Why I wrote this book

This week, a board will approve an eight-figure AI budget.

The evidence: a vendor deck and a thirty-minute demo.

I've watched companies buy AI twice. In the nineties it was called expert systems. Now it's called AI agents. Both times they bought it the way they once bought ERP: an answer, before the question.

I remember how the first wave ended.

The customer said: "My team of experts keeps to schedule and makes fewer errors without your system than with it." The project closed. The expert system effectively became a database.

I've spent the thirty years between the waves in the architect's chair inside banks. That's where the gap between what was bought and what was needed eventually lands.

Nobody is paid to close a different gap. The people accountable for a firm's integrity, risk, and P&L are betting on a technology explained to them almost entirely by the people selling it.

Between the vendor's pitch and the board's accountability, there is a missing layer: what this machine actually is, what it cannot do by design, and what the enterprise must become to use it without harming itself.

Architecture of Intellect is that layer.

No hype. No doom. Engineering.

It's out today as an ebook. Paperback follows shortly.

If you're accountable for a firm rather than a feature, this was written for you. Disagree with any of it? Good. That's what the comments are for.