Here’s the dirty little secret about AI in business: most of us aren’t ready for it. I mean ready — ready. And seeing this in writing, I’m not even sure it’s a secret.

It’s more like a feel-good mantra we repeat ourselves to pretend we’re all about to hitch a ride on that rocket OpenAI is building in search of AGI. A mantra that assures us it’s okay if the details haven’t been ironed out—we’ll sort them on the way to this fantastic destination.

Everyone’s drooling over the latest AI tool, hyping “the next big thing,” and rushing to slap a chatbot on their website, but no one wants to admit the truth. We’re building houses on dunes. Startups and scale-ups are throwing money at AI solutions without figuring out how to work as a team. It’s like buying a Ferrari when you don’t know how to drive stick. (I’m still looking for the right analogy here…)

I’ve spent the last decade watching this cycle of hype and heartbreak, and it’s exhausting. So, for the last eighteen months, I thought of something different.

I call it Paradigm, and it’s not here to coddle you or sell fairy tales about “tech unicorns.” It’s a hard reset — an honest conversation about foundations designed to do one thing: help organisations to collaborate at the human level before they drown in AI-driven hype.

Collaboration in tech is broken, especially in SMBs and large orgs. People are swimming in tools that promise seamless teamwork — Slack, Asana, Trello, Notion; take your pick. Yet, misalignment, inefficiency, and burnout are rampant. Why? Because you can’t slap a bandaid on a broken bone. No amount of shiny tech will fix the fact that most teams don’t know how to communicate, align on strategies, or even agree on what the hell they’re building.
I thought about bringing up the proverbial table here, but let’s not muddy the point with politics and drama.

So here we are at the end of 2024, with CEOs shovelling cash into AI projects while their teams drown in miscommunication and confusion. AI doesn’t fix this; it amplifies it.

Enter Paradigm, a concept with two manifestations:


Paradigm Foundations: Four workshops designed to strip everything back to basics. No fluff, no “innovation theatre.” We sit down and work on the blocks that build robust foundations: team alignment, product relevance, brand identity, and market strategy. There is no “innovation dress-up” here — just the actual work that sets you up to use AI effectively down the road.


Paradigm StageOne: A digital toolset born in the Cloud, built for humans. It’s not here to replace collaboration but to make it possible. Imagine a workspace where everything your organisation needs is in one place: strategy, assets, tools, and real-time insights. No more chasing down data or holding five meetings to get everyone up to speed. It’s streamlined, bright, and built on simplicity, transparency, and accountability.

Let’s zoom out for a second. Human Intelligence has been the bedrock of our progress for millennia, evolving from creativity, emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, adaptability, and contextual understanding. These qualities made humans the ultimate apex, able to conquer and reshape the world in ways no other species could.

Then came, well, we invented Synthetic Intelligence. We gained supercharged processing power, pattern recognition, scalability, predictive capabilities, and automation with it. In other words, the ability to achieve in seconds what would take a team of humans days, weeks, or years. Synthetic Intelligence wasn’t meant to compete with us but to enhance our natural strengths. And in this current era — the age of Hybrid Intelligence — we’re standing at a crossroads.

Hybrid Intelligence is where human creativity meets machine efficiency. We’re seeing the dawn of what could be our most powerful symbiosis yet: creative innovation, adaptive learning, and enhanced decision-making — all driven by a blend of human intuition and synthetic insight. And this is where we are right now, on the road to AGI. A marker on a dotted line that stretches ahead beyond just smarter tools to a fully realised Artificial General Intelligence.

The search for AGI is expensive and ambitious, and if poorly managed, it could destroy everything good about synthetic intelligence. That’s why we need a foundation for collaboration rooted in human intelligence before we proceed further down this road. We must ask ourselves: Are we building a future where AI empowers us, or are we setting ourselves up for a future where we’re scrambling to keep up with our creations?

The idea is simple, but no one wants to hear it: We must get our human foundations right before we worship AI. We can’t expect AI to “collaborate” with us if we, the humanoids, don’t even know how to collaborate with each other. Hybrid Intelligence — the mix of human and synthetic smarts — can’t happen in a vacuum of dysfunction.

So, let’s slow the hype cycle. Let’s avoid looking for shortcuts for a while and work with any available tools on foundations. Let’s fix the basics.

In its current incarnations, Paradigm isn’t some quick-fix, Insta-ready solution. It’s a call to arms, a blueprint to build something real, something that’ll last beyond the next trend. If you’re serious about building a company that won’t collapse with the next market shift, get your team aligned, your product solid, your brand nailed down, and your market in view.

If you’re in this for the long haul, here’s my challenge: Press pause on shiny tech and buzzwords and focus on the basics for a while. It will pay off later, I promise.

*The tweepadoc is an elephant, according to Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, in the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory".