Category: AI & Copilot

By the second day of an AI + ERP conference I attended, I had heard the word ‘agent’ so many times that it had lost all meaning. A researcher is an agent. An analyst is an agent. Facilitator is an agent. Every sponsor demo featured agents. Every hallway conversation mentioned agentic AI. Then another attendee… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 22: When Everything is an Agent, Nothing is an Agent

The breakthrough this week wasn’t technical. It was mental. After 20 weeks of exploring AI as a business leader—not a developer—I finally understood how to think about MCP servers. More importantly, I realized I may need to build one myself. If you’ve heard the term “MCP server” and quietly nodded without fully understanding it, this… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 21: What MCP Servers Are (and Why I’m Building My Own)

And what they’re still missing I recently sat down to skim two research reports that had been collecting dust in my reading pile: MIT’s The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 and Wharton’s Accountable Acceleration: Gen AI Fast-Tracks Into the Enterprise. I expected to spend thirty minutes. I spent hours. Not because they… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 20: What MIT and Wharton Found

When everyone’s waiting for “the thing” that will finally make AI worth their time. I keep having the same conversation. We’ve been reaching out to clients to help them get started on their AI journeys. They’re interested. They’ve seen the demos. They’ve experimented with ChatGPT for vacation planning or homework help. They believe AI will… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 19: Why You’re Still Waiting (and What That’s Costing You)

In week 16 of this series, I shared a diagnostic framework for untangling process problems — seven steps adapted from medical differential diagnosis to help you understand issues you don’t have time to think about. This week, I decided to apply that framework to myself. I challenged myself to identify something in my own work… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 18: When You Realize You Can Build What Doesn’t Exist

During a week at Directions EMEA in Poznań, Poland, where I presented ‘AI for the Over 40: From Skeptic to Evangelist,’ I had dozens of conversations with business leaders about their AI journeys. What struck me wasn’t what tools they were using — it was how they were organizing their AI work. Or more accurately,… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 17: How You Organize Your AI Work Matters More Than You Think

From barriers to action: How to diagnose problems you don’t have time to think about In Week 15, I outlined the seven barriers that quietly defeat process improvement. This week, I want to tackle the harder question: How do you even identify which barrier you’re dealing with when you’re too busy to think about it?… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 16: A Diagnostic Framework for Process Problems

When every demo looks impressive—but none of them solve your real problems In October, I attended the Dynamics Community Summit, where I delivered a Premier Sponsor Spotlight on AI. Before my session, though, I sat through presentation after presentation focused on agentic AI—vendors showcasing autonomous systems, consultants outlining theoretical frameworks, and everyone promising that AI… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 15: Why Agentic AI Isn’t Solving Your Problems

For the first thirteen weeks of this series, I focused on my personal AI journey—my frustrations, breakthroughs, and hard-won literacy. But while I was learning AI one prompt at a time, something larger was happening across our organization. We were conducting an experiment without realizing it: What happens when you encourage AI adoption without expecting it?… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 14: How AI Moved from Experimentation to Expectation

After three months of building what I proudly called my AI Ready Data Model—a unified structure connecting budgets, forecasts, actuals, operational metrics, and sales pipeline data—I was finally ready for my big AI moment. I uploaded everything, took a breath, and asked AI to normalize the data for regression analysis. Instantly: “Token limit exceeded.” I… Continue reading AI Over 40 Series – Week 13: When Your AI Miracle Hits the Infrastructure Wall