As AI systems shift from answering questions to completing real work, the most valuable skill isn’t prompt engineering, it’s delegation. Working well with AI mirrors good management: define clear outcomes, give context, break work into pieces, review, and build trust over rounds of feedback. That’s why the heaviest AI users are often the most optimistic, […]
AI Isn’t Making Hiring Faster. Because Hiring Was Never the Real Bottleneck. Trust Is.
AI has automated almost every step of recruiting, yet hiring hasn’t gotten faster. The reason is that the real bottleneck was never administrative work, it’s trust. Now that candidates and recruiters both use AI, application volume has exploded and the hard question has shifted from “can we find candidates” to “can we tell what’s authentic.” […]
AI Isn’t Replacing Workers. Companies That Implement It Well Are Hiring More.
A study of 21,559 U.S. companies from Ramp and Revelio Labs found that heavy AI spenders grew headcount about 10% over two years, with entry-level hiring up around 12%, while modest adopters saw no real change. The dividing line isn’t whether a company uses AI, it’s how deeply it implements it. Access to a capable […]
The AI Bottleneck Has Moved: Why Every Major AI Vendor Is Now Selling Implementation
The AI bottleneck has shifted from building models to implementing them. Microsoft’s $2.5 billion Frontier Company and AWS’s $1 billion Forward Deployed Engineers both bet that the next competitive advantage is helping organizations actually deploy AI and produce measurable outcomes, not shipping a better model. Foundation models are becoming commodities, while enterprise knowledge, governance, security, […]
The Knowledge Manager Is Coming Back. AI Made the Job Necessary Again.
Search solved discovery, not trust. Twenty years of digitization left most enterprises with conflicting policies, stale documents, and undocumented tribal knowledge that human employees navigated by judgment. AI assistants don’t navigate by judgment. They treat every document as a candidate for truth, and they confidently surface the wrong one. Most AI rollouts stall on the […]
What Canada’s Emerging Leaders Tell Us About Where the Economy Is Heading
Reading The Peak’s 2026 Emerging Leaders list as an economic snapshot reveals six clear signals: AI has become deployment infrastructure rather than a research frontier; operators are the new founders; government is pulling in real talent; purpose and profit have stopped arguing; leadership is spreading across regions; and reputation is starting to beat job title. […]
Why Every Organization Needs an AI Playground
The organizations winning with AI are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most polished governance frameworks. They are the ones that have built an AI Playground: a safe, encouraged, transparent environment where employees, leaders, and teams can experiment, share what they learn, and discover real workflows by trying things. AI is not […]
The Future of Email May Be More Email
For two decades, email advice has been about reducing volume. AI flips that. The real problem was never volume, it was signal detection, and modern AI can summarize threads, surface stalled approvals, extract action items, and quietly handle the mundane processing humans were never good at. When the cost of processing communication drops, behaviour changes. […]
What Businesses Can Learn from the Government of Canada’s AI Training Push
The Government of Canada is doing something surprisingly smart with AI, and it is not the training itself. It is the mindset. Through the Canada School of Public Service AI Learning Week, the federal workforce is being encouraged to experiment, share real workflow stories, treat governance as part of adoption rather than a blocker, and […]
Ontario’s AI Audit Is a Wake-Up Call for Businesses, and a Huge Opportunity
The Ontario Auditor General’s AI report is not a warning against adoption. It is confirmation that AI has moved past experimentation and into operational infrastructure. The audit surfaces fragmented governance, inconsistent oversight, no clear inventory of where AI is in use, and procurement processes that have not caught up. These are the same issues showing […]
The AI Interview Era Has Arrived
Coding interviews built around scarcity (no internet, no docs, no AI) no longer reflect how software actually gets built. Google is piloting AI-assisted interviews, Canva encourages AI use during technical screens, and Wealthsimple replaced the resume entirely with a one-week prototype-build challenge that drew 1,152 applicants. The skillset has shifted from syntax recall to systems […]
Joining Hill+Knowlton Strategies
I wanted to formally share some exciting news from my professional life. Effective yesterday, Ascentum Inc has been acquired and will be joining the Hill+Knowlton Strategies family. I’ve been with Ascentum for 3 years and as you probably know Ascentum specializes in helping businesses, government and not-for-profit organizations facilitate and create dialogue with stakeholders via online, […]
How to Travel to the US, with your iPhone…
I travel to the US 2-3 times a year and I want to use my iPhone while traveling. The first task is to understand is your usage. My typical usage is: Voice Calls – I receive 2-3 calls daily with a total daily talk time of 20 mins, generally I know 2 of the 3 […]
New Ascentum.com Site
As most of you know I’ve been working for the last few months at Ascentum and we’ve been working towards a new website. Yesterday we launched new Ascentum.com website, which was a switch from Ascentum.ca and an older CMS system that didn’t feature many social media functions. The new site Ascentum.com is also supported by […]
Yellowpages.ca getting better…
Today we got our annual call from the Yellow Pages Group about advertising in their directories. We’ve moved offices so we’re probably in the Toronto West book. The major difference between the call last year and this year was the online only options. Last year we didn’t really have an option not to purchase online […]