Written for the board.
Decisions about models, markets and the systems an organisation depends on. Each article argues a position, examines the objection and sets out what to do next.
- Artificial intelligenceSeptember 9, 2026
Sovereign AI and Swiss data residency for financial institutions
A Swiss bank can use frontier models without sending a byte of client data abroad. It requires an architecture decision, not a vendor promise, and the revised Data Protection Act is clearer on the point than most vendors are.
- VoiceSeptember 9, 2026
Voice agents in Arabic dialects, and where they break
Modern Standard Arabic is a written language. Callers speak Levantine, Gulf, Egyptian and Maghrebi, switch to English mid-sentence and read numbers in two directions. Here is where the systems fail, and what a bank or a ministry should demand before it lets one answer the phone.
- Advertising and growthSeptember 9, 2026
The end of the agency-of-record model
The agency of record was built for a world where production was scarce and media was bought by hand. Both are gone. What replaces it is an advertising system the client owns, and a firm paid to build it rather than to run it forever.
- Engagement economicsSeptember 9, 2026
Retainer economics for enterprise AI
AI work does not end at go-live; models drift, regulations move and the third use case is discovered in the second month. A retainer is the honest contract for that shape of work. This is how to price one, govern it and know when to stop.
- BrandSeptember 9, 2026
Brand identity as infrastructure
An identity that lives in a PDF is decoration. An identity that lives in tokens, templates and a governed release process is infrastructure, and it is the only kind that survives a merger, a rebrand of a subsidiary or the next chief marketing officer.
- Market intelligenceSeptember 9, 2026
Market intelligence inside family-owned conglomerates
A family group spans six industries and one dinner table. Its intelligence function has to serve both: rigorous enough for the operating companies, legible enough for the board that meets on a Sunday. A design for that function, and the mistakes that kill it.
- EngineeringSeptember 9, 2026
Migrating legacy core systems without stopping the business
The big-bang cut-over is how core migrations fail. The alternative is slower, less dramatic and works: a compatibility layer, one consumer at a time, and a rollback path that is rehearsed rather than hoped for.
- ProcurementSeptember 9, 2026
Procurement's questions about AI vendors, answered
Who owns the model weights? Where is the training data? What happens to our prompts? Can we leave? The questions procurement teams ask AI vendors are the right ones. Here are the answers a serious firm should be able to give, and the ones that should end the conversation.
How these are written.
Every article is a position, not a summary: it names the decision it is meant to inform, argues it against the strongest objection and states what would change the author's mind. Regulatory frameworks are cited by name and obligation, never by a statistic we could not verify. Nothing is written to be discovered by a search engine; everything is written to be forwarded to a chief of staff.
Tell us what cannot fail.
A proposal request takes seven short steps and is read by the engagement lead who would run the work. References for real engagements are provided under non-disclosure, matched to your industry and region.