Thoughts on AI, automation, and navigating the restructuring of professional work.
11 posts
This month agents stopped talking and started operating real applications. Meta's Muse Spark and Claude Cowork now click through desktops, browsers, and ERPs inside a logged-in human session. That breaks the audit trail in a way API logging never anticipated, and it lands squarely on internal audit.
On June 12 a single US export-control letter took Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline for every customer on earth, for 18 days, with no notice. In the same window, US companies quietly moved up to 46% of their token usage to cheaper Chinese models and lawmakers opened a probe. Your AI vendor is now a single point of failure, and that is a third-party risk audit waiting to happen.
Companies spent two years telling people to use more AI. Now Uber has capped its engineers at $1,500 a month and Meta is reining in spend that was heading toward billions. The swing from tokenmaxxing to token discipline is a governance failure hiding in plain sight, and it is exactly the kind of thing internal audit exists to catch.
Non-human identities now outnumber people in most enterprises by forty to one, 82% of companies have AI agents running they never inventoried, and most agents have no audit trail. That is not a security problem. It is an audit problem, and it is ours.
AI adoption is accelerating so fast that providers are throttling access and companies are building token leaderboards. Inside every organization, two cohorts are forming. And nobody has written the governance rulebook yet.
My education taught me to learn. The knowledge it gave me is already obsolete. If AI handles the output, the question isn't what you know—it's whether you know how to steer the machine that knows everything.
The big firms have already made their bet. Here's a practical workflow to make yours — one hour a day, go hard, and stop being polite to the machines.
KPMG just demanded a 14% fee cut from its own auditor—citing AI. A law firm replaced a departing associate with AI tools and saw costs drop 27%. The economics of professional services are being rewritten in real time.
The SaaSpocalypse wasn't about one product. It was the market recognizing that middlemen get eliminated when knowledge becomes abundant. Here's what that means for audit—and every knowledge profession.
The market just woke up to what I discovered last week: AI can automate knowledge work now. Here's what that looks like on the ground—and why it's just prompts and workflow.
I built an AI system that can do a significant portion of my audit job. In a week. With zero coding knowledge. This is what that satisfying, terrifying realisation felt like.