Practical AI advice for your working day.
Short reads about choosing AI tools, checking their answers, planning costs, and helping your team use them. Start with any question that matches your work.
9 articles
In the roomWhat a demo can't show youA demo is a performance of the best case. Three requests turn it into evidence, and all of them take under a minute.In the roomHow to read an accuracy claim"94% accurate" is not a fact about a system. It's a fact about a test somebody designed, and the design is where the interesting part lives.In the roomRunning a two-week bake-off that ends in a decisionMost pilots end in a conversation about whether it felt better. Write the acceptance criteria before you see a single result and that can't happen.In the roomBuild, buy, or extend — and when to do none of themMicrosoft's own blueprint makes this a testable decision, which tells you it's a real one. The framing that helps is what you'd be sad to have someone else own.In the roomDeciding not to proceedThe hardest meeting in the track. How to say no in a way that's about the evidence rather than about enthusiasm, and how to leave the door open honestly.CertificationsThe three AI certifications worth having if you don't write codeMicrosoft, Google, and AWS each publish a foundational AI certification aimed at business audiences. Here's what each one actually covers, what it costs you, and the order I'd take them in.BudgetingWhat an AI feature actually costs, and how to forecast itTokens are the unit you get billed in, and almost nobody explains them in terms a budget holder can use. Here's the arithmetic, with real prices.FundamentalsWhy it makes things up, and what you can actually do about itHallucination isn't a bug someone forgot to fix. Understanding why it happens tells you which controls work and which are theater.In the roomEleven questions to ask when someone pitches you an AI projectYou don't need to know how it works to run a good review. You need to know which questions have uncomfortable answers.
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