McKinsey’s latest AI data confirms what we see in boardrooms across APAC: productivity gains are real but conditional. The organisations moving fastest are treating AI as an organisation design challenge, not a technology upgrade.
The augmentation story is real, documented, and measurable. It almost never makes the news. That silence is not neutral — it is being filled by fear. And the organisations best placed to fix it are largely not doing so.
Three corporate communications in the same week — StanChart, Meta, Omnicom — and a question that keeps coming back: have the people making these decisions genuinely reckoned with the human cost?
Most leaders evaluate AI tools the wrong way. The question is not ‘can this do what I already do?’ but ‘does this change what I can reasonably attempt?’ Perplexity Computer answers that question affirmatively for a specific category of work.
The operational overhead that once made going independent daunting is no longer the barrier it was. But the barrier now is knowing how to direct these tools, not just deploy them.
The more I use AI, the more human I have had to become. The barbell strategy means concentrating at the extremes — and most leaders are getting it exactly backwards.
Something is splitting the executive class in two, and most organisations have not named it clearly yet. The gap between AI chat users and AI builders is growing \u2014 and the distance is invisible to the people inside it.
