Augmented, not automated

The modern executive does not write alone. Nor should they. Leadership has never been solitary; it has always been a chorus. Analysts ran the numbers, coaches whispered in the ear, ghostly hands smoothed annual reports, and some poor associate polished the midnight Powerpoint. Artificial intelligence is only the latest helper - though unlike the rest, it doesn’t tire, doesn’t bill by the hour, and scales without limit.

But scale is not sameness. A photocopier scales. A spam bot scales. What I use is not a generic chatbot peddling clichés. I have trained and tuned it to my crooked timber: strategy, finance, telecoms, governance. It challenges lazy sentences, resists abstractions, sharpens without sterilising. This is not automation. It is augmentation by design.

And that distinction matters. These essays are not wallpaper - smooth, bland, forgettable. They bear scars. They carry the imprint of lived battles: the O2 broadband gamble, when trust proved more valuable than arithmetic; the BT/EE merger, where governance mattered more than glossy decks; the consulting years, where scar tissue was the curriculum.

The arguments are mine. The voice is mine. The tools accelerate, they do not invent. They cut through density, pressure-test tone, make sentences land. Without them, the words might arrive late, lumpy, half-dressed. With them, they arrive faster, cleaner, sharper - stripped of excuse.

Authenticity is not about keystrokes. It is about ownership. When I write that culture change requires replacing a third of leadership, or that lazy fibre analysis is still lazy however you wrap it, those are not machine positions. They are mine. I will defend them in the boardroom, or abandon them if the evidence proves me wrong. AI does not dilute that responsibility; it intensifies it.

The executive who insists on writing alone mistakes authenticity for masochism. They confuse self-denial with virtue. The authentic executive designs their own augmentation and still signs their name.

That is the point. Augmentation without abdication.