Thoughts, tools.
And the work between.

I'm happier than I've ever been. I just wish the price hadn't been quite so high.

AI is making senior-looking output cheap. The awkward question is which parts of experience are still worth paying for.

A two-year Dubai resident, one Belgian Malinois, and a geopolitical simulation nobody else is running.

I watched 2.5 million people uninstall ChatGPT last week. A moral stand. Downloaded Claude instead.

Not literally. But you know the feeling. You’ve got 12 AI tools you’re paying for, a Notion dashboard that’s somehow both empty and overwhelming, and a Claude Code setup that’s been “optimised” so thoroughly it can barely…

Every new session starts cold. Every task needs the same briefing again. Every decision risks contradicting the last one because the system has no persistent memory of what happened yesterday.

Last weekend, I built an autonomous engineering team in 48 hours. Not a metaphor. Not a "vision." I sat at my desk in Dubai, talked to a chatbot on Telegram, and watched two AI agents coordinate a full development loop. One…

Two years ago, the work sitting on my desk right now would’ve required six or seven people. Not hypothetically. Not in some LinkedIn thought-experiment sense. Literally.

Three of the most powerful people on the planet stood up last Friday and said the same thing. At the Munich Security Conference, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the room that the post-1945 world order “no longer exists.”…

A personal story of building from $100 to $10,000 a month through curiosity, courage and taking action. Lessons from Keith De Alwis on starting small.

There’s a chart Tesla released recently – Figure 3 in their Optimus development update – that should have stopped every tech executive in their tracks.

I’ve been writing tech articles since the pandemic. Mostly for fun, occasionally for money, always as a way to clarify my thinking on topics I was working through anyway.

I’m just going to put it there and say this – If you can keep yourself healthy, functional, and unbroken for the next 20–30 years, you stand a real chance of living long enough to access therapies that extend your life beyond…

There’s a particular brand of confidence that comes from having an AI validate your every thought. It’s intoxicating, really. I’d been working on a side project for a few weeks – one of those ideas that had been rattling…

We’ve all seen them online. Twenty-two-year-olds leaning against rented Lamborghinis, promising you can make ten grand in thirty days if you just “smash this one weird trick.” Absolute rubbish, all of it.

Six months ago, a mate of mine finished his contract at Microsoft. Solid CV, years of experience, genuinely brilliant at what he does. The kind of person who should have recruiters queuing up.He’s now driving a taxi to pay the…

Picture this: a dusty corporate boardroom somewhere in Asia, circa 2021. I’m sitting through yet another PowerPoint presentation about “digital transformation” – complete with the obligatory stock photos of people pointing at…

Most guides to AI consultants are written for people who want to become one. This one is for the people paying the invoice.

Most people come to DPI through payments or ID. I came in through a birth certificate.

Will the work pay for itself? Model capacity, costs and cash impact with the free AI ROI calculator.

Brazil built Pix for about $4 million. Running it costs around $14 million a year. The build was the cheap bit.

The median UK AI consultant contract pays about £564 a day. A Big Four firm's top published rate is five times that. Both are called AI consultants.

Gartner reckons only about 130 of the thousands of 'agentic AI' vendors are the real thing. Start there.

Most businesses ask "consultant or agency?" when the real question is who runs the thing in month seven.

The typical UK business that put a number on its AI spend last year spent about £2,000. Start there, not with a £50k project.

Your staff are already using AI at work. The only question is whether anyone wrote down the rules.

The median UK business using AI spent £2,000 on it in a year. The mean was £19,000. That gap is the whole story.

Most AI proofs of concept prove one thing: that the demo worked. That's not the question you needed answering.

Most businesses ask whether they're ready for AI. The better question is: ready for which job?

A receptionist costs £21,000 a year or more. An AI one costs less than your phone bill. That's the wrong comparison.

Most AI roadmaps are a wish list with dates on it. A useful one fits on a page and includes a kill list.

Seventy-two per cent of workers say the skills expected of them have changed. Thirty-six per cent say they've been trained for it.

Building your own AI feels like control. For most businesses it's an expensive way to own a maintenance problem.

All three cost about the same per seat. The real price difference is hiding in your Microsoft licence.

The August 2026 deadline everyone warned you about moved. Most of the reasons to prepare didn't.

Most businesses shopping for a Chief AI Officer have a technology problem. Some shopping for a CTO have an AI one.

The best question to ask an AI consultancy is what they'd tell you not to do.

Buying an AI tool takes an afternoon. Changing how the work gets done is the actual project.

"95% of AI projects fail" is the most quoted statistic in business AI. It isn't quite what the report says.

50 countries, one DPI component each, by the end of 2028. Here's why it matters beyond the headline.

Shelves of registers, some decades old, some rotting. Starting fresh is easy. This is the hard bit.

The launch gets the ribbon-cutting. Support gets a line in an appendix. That's backwards.

DPI is the track. DPGs are the trains. Here's the 30-second version I give ministers, and the bit most explainers skip.

Ask a registrar general what their first use case is and they'll tell you before you've finished the question.

"We're using one or two DPGs. What else fits?" Here's how the stack actually connects.

In many of my conversations with governments, it's the funder who pulled us into the room.

The software is rarely the slow bit. Here's where the months (and sometimes years) actually go.

Tier 1 firms and ten-person local tech companies are winning the same kind of work. Here's why.

DPG status won't win you a single contract on its own. What it does is get you into rooms you'd never reach otherwise.

The technology is rarely what holds a CRVS programme up. The law usually is.

Identity starts at birth. So why does civil registration so rarely make the DPI shortlist?

Putting a form online doesn't make it infrastructure. Here's the test I'd use instead.

"It's almost too good to be true." Every government says it. Here's the honest answer.

Some governments I've spoken to have unpaid bills with their proprietary vendor, disputes that have gone legal, and a system nobody will touch.

Secure products can still end up as insecure deployments. Here's how that happens.

Free, open source software that governments can run for decades without paying a licence fee. Sounds too good to be true. It isn't.

GovStack can read like a utopian whitepaper. Then you watch it shave months off a procurement decision.

Updated October 2026. A practical guide to AI consulting: skills, fees, agents, secure integrations and turning promising pilots into measurable business value.

A whole toolbox, introduced as a screwdriver. What happens when AI lets experienced people deliver across the disciplines they already understand?

You can’t control which walls governments build. You can control how much of your business falls over when they do.

Before you give an agent another tool, find out what it has been doing with the ones it already has.

Agents can do the grunt work I learnt my trade on. So who gives the next generation their first job?

Sri Lanka’s digital strategy is promising. The test is how quickly citizens feel the difference.

By 2050, one in four people on Earth will be African. Most will be under 25. And while the West obsesses over AI ethics and declining birth rates, Africa is building the infrastructure, talent, and momentum that will define…

Most people have never heard of digital public goods. And frankly, why would they? It’s not exactly the kind of phrase that gets you invited onto breakfast TV or trending on LinkedIn with some motivational quote overlaid on a…