Agentic AI & Community Building
I help leaders put agentic AI into practice and build communities where people learn from each other. Advisory, talks and workshops grounded in boards, operations and CEO peer learning.
Work with Tony
For boards, leadership teams and communities working through what AI changes, what stays human, and what to do next.
Over 16 years working with leaders in the UK and Europe, from growing businesses to companies with annual turnover in the hundreds of millions of pounds.
Sessions include leaders who returned more than once. More about my experience.
Latest writing
One supplier can connect your whole business, then interrupt several parts of it at once. What the Microsoft outage teaches us about resilience, UK control and giving our agents an approved alternative.
I increasingly use the desktop to launch the agent. The bigger change may be software that organises itself around our work, instead of making us organise ourselves around its menus.
A US bottleneck could create a British opportunity. History suggests the winners will be the places that make useful technology accessible, not simply announce it.
The articles attracting the most interest at the moment, and my take on why.
We work to pay for life. But a salary, a sense of purpose and a good life are different things. Could AI help us separate them?
I think this gets people because it's a question we don't often stop to ask. We've got bills to pay, of course. But if the money were sorted, what would you actually choose to do with your time? All this talk about AI taking jobs makes that worth thinking about. There's more to a good life than having a job.
A new inbox label for a familiar irritation: AI wrote the reply, but did the sender read it? What mobile-phone etiquette can teach us about judgement, shared attention and the manners of AI.
My guess is people recognise this. Somebody puts your message into AI and sends the answer straight back without reading it. Now you've got to make sense of something they haven't bothered to understand themselves. Come on. Read it first. I think we're still working out the manners of using these tools with other people.
There is no secure evidence for a historical wizard called Merlin. There is much better evidence showing how medieval writers assembled the legend.
This started with me wondering what deep research could do with a question like "Was Merlin real?" I suspect the curiosity is part of the appeal. You know the name, you know some of the stories, but where did they actually come from? Following that question was interesting in its own right. We're allowed to use these tools just to learn something.
Research
Start here when agents and people need shared terms for requests, commitments, evidence and handoffs, not just more conversation.
A research paper proposing agentic language as a common operating layer for humans and agents: shared business terms, Agent Moves, Meaning Blocks, receipts, judgement, human-care signals, and pattern promotion.
Use this to distinguish a decision people have tested and can support from agreement produced by pressure or silence.
A research paper proposing consensus as a disciplined process of conviction, evidence, listening, challenge, adaptation, and commitment, then translating that human governance model into agentic systems.
Start here
One useful workflow, clear boundaries and a first step you can test.
Keep judgement, ownership and evidence visible as AI takes on work.
Move from an impressive demo to work someone can rely on.
Create space for people to challenge, contribute and learn together.
Distinguish a model price from the cost of useful, completed work. Monthly snapshots are dated, not live tariffs.
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