Author's Note

Twenty years inside software-dependent corporates, from engineer to CTO. Why AI has made the structural patterns described in this book too expensive to ignore any longer.

I have spent more than twenty years inside software-dependent corporates in roles ranging from engineer to CTO. I served as CTO of a leading ecommerce marketplace with more than 13 million customers, led a technology organisation of over a thousand people as CTO of an ECB-regulated multinational with € 10 billion turnover, and transformed how hundreds of engineers work at a unicorn fintech. I have redirected hundreds of millions in product and technology investment and written off programmes that should never have been funded.

For the past few years I have been using AI daily: building a sophisticated platform from scratch for Eccasion with serial founders of a European mobility company, leading a large-scale SDLC overhaul to make a unicorn AI-ready, and building DemandOps, including an AI-native digital twin for garden planning. What I noticed across all of this work was that the real value of AI was not generation but synthesis: reconciling what people said they would build with what was actually there. Vagueness did not produce flexibility; rather, it inevitably resulted in hallucination.

When I described this pattern publicly, the recognition was immediate and far broader than I expected.

I have carried this book in my head for twenty years. AI has made these structural problems dramatically more expensive to ignore, which is why it is now in your hands. I should warn you that it is not particularly diplomatic, though it is considerably less devastating than AI will be for the competitiveness of any organisation that finds it too confronting to finish.

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