Welcome to COOaaS
People are still the hardest part. AI, culture, and operations through the eyes of a senior operator.
I started writing on LinkedIn recently about something I have been sitting with for a long time.
Not about AI tools. Not about frameworks or playbooks. About the thing nobody in the room says out loud. That the biggest obstacle to every AI transformation I have been part of is not the technology. It is the people holding it, the leaders avoiding the conversation, and the organisations that confuse efficiency with growth.
The response surprised me. Not because people agreed. But because of who agreed. Senior leaders, operators, practitioners who have been in those rooms too. People who recognised the silence I was describing because they had sat inside it themselves.
That told me something. The conversation needed more space than a LinkedIn post allows.
So this is that space.
What COOaaS is about
I have spent twenty years operating at the intersection of AI transformation, cultural intelligence, and organisational design, across Deloitte, AWS, McGraw-Hill, and advisory work for global enterprise clients spanning media, healthcare, technology, public sector, and education.
The through-line across all of it has never been the technology. It has always been the people. This space covers three things I keep coming back to. AI and the human cost of adoption. Cultural intelligence as an operational discipline. And the changing role of the COO as guardian of how people and AI actually work together. You can read more about all three on the About page.
Not as a consultant who parachutes in with a slide deck. As a trusted No.2. Someone who has sat in enough SteerCos, transformation programmes, and difficult people conversations to know that the hardest problems are never on the agenda.
What to expect
Each article here will go deeper than what I post on LinkedIn. The posts are the observation. The articles are the thinking behind it. The context, the nuance, the parts that do not fit in fifteen paragraphs.
The first series is called The Human Problem. It starts with AI adoption and goes somewhere most AI commentary does not. Into the psychology of displacement, the economics of automation, the responsibility of leadership, and ultimately the question of what meaningful contribution looks like in a world where the machines are getting very good at the work.
It is not a comfortable series. But I think it is a necessary one.
If you have found your way here from LinkedIn, welcome to the longer conversation.
If you are new, start with the first article when it lands. It will tell you everything you need to know about how I think.
Either way, I am glad you are here.