AI is going to change how your organization works. Getting ahead of it is the opportunity of the decade.
Presage gives you an independent read on where that change lands in your own operation, how to bring your people through it, and how to tell whether it's working. Nothing to sell but judgment.
The hard part to change isn't the technology.
It's your people, your roles, and the work itself. That's where initiatives stall, and it's the part I work on.
AI is changing something deeper than the last two waves did: who does the first draft of the work. Your organization won't be building AI. It will be adapting to it - and adaptation is the discipline I've practiced for thirty years.
Presage is the advisory practice of Robert Arena.
Where leaders usually start.
Readiness and Strategy
You're being told AI can do everything. You need to know what it can do in your operation, and what to do first.
An assessment and a roadmap ranked by evidence, honest enough to include the options I'd advise against - and when the roadmap says buy, RFP support from your side of the table.
I've run procurements as the buyer and answered them for a living, and I take nothing from vendors.
Adoption and Change Leadership
The technology works. The rollout stalls - unclear ownership, staff who weren't ready, workflows redesigned on paper but not in practice.
A change plan built on what independent research has validated, with the support, communication, and measurement that carries people across.
I've led technology adoption across teams of hundreds of instructional staff and programs serving more than 20,000 users, through growth, acquisition integration, and a pandemic that doubled demand overnight.
Evidence and Evaluation
A pilot is running, and nobody can say how you'll know it worked.
Pilots with success criteria set in advance, honest go/no-go points, and measurement built on independently validated instruments, not vendor benchmarks.
At Johns Hopkins CTY there was no systematic measurement of program quality when I arrived, so I built the surveys, the data, and the feedback loop that decisions ran on afterward.
Twice before, at scale.
I helped build the Internet wave in the 1990s. I led a national education company's adaptation to the mobile transition - remaking content, production, and the skills of the teams behind them for a world of tablets and phones. I ran an 850-person remote operation through the cloud and remote-work shift. What I said at the time is on the record.
See the recordThe Internet
Mobile, cloud, and remote work
AI
The Internet, 1995 - 2005. Mobile, cloud, and remote work, 2005 - 2020. AI, 2020 - today.
Enthusiasm that shows its work.
Every recommendation I make carries its reasoning, its evidence, and its failure modes. If the honest answer is "not yet" or "not this," you'll hear that too - that candor is what makes the excitement trustworthy. Some of that work is public, at The Participant Observer, where you can check the reasoning as well as the conclusions.
Read The Participant Observer