An employee who is not spending enough money is not doing their job properly.

That is not satire. It is the logic of a productivity metric currently in use in organisations measuring their people by token consumption — and the model provider sends a small perspex award to mark the achievement.

Brett Raven has spent twenty-five years being held accountable for the numbers that artificial intelligence programmes are now generating in abundance. He has been chief technology officer inside fast-moving e-commerce businesses, advised the C-suite at Salesforce on enterprise architecture, and led an experience-platforms delivery practice at Accenture across the Asia-Pacific. He now works as a fractional chief information officer, which means he is called after the transformation has stalled.

His position is blunter than his commercial interests would recommend: there is a bubble, the pilots are not converting, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the technology. This conversation works the seam between what artificial intelligence is claimed to deliver and what, on the evidence, it actually does.

Takeaways

1. The bubble is in the capital structure, not in the capability — and the two claims are routinely confused.
2. The rules governing entry to the world's major equity indices were rewritten in a matter of weeks by private firms, with no regulator, no published impact analysis, and no appeal. One provider refused, which proves the rest had a choice.
3. Token consumption is not a productivity measure. It is conspicuous consumption with a trophy attached, designed by the party collecting the revenue.
4. What kills these projects is expectation management and change management. It is almost never the technology.
5. Organisations do not need an artificial intelligence strategy, and they do not need a chief artificial intelligence officer. They need a business strategy specific enough to say which capability moves which number.
6. The failed-pilot statistics are partly misread — but the defence only holds for firms that can afford genuine exploration, and almost none can.
7. "Hours saved" is a claim about a counterfactual, and it rarely survives the question of where the hours went.

Chapters

[00:00] Intro
[01:13] A word before we begin
[01:55] Introduction
[03:46] Is there an AI bubble?
[08:09] Dot-com, the GFC, and "too big to fail"
[12:17] Money printing, index rules, and whose retirement is exposed
[14:57] Token maxing: spending as a productivity metric
[16:59] Boards, delegation, and the report that travels
[20:04] Klarna, after the press release
[22:17] Australia as fast follower
[23:58] Individual productivity and enterprise agents
[28:11] Start with the problem, not the tool
[30:53] Chief AI officers, and where AI belongs
[34:52] Digital exhaust and the erosion of privacy
[39:43] Telling a board what it doesn't want to hear
[44:31] Long horizons, short quarters
[46:36] The two-hour application
[50:10] Pilots designed to fail, and funding in tranches
[53:23] Lightning round
[58:58] Close

Guest Links & References

• Brett Raven
• The Consulting CIO

About the Show

On the Subject of Leadership is a long-form interview series on governance, organisational culture, and the realities of decision-making — without slogans or motivational gloss.

Hosted by Dr Robert N. Winter.

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Credits

Recorded remotely via Riverside

Music: The Hidden Thread by Roberto Prado / Artlist