I spend my working days in the middle of the loudest shift enterprise technology has seen in decades. I work in go-to-market for business applications at a large cloud provider, which means agentic AI isn’t a trend for me, it’s an average Tuesday. I help customers and partners adopt these tools, and together we look at how they might reshape their companies, their industry, and society beyond.
So why am I also writing manually — in a blog, of all early-2000s things? Well, that front row seat has shown me something clearly: AI isn’t just shifting how we work, it’s changing how we think. Handing the menial tasks to AI can free us up to think more deeply, be more creative, and ultimately be more fulfilled and productive. My concern, however, is that in some cases it’s leaving gaps in our thinking. We produce documents, strategies and PowerPoint presentations with AI, and increasingly I feel detached from the thinking behind them — AI reads and summarises all of it for me, and I don’t take it in myself. I know some friends feel the same. And a recent MIT Media Lab study found that excessive reliance can build up what the researchers call “cognitive debt” — in their experiment, most people who wrote essays with ChatGPT couldn’t even quote from the words they’d just written.
So what does writing have to do with it? Well, to paraphrase Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand. At Amazon, there’s a tradition of holding meetings centred around a six-page written memo rather than a PowerPoint — because it’s much harder to hide poor thinking in a carefully drafted document than in a glitzy, flashy deck. It makes for an odd experience for new joiners: the meeting opens with an awkward silence while everyone reads, and then begins a far more informed, in-depth discussion on solving the problem.
In my personal life as well, I’ve always been keen to write. It’s partly spurred on by how much I love to read, and partly a sense that by writing I set something down in stone (well, paper these days — or a screen) that will outlast me. Spending time creatively also helps take my head out of work, and gives my own time more meaning than the eat/sleep/back-to-work loop weekdays can sometimes feel like. And I’m often involved in politics, where writing deeply interests me because it has an effect on everything in our lives.
So what can I offer to readers? Well, I get a front row seat to the agentic revolution as it happens — in some cases helping drive it forward through key partnerships in the industry. If you work in tech and find yourself wondering what all of this means beyond the product roadmap — for how we think, work and live — then you’re exactly who I’m writing for. From a politics perspective, I’ll lend that tech-led lens to how we might solve some of the UK’s challenges. And from a fiction writing perspective, I’ll share my trials and tribulations as I try to go from corporate sales to deep-thinking creative.
What you’ll find here
Tech — what it’s actually like using and working with AI and the tools reshaping how companies serve their customers — from someone doing it daily, not observing from the cheap seats.
Politics — how technology ripples into people’s lives and then into the country’s choices — mostly Britain, because that’s where I live and vote.
Writing — dispatches from the novel, short fiction, and honest notes on carving out room to think creatively in a busy life.
One disclaimer, once: while I work in tech, the views here are entirely my own and not linked to my employer.
If first-hand notes on technology, politics and writing sound like your kind of thing, subscribe — I’ll see you in a fortnight.
— Steven