Connecta

28/05/2026

Many organizations celebrate the wrong kind of milestone: A new branch opened, 50th anniversary, 5,000 employees.

What if the primary metric is quality of impact to lives we influenced? Number of homeless families we were able to shelter? College scholars we sent to school from impoverished families?

A better brochure, a better logo, a better office - sure that can make you feel good. Just don't mistake it for true legacy.

27/05/2026

Making decisions cannot be reduced to the deadening act of swiping.

26/05/2026

Leaders are not supposed to complain about tough situations or difficult decisions that need to be made.

In fact, they should be thankful - because it gives them the chance to prove what they're made of.

23/05/2026

Connecta firmly believes the world needs more women CEOs.

Our own Managing Partner is not just a strong woman. She is a woman of many strengths.

Applications are now open for the Women in Leadership Awards 2026, celebrating Australia’s most influential women in business. Held at The Calyx, Sydney on 30 July 2026, the premium leadership luncheon will unite senior executives, founders and emerging leaders for an afternoon of recognition, insight and connection.

20/05/2026

The use of AI has reached not a point of recklessness but a point of going into the wild and being excited without a sense of caution. This is why our AI design and implementation planning efforts have focused on governance and real-time transparency audits. It speeds up deployment of AI solutions, not the other way around, contrary to perceptions.

Consultancy group Ernst & Young (EY) has withdrawn a cybersecurity report after an investigation by GPTZero found that 70% of the citations within it were either fabricated or broken.

20/05/2026

Hard resets are often needed when there is a protracted period of imbalance. That said, hard resets cannot become a norm. Once they serve their purpose, a more deliberately designed trade arrangement must be reached between these two Superpowers.

The U.S. trade deficit with China has narrowed sharply in recent years. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the goods trade deficit fell from $382 billion in 2022 to $202 billion in 2025. The trend has continued into 2026, with the deficit standing at $33 billion in the first quarter alone.

Click here for more https://www.statista.com/chart/36221/us-trade-volume-and-balance-with-china/

17/05/2026

Our perspective remains simple: AI should be called hyper-automation. And like any other automation projects before it, the goal is to enable humans more effectively so that humans can reach the next level of productivity or innovation faster.

Oops.

12/05/2026

Since 2022, we've been advocating T-W-T or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday work in the office or onsite, at maximum. The real problem isn't the five-day work week. It's the continuing imposition of five days onsite or in-office work.

🔗: https://bit.ly/4chl9jz
AI is looming over many white-collar workers like a dark cloud, threatening to automate their jobs. But JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said there are sunnier days ahead thanks to the tech’s productivity gains—people will have more jobs than ever, and will be clocking in fewer hours a day.

27/04/2026

The current economic pinch everyone is feeling because of the sudden and significant oil price hike has re-ignited the debate on hybrid work arrangement. Work from home (WFH) is now on the table again, after it was supposed to have been decisively silenced by sweeping return-to-office (RTO) mandates.

Our Consultants have been separating the noise from the signal even before the disruption caused by the pandemic.

We have helped our clients evolve the work, the workplace and their workforce so that the next level of flexibility is achieved with personal and business given the due regard that they both deserve.

And the results?

In an industry where 35% attrition is standard, our client ended the year with 12% after 10 months of implementing NextFlex.

Where hiring used to be a constant challenge, another client brought down their average time to fill from 59 days to 40 days. That's just 10 days longer than the standard 30-day notice period in the Philippines.

Doable? Yes. Game-changer? Absolutely.

17/04/2026

Technology adoption keeps compressing: the internet took Corporate America a decade, Uber and Airbnb did it in three from the iPhone launch, and AI is moving even faster.

The data compellingly shows the calm is cracking. Over five years, Not Worried at All collapsed from 38% to 23% — a 15-point exit of optimists. Fairly Worried climbed from 14% to 24%. Very Worried held steady at 9%, meaning the 2021 early warning now reads as emergency signal – the fact that none of them climbed to a more positive space. Combined, worry went from 23% to 33%.

With free AI tools everywhere and hyper-marketing relentless, this shrinking optimism is informed, not ignorant. The real headline: 33% are already worried while corporate AI adoption is still nascent. When adoption matures, that worry likely doubles.

Survey respondents were asked, "How worried, if at all, are you that your type of work could be automated within your lifetime?"

15/04/2026

WHEN ARTIFICIAL IS SUPERFICIAL

As Consultants, we have been pushing the reasoning limits of AI platforms and engines. It’s not an accident therefore that we’ve seen the good, the bad and the really ugly.

The biases. The sycophancy. The hallucination.

Don’t even ask it to predict future outcomes based on specific statistical models you will require.

And no – this doesn’t mean it’s all bad. The ability to digest quickly from files in our NotebookLMs – it’s superb. But far from perfect.

It is the lack of consistency that bothers us and pushes our consulting team farther away from assigning any degree of trust on what it outputs.

It's prompting three times to validate before it recognizes an error. Three times, if you're lucky. The second attempt goes like, "I have reviewed all recent data and my analysis remains the same, etc." The third one? It's suddenly in tears, apologizing for the hallucination.

Guess what, it’s roughly the same experience from non-enterprise customers.

With all the marketing hype on AI, what’s not being given equal airtime is the implementation reversals. YES, REVERSALS.

AI solutions implemented to the detriment of customers. To the disdain of clients. To the utter disappointment of humans who were promised a reliable deputy.

KYC perfectly done, but implementation gone wrong.

When the tool hallucinates with confidence, apologizes on the third prompt, and still gets it wrong — that is not a deployment problem. That is a product defect in an expensive suit. I've sat across from enough failed transformations to know how this goes. The damage lands on the client. The invoice lands on the consultant. And the vendor drops a press release about the next model.

To call it intelligence is an affront to true human intelligence.

But since the word Intelligence is already out there and being widely used, I will simply call it for now SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

AI will get there. we somehow still believe that. But "getting better" is not a warranty. And it is not a defense when you've already invoiced the client for something the tool could not deliver at quality and scale.

Until the tool is actually reliable — not impressively capable mostly on Tuesdays — there is no such thing as intelligent deployment.

There is only managed exposure to an unfinished product.

Do we hope it gets better? Absolutely! Purge the training junk, all that it has consumed from Wiki and Reddit junks. That's a good place to start.

Wait, wasn’t this the very approach advocated by IBM Watson?

AI is for now SI.