

April 21, 2026 · Anthony Franco

A recent MIT study claimed ChatGPT reduced brain activity by 55% during writing tasks. This is the Calculator Panic of 1975 all over again. The real danger isn't cognitive atrophy. It's judgment atrophy.

April 7, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Your team doesn't need the real you. They need the version of you who doesn't freeze when the server crashes at 2 AM. Leadership isn't about finding your authentic self. It's about developing the range to serve different contexts.

March 24, 2026 · Anthony Franco

AI won't replace you. It will replace the parts of your job you spend 80% of your day doing. We are moving from an economy of execution to an economy of direction, and that changes the skill stack entirely.

March 10, 2026 · Anthony Franco

Every company has a culture. The question isn't whether you'll have one. It's whether you'll create it intentionally or let it emerge by accident. Culture isn't perks. It's whether people feel safe disagreeing with you.

February 24, 2026 · Anthony Franco

The hype cycle is breaking. AI isn't failing because the technology is bad. It's failing because we're managing probabilistic tools with deterministic playbooks. The fix isn't better prompts. It's better principles.

January 27, 2026 · Anthony Franco

If we're in a simulation, some of us are main characters and some are background players with three lines of dialogue. So I decided to tackle the most important philosophical question of our time: How do you know if you're a Non-Player Character in your own life?

January 13, 2026 · Anthony Franco

AI doesn't remove human error. It scales it. When the bot screws up, who is responsible? Most organizations create an accountability vacuum where everyone is involved and no one is accountable.

December 30, 2025 · Anthony Franco

Calling yourself "in AI" because you use ChatGPT is like saying you're in the culinary arts because you know how to operate a microwave. There are three tiers of AI adoption, and confusing them is dangerous.

December 16, 2025 · Anthony Franco

Last year, OpenAI spent $6.5 billion to acquire a design company. Not a model company. Not a chip company. A design company. If the people who built the model think design is the bottleneck, what does that tell you about your own implementation?

December 2, 2025 · Anthony Franco

80% of AI projects never make it past the pilot phase. The reason isn't bad technology. It's automating broken processes. If you automate a bad process, you just scale the chaos.