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Practical perspectives on AI leadership, people, process, and technology from AscendAI.

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Latest articles

  • You Already Have the People. You Just Haven’t Given Them the Structure.

    The most common thing I hear from mid-market leaders about AI goes something like this: “We want to move on this, but we don’t have the technical staff to pull it off.” It sounds reasonable. It’s also, in most cases, the wrong diagnosis. Wyatt Barnett is Head of AI at the NCTA the Internet and…

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  • Anthropic Picked the Wrong Name. Here’s What Claude Code Actually Does.

    When Anthropic named their agentic tool Claude Code, they made a decision that cost every non-developer one of the most powerful productivity applications available right now. The name did exactly what bad names do: it told a large portion of the people who would benefit most from the tool that it wasn’t built for them.…

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  • The Build vs. Buy Decision in AI Just Got Completely Flipped

    Most CEOs ask the wrong question about AI. They walk into meetings asking “What AI tools should we buy?” when they should be asking “What should we build ourselves?” This shift isn’t academic. The economics of custom development have fundamentally changed, and it’s forcing a complete rethink of technology strategy. Listen to the full episode:…

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  • The Frozen Middle: Why Your AI Pilot Failed (And It Wasn’t the Technology)

    95% of AI pilots never make it to production. If you’re reading this, yours probably didn’t either. Most people blame technology. Wrong model, wrong vendor, wrong implementation. Brett Schklar has spent two years working with 1,800 CEOs and business owners, tracking AI adoption across every department and industry vertical. His data tells a different story.…

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  • When Models Lie and You’re Still Paying for the Tokens

    The $200 Lesson in AI Reliability Your AI just confidently walked you through a solution that made your problem worse. And you’re still paying for those tokens.  This exact scenario happened to my podcast co-host Eli last week. His bike’s electronic drivetrain stopped working properly, a system so reliable he’d never learned to adjust it…

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  • Why Your AI Productivity Wins Are Making Your Best People Miserable

    Your top AI performers are burning out, and the productivity metrics you’re celebrating might be hiding a human infrastructure crisis that threatens everything you’ve built. I had three different conversations last week with leaders running “AI-first” teams. Each was bragging about 10x, 50x, even 100x productivity gains. But when I dug deeper, the same pattern…

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  • The Implementation Reality Nobody Talks About

    Aaron Wilt should be winning at AI. He’s technically sophisticated, runs a 40-person company, understands the technology deeply, and has given his team access to every major AI platform. Six months after his initial rollout, they were still doing most things manually. This isn’t a story about companies that don’t “get” AI. This is about…

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  • The Microsoft-Claude Connection That Actually Transforms Productivity

    The Integration Most Companies Are Missing I’ve been a Microsoft skeptic for years. Word and Excel always felt like digital relics compared to Google’s cloud-native approach. But something fundamental shifted in the productivity landscape that caught me completely off guard. It wasn’t Microsoft Copilot, that’s still an expensive Clippy with better graphics. The breakthrough came…

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  • Most Organizations Are on Level One. Here’s What the Map Actually Looks Like.

    When I ask audiences what they’re using AI for, the honest answer, the one that cuts through the excitement and the strategy decks and the pilot program announcements, is that most people are still opening a chatbot, typing a question, and closing the tab. That’s not a failure. It’s a starting point. But it’s worth…

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