Polaris Digital

25/06/2025

“Maria, this report is incredible,” the department head said. “You pulled this together in ONE DAY?”

Maria grinned. “Lots of coffee and AI.”

The manager nodded appreciatively, but couldn’t shake her curiosity about Maria’s process. She’d heard colleagues mention using AI for various tasks, but the results were usually hit-or-miss. How had Maria managed to produce something this sophisticated so quickly?

Then came the presentation.

“This wasn’t your typical ‘AI do my homework’ situation,” Maria explained. “I had a creative model brainstorm wild ‘what if’ scenarios, then fed those to a reasoning model for deep analysis and pattern recognition across our historical data. A research-focused model handled competitive analysis and market intelligence. Used a specialized reasoning model for complex financial modeling that would’ve taken our analysts weeks. Had an image generation model create visualization mockups, and a real-time search model cross-referenced everything against current conditions. But at every step, I had to apply my years of industry experience to guide the prompts, challenge the outputs, and decide what actually made business sense. My job was conducting this AI orchestra into coherent strategy that I could stake my reputation on.”

The manager’s skepticism melted away. This wasn’t the simple question-and-answer process she’d imagined.

Saying you “used AI” is like saying you “drew a map.” You don’t know if someone used a basic template or meticulously charted the area, land, and oceans. Both might produce impressive 30-page reports, but only one has real depth and value.

Don’t try sailing through a storm with a pretty fake map and end up a castaway...

03/06/2025

Last week, I found myself as a guest of a community project in central Portugal for what I call a “Think Week”. Stepping away from the daily hustle to get quiet, do some physical work, and gain real clarity on life and work.

Not a true retreat. Not completely off work or offline. But making space and energy for the strategic. It’s like that moment I often talk about with clients: the open water swimmer who pauses, lifts their head, and checks if they’re still swimming in the right direction. This week was my “head up” moment.

Life had been moving at an intense pace, and I needed space for reflection and some intentional “not-thinking.” So there I was at this farmhouse-like setting, sharing meals and daily activities with international volunteers, stacking firewood that became moving meditation, taking long walks among olive trees. These wise ancient trees became excellent thinking partners.

I uncovered current stressors, de-stressors, and sources of joy. I also worked on balancing selflessness and service with necessary self-care, and came up with a business insight or two. As someone who advocates for and coaches sustainable performance, I was reminded that I need to lean further into it myself.

Sometimes the most strategic thing we can do is step away from what’s urgent to reconnect with what’s essential. To slow down from AI speed to Human speed. It’s incredible what intentional space, being in nature, and connecting with straightforward, uncomplicated humanity can do.

Back to work… :)

28/04/2025

In all seriousness, it’s genuinely impressive the impact one can have with these tools in hand. Typically, within a few hours - mind you, this is not just a casual AI chat - an interested, invested, and persistent systems thinker working alongside a reasoning AI model and deep research can surface valuable decision-making insights across a wide spectrum of categories, from evaluating business strategies and investments, to best approaches to refinance small business debt, to managing obscure health conditions for older adults, and beyond.
As of now this is very much a non-scalable, non-agentic (yes, you can laugh…), high-touch approach that can deliver personalized and sometimes life changing insights and decision making knowledge to people who otherwise would simply never encounter it. Often, the scarcity-centric design of mass services would never allow for the nuances of their situation or it would be prohibitively expensive for it even to be a commercial offering that made sense.
The tech will continue evolving, making it easier and easier to deliver these kinds of insights. The bigger question is how to make this type of use case viable. Ultimately, it might take a deliberate tech-for-good or social impact approach to put these capabilities in a ready to use format directly into the hands of the people who need them most.
Or maybe this is one area us good old Humans continue to have their value add…

27/04/2025

In all seriousness, it’s genuinely impressive the impact one can have with these tools in hand. Typically, within a few hours - mind you, this is not just a casual AI chat - an interested, invested, and persistent systems thinker working alongside a reasoning AI model and deep research can surface valuable decision-making insights across a wide spectrum of categories, from evaluating business strategies and investments, to best approaches to refinance small business debt, to managing obscure health conditions for older adults, and beyond.
As of now this is very much a non-scalable, non-agentic (yes, you can laugh…), high-touch approach that can deliver personalized and sometimes life changing insights and decision making knowledge to people who otherwise would simply never encounter it. Often, the scarcity-centric design of mass services would never allow for the nuances of their situation or it would be prohibitively expensive for it even to be a commercial offering that made sense.
The tech will continue evolving, making it easier and easier to deliver these kinds of insights. The bigger question is how to make this type of use case viable. Ultimately, it might take a deliberate tech-for-good or social impact approach to put these capabilities in a ready to use format directly into the hands of the people who need them most.

31/05/2024