The shelf that decides whether any of the above survives contact with a real business. Titles are on the spines; the notes underneath are the three tellings, in short — for a ten-year-old, for the architect, and for the boardroom.
6 concepts on this shelf · Intermediate → Advanced · about 2 min read
Kitchen table — Marking its homework — on purpose, on a set of questions you keep, so you notice when it gets worse.
Whiteboard — Task-level suites, graders, golden sets and regression runs in CI. Writing down what 'correct' means is the uncomfortable part, and the whole point.
Boardroom — Ask any AI vendor one question: how do you measure that it is right, and can I see the test set? Vibes are not a control.
evals, evaluation, hallucination, LLM as judge, golden set, regression testing, quality
Kitchen table — Rules about what it is allowed to do on its own, and when it has to come and ask a grown-up.
Whiteboard — Least privilege for something that improvises: scopes, allow-lists, approval gates, sandboxes, and a blast radius you have actually calculated.
Boardroom — Where regulators, auditors and your own risk committee will look first. Design it in early; retrofitting it is far more expensive.
guardrails, responsible AI, AI governance, permissions, least privilege, human in the loop, compliance, audit
Kitchen table — Getting it out of the workshop and keeping it working every day, not just on the day it was built.
Whiteboard — Versioning, CI/CD for models and prompts, canaries, rollback, drift monitoring and tracing. A model in a notebook is a hypothesis, not a system.
Boardroom — The gap between a successful pilot and a dependable service. It is mostly this — and it is where most programmes stall.
MLOps, LLMOps, deployment, model monitoring, drift, observability, CI/CD, rollback
Kitchen table — Every letter, bill and message a company sends you — written so it actually makes sense.
Whiteboard — Template and content management, variable data, composition, channel orchestration and archive — now with generation and personalisation layered on, under strict review.
Boardroom — Millions of regulated documents a year. Small improvements in clarity move call volume, complaints and compliance risk all at once.
customer communications management, CCM, correspondence, document composition, personalisation, omnichannel, notifications
Kitchen table — A very tidy filing cabinet that also understands what is inside each file.
Whiteboard — Capture, classification, extraction and lifecycle over enterprise content, with retrieval and models turning archives into something answerable.
Boardroom — Decades of documents are usually the most valuable and least used asset in the building. This is how they start earning.
content management, ECM, document intelligence, document extraction, OCR, records, knowledge management
Kitchen table — Thinking harder takes longer and costs more. Sometimes the quick answer is the right one.
Whiteboard — Caching, routing, model tiering, batching and early exit. Measure cost per resolved task, not per token — the cheap model that fails twice is not cheap.
Boardroom — The unit economics. Know your cost per completed task and the human cost it replaces, or the pilot will never survive its first budget review.
AI cost, token cost, latency, caching, model routing, unit economics, ROI, TCO