This is the first dispatch. karlbaz.com just opened to readers, after some weeks of quiet work.
Once a month, no more. Each dispatch links to the month’s memos and adds a short note from the desk.
This month’s memos
- Your AI council is not an operating system. The committee can govern AI but cannot operate the work.
- AI made OKRs that lean on output easier to hit and less useful. The hit rate climbs and the reason for the OKR gets harder to find.
- What AI does to an executive’s read on their own company. When senior people stop doing the first pass on data, the read on the org atrophies on a months timeline, not years.
- The ‘AI replaces juniors’ story points at the wrong layer. The pattern of work described as ‘junior tasks’ isn’t the same pattern that develops a junior into a senior.
- The Arabic operators I know still default to English tools. The deployment language and the operating language are different things.
Notes from the desk
I’ve been spending the past few weeks on what an AI operating mechanism looks like in practice. Two pieces keep coming back: an inventory of active workflows, and a kill column for tools that aren’t earning the time they take. Most of the failure modes I see live in the absence of an operating cadence underneath the AI.
A new artifact is in the works as a companion: an AI use case operating register. It will go up at /artifacts/ when ready.
Until next month.
Karl