AI for the Over 40 – Week 29: AI Context Management: What Happens When You Hit the Ceiling

I almost could not write this article. Not because I did not know what to say, but because the tool I was using to write it kept breaking mid-sentence. I was running into max compaction errors, “response could not be fully generated” messages, and conversations that stopped dead with no clear explanation and no obvious… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 29: AI Context Management: What Happens When You Hit the Ceiling

AI for the Over 40 – Week 28: When “Required” Doesn’t Mean “Unchangeable”

Every organization has them: the activities nobody really believes in, but everyone participates in anyway. Performance reviews. Strategic planning cycles. Compliance training. Budget reconciliation rituals. The annual or recurring processes that consume enormous time and energy while everyone involved quietly acknowledges they are not producing what they are supposed to produce. We complain about them.… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 28: When “Required” Doesn’t Mean “Unchangeable”

AI for the Over 40 – Week 27: Building Your Own AI Career Development Partner

What if performance management evidence was collected by you throughout the year instead of about you during annual review season? Last month, I sat down to complete my self-evaluation. I’ve been through some version of this exercise for more than two decades across multiple companies. As I stared at the screen, I realized something uncomfortable:… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 27: Building Your Own AI Career Development Partner

AI for the Over 40 – Week 26: AI Research Strategy Starts Before You Research

I’ve been trying to decide when to use Microsoft 365 Copilot versus Power Automate versus Zapier. Not a simple feature comparison. I wanted a decision framework that could help me determine which tool fit which scenario — and when a hybrid approach made the most sense. A few years ago, that kind of research project… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 26: AI Research Strategy Starts Before You Research

AI for the Over 40 – Week 24: Why Your AI Project Should Start in Chat

In Week 20, I shared MIT’s finding that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail to reach production. The explanation was the learning gap: organizations try to build solutions they do not fully understand for problems they have not clearly defined. I have been thinking about that statistic ever since—not because it surprised me, but because… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 24: Why Your AI Project Should Start in Chat

AI for the Over 40 – Week 23: Beyond Summaries: How To Get More Value from AI Meeting Transcripts

I’ve been using AI to help with meeting notes for over a year. Copilot in Teams generates summaries, pulls out action items, and tells me who said what. For a long time, I assumed that was the goal. Now I realize I was thinking about meeting transcripts the same way I initially thought about AI… Continue reading AI for the Over 40 – Week 23: Beyond Summaries: How To Get More Value from AI Meeting Transcripts

AI for the Over 40 – Week 22: When Everything is an Agent, Nothing is an Agent

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

AI Over 40 Series – Week 21: What MCP Servers Are (and Why I’m Building My Own)

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)

AI Over 40 Series – Week 20: What MIT and Wharton Found

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