An executive briefing on enterprise AI
How AI Is Collapsing Execution Time and What Leaders Must Do Before Their Competitors Do
Your planning cycle runs twelve to eighteen months. Frontier AI capability doubles every four to seven.
15,587 words · 106 pages · 10 diagrams · First edition, 2026
The argument
That is the whole argument, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. The assumptions behind your largest current technology programme have been superseded two to four times since you approved it. It will land on time, on budget, and priced for a world that stopped existing around its ninth month.
Between 2024 and 2026 three things collapsed at once: the unit price of machine reasoning, the skill floor required to produce a working artefact, and the coordination overhead between specifying work and receiving it. Work that needed an analyst, an engineer, three requirement cycles and a vendor statement of work is now done by a small internal team in a fraction of the time.
Most organisations have not noticed, because most executives experience AI as an advisor that suggests while they still do the work themselves.
Evidence first
It leads with the evidence against its own argument.
Roughly 95 per cent of enterprise generative AI pilots produce no measurable effect on profit. Gartner expects more than 40 per cent of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027. A controlled trial found experienced developers working 19 per cent slower with AI tools while believing they were 20 per cent faster.
Those findings are quoted with their methodology attached, not explained away. They are also the reason the book exists, because they describe a failure of adoption rather than a failure of capability, and the two need completely different treatments.
What you get
Who it is for
Chief executives, CIOs, CTOs, chief data officers, heads of digital and strategy, enterprise architects and board members. Anyone accountable for whether their organisation is still competitive in three years.
No code. No architecture diagrams. No predictions about 2030. Short enough to finish on a single flight, and every chapter ends with something you can act on this quarter.
Contents
Get the book
Coming to Kindle, Apple Books and Google Play.
Links go live as each store approves. First edition, 2026.