Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

Many businesses are not yet prepared to fully reap the benefits of AI.

Many businesses are not yet prepared to fully reap the benefits of AI.
Unlock AI's true potential for your business by integrating it into your strategy, boosting productivity, and enhancing customer experiences.

AI has become a ubiquitous technology, with companies exploring its applications for revenue growth and improved customer and employee experiences. However, most businesses are unprepared to leverage AI to its fullest extent, limiting its potential. Only a small number of companies are successfully applying AI to improve their operations and create new value. AI-powered automation, when combined with specialized and generative AI, can boost productivity, eliminate errors, and achieve faster results. Successful examples include Cathay Pacific, British Airways, and Intel. To fully deliver on its promise, AI initiatives must be part of a larger business strategy and be governed, trusted, and actionable.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-to-unlock-ai-true-business-value


Featured writing

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

We always panic about new tools (and we're always wrong)

Every time a new tool emerges for making or manipulating symbols, we panic. The pattern is so consistent it's almost embarrassing. Here's what happened each time.

Dev reflection - February 03, 2026

I've been thinking about constraints today. Not the kind that block you—the kind that clarify. There's a difference, and most people miss it.

When execution becomes cheap, ideas become expensive

This article reveals a fundamental shift in how organizations operate: as AI makes execution nearly instantaneous, the bottleneck has moved from implementation to decision-making. Understanding this transition is critical for anyone leading teams or making strategic choices in an AI-enabled world.

Notes and related thinking

ARTIFICIAL intelligence could hit three in five workers — possibly replacing their jobs. The warning comes in a new International Monetary Fund report on the future of work. It warned of lower sala…

AI could replace three in five workers, warns an IMF report, signaling potential job loss and lower salaries. Discover the implications for the future of work.

Atlassians choose where they work, every single day. Download our free report to see what we’ve learned as a result.

Explore Atlassian's insights on flexible work policies and employee satisfaction. Download the free report to learn from their distributed work experience.

The question over whether to allow employees to work from home has been settled. Here’s the new normal.

Explore why the shift back to office work may fail as data supports remote work's benefits for productivity and employee well-being.