// Topics / Operations
Operations
20 entries tagged “Operations”
- Unsupervised
· 7 min
Producing the work can be handed to a machine. Answering for it cannot. What an organization values when machines do most of the making, what people are for, and four things to try this week.
opinion
ai
strategy
Shadow AI Is an Operating Problem, Not a Ban
· 4 min
Banning AI tools removes your visibility, not the tools. Make the governed path the fast path and pull usage into the control plane.
governance
ai
security
Power Belongs on the AI Roadmap
· 3 min
Power, not models or GPUs, is the binding constraint. Treat energy and capacity as roadmap dependencies with real lead times.
ai
architecture
strategy
Regulatory Divergence Is a Routing Problem
· 4 min
One global AI policy is wrong in every market. Tag requests by jurisdiction, data class, and user type, then route policy like cost and capability.
governance
ai
privacy
Reliability Is the Autonomy Ceiling
· 4 min
Capability earns the demo; measured reliability earns the autonomy. Budget autonomy by failure cost times failure rate.
ai
reliability
operations
Agent Identity Is the New Control Plane
· 4 min
An agent that acts needs an identity—scoped, short-lived, attributable, revocable—not a shared API key.
ai
reliability
security
Token Prices Fell. AI Bills Did Not.
· 3 min
Per-token prices keep falling while bills climb. Manage cost per governed workflow, not price per token.
cost
ai
executive
The Benchmark You Didn't Build
· 4 min
Public benchmarks are contaminated and gamed. The only eval that matters runs on your traffic, your failure modes, your bar—and you own it.
ai
reliability
metrics
Leading Senior Engineers in the AI Era: Autonomy, Standards, and Accountability
· 4 min
Leading senior engineers on AI work needs one concrete standard: a definition-of-done built on evals, named failure modes, and escalation triggers.
leadership
ai
teams
Agentic Systems at Scale: The New Reliability Contract
· 4 min
Agentic systems need SRE-style reliability contracts with explicit blast-radius limits, fallback paths, and kill switches.
ai
reliability
operations
The Anti-Fragile AI Organization
· 4 min
The best AI organizations do not merely survive model churn and vendor shocks; they convert each one into a capability they keep.
teams
ai
reliability
The Executive Case for Local-First AI Infrastructure
· 3 min
Local-first AI is not ideology. It is control over placement, margin, latency, and failure modes.
ai
architecture
cost
The Post-Prototype AI Org: Operating Models That Survive Year Two
Canon post —
· 3 min
Year-two AI failure usually comes from org-design mismatch, not model-quality mismatch. The handoffs are where the system slows down.
ai
teams
leadership
The Operating Cadence: Turning AI Leadership Interfaces Into Predictable Output
Canon post —
· 4 min
Interfaces describe who owns what. Cadence is what turns those interfaces into compounding output.
leadership
ai
operations
Decision Latency as a P&L Variable: The Leadership Metric Nobody Owns
Canon post —
· 2 min
Decision latency is measurable and should be treated as a direct cost driver.
leadership
metrics
strategy
How Great CTOs Design AI Roadmaps That Survive Contact With Reality
Canon post —
· 3 min
AI roadmaps fail when they are sequenced around ambition instead of dependency, verification, and rollback cost.
strategy
ai
leadership
Hiring for AI Teams: The Operator Profile That Actually Scales
· 3 min
The highest-leverage AI hires are operators who can handle ambiguity, systems tradeoffs, and verification pressure.
hiring
ai
leadership
Build the System the Model Cannot Break
Canon post —
· 12 min
A manifesto for building AI-native organizations. Twelve tenets across strategy, architecture, economics, and people — and the only test that matters in year two.
opinion
ai
strategy
The Throughput Engineer: Why Headcount Is a Lagging Metric
Canon post —
· 8 min
Headcount is a lagging metric. The best engineering organizations measure throughput: decision speed, defect containment, and constraint removal.
leadership
productivity
operations
SRE Principles Are Great. The Cargo-Culting Is Not.
· 5 min
The SRE hype train has everyone copying Google's playbook without asking whether it fits. What actually matters when you're not running at planet scale.
reliability
devops
operations