Vol. VII — Writing
    The JournalEssays & Field Notes

    Practical writing on AI in the wild.

    Field notes from real engagements. Frameworks, postmortems, and the unglamorous discipline of shipping AI in production.

    Latest Articles

    Showing 10–18 of 64 essays

    Where AI Should Sit in Your Org Chart
    AI Leadership··3 min read

    Where AI Should Sit in Your Org Chart

    Three structures, each with a predictable failure mode. The right one depends less on strategy than on how many people you have.

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    What Is a Fractional COO, and When Do You Need One?
    Fractional Leadership··3 min read

    What Is a Fractional COO, and When Do You Need One?

    The symptom is usually the same: the founder is the operating system, and the company cannot grow past their attention.

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    Why Your Team Hides How Much AI They Use
    AI Governance··3 min read

    Why Your Team Hides How Much AI They Use

    They are not being reckless. They are responding rationally to how your company treats the answer.

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    Six Clauses to Negotiate in Any AI Contract
    AI Strategy··3 min read

    Six Clauses to Negotiate in Any AI Contract

    The price is the least negotiable thing in an AI contract, and the least important. Here are the six that matter.

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    How to Budget for AI When You Can't Predict Usage
    AI Strategy··3 min read

    How to Budget for AI When You Can't Predict Usage

    Usage-based pricing makes AI budgets guesswork. Here is a structure that survives the guessing.

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    Hiring Your First AI Leader: What to Look For
    AI Leadership··3 min read

    Hiring Your First AI Leader: What to Look For

    The candidate who impresses in the interview is often the wrong one. Here is what actually predicts success in the first AI seat.

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    What to Do When Your AI Gets It Badly Wrong
    AI Governance··3 min read

    What to Do When Your AI Gets It Badly Wrong

    Every AI system will produce a bad output eventually. The difference between an incident and a crisis is whether anyone decided in advance.

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    AI Data Quality: How Clean Is Clean Enough?
    AI Strategy··3 min read

    AI Data Quality: How Clean Is Clean Enough?

    Perfect data is not the standard, and waiting for it is how companies spend a year preparing and ship nothing.

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    How to Kill an AI Project Without Killing the Programme
    AI Strategy··3 min read

    How to Kill an AI Project Without Killing the Programme

    Every AI portfolio needs a way to end things. Most companies have no mechanism, so nothing ever stops and everything accumulates.

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    FAQ

    Common questions

    What does this blog cover?
    AI strategy and leadership decisions for growing businesses: what a Chief AI Officer actually does, how to evaluate vendors, how to measure return, and why most AI projects fail. It is written for people deciding what to fund, not for people building models.
    How often is it updated?
    New pieces publish regularly, and existing ones are revised when the underlying facts change — pricing, market rates and vendor landscapes move quickly enough that stale posts become misleading rather than merely dated.
    Who writes it?
    Erin Moore, a fractional Chief AI Officer and U.S. Army veteran with an Executive MBA, an MS in Data Science and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Everything is written from the buyer's side of the table, which is where the work happens.
    Where should I start?
    If you are new to the topic, start with what a fractional Chief AI Officer does and why most AI projects fail. If you are already spending on AI, the posts on AI audits and measuring ROI will be more immediately useful.