Brett Raven: Two Things Kill It

There is a familiar shape to the discussion of artificial intelligence in Australian enterprises. Adoption figures rise. Pilot counts rise. Licence spend rises. Somewhere in the annual report a paragraph appears attesting to the organisation's commitment to the technology, and somewhere in a board pack a slide attests to its momentum. Then the conversation turns to what any of it has contributed to earnings, and the sentences get shorter. The technology itself is not in doubt—it works, visibly and often impressively. What remains unclear is the mechanism by which a working demonstration becomes a line in the accounts, and whether the people authorising the expenditure possess any means of telling the two apart.In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Brett Raven—a fractional chief information officer and principal of The Consulting CIO, who has spent twenty-five years being held accountable for precisely the numbers now under dispute. He has been chief technology…