Almost forty years ago, I was writing assembler on a Commodore 64.

Today, I sit in C-suites debating whether AI agents should be allowed to occupy seats my colleagues once held.

The trajectory between those two points is my career — decades across software development (I started late 80s with the best book for software development having over 1200 pages!), infrastructure, and IT leadership in DACH and the Gulf. And I will admit something candidly: what has happened in the last two years in artificial intelligence and digital transformation feels almost Shakespearean — in pace, and in the scale of what is being rewritten.

I do not believe most organisations are ready. A week now compresses what used to be two years of strategic horizon. Every week, I find myself rewriting priorities and responsibilities — not out of restlessness, but because the ground itself is shifting. The most underappreciated shift, in my view, is this:

AI has redefined the basic unit of enterprise information.

Data and content used to be static — described, stored, retrieved. They are now resolved into a new artefact: the token. Tokens are orchestratable. They are generated, transformed, exchanged, signed, and attributed. The disciplines we built around data — data security, data protection, data management — already have a successor stack forming on the runway:

token security, token protection, token management.

Very few organisations have even begun to think about it. The questions I am asked in every C-suite discussion have become harder — and frankly, less glamorous than they were eighteen months ago:

  • Can our organisation actually absorb what AI can now do? I do not know yet.

  • Can we predict where we will be in three months — and convert AI outputs into commercial advantage by then? I do not know yet.

  • Do we really have to substitute our colleagues with AI agents, or is there a credible alternative? I do not know yet.

I know only one thing with certainty: If an organisation does not have an AI adoption framework and roadmap today, it will be left behind tomorrow.

Jensen Huang recently offered a useful frame. He described the AI economy as a five-layer stack: energy, chips & systems, infrastructure, models — and, on top of all of it, adoption. Adoption, he said, is the layer he is most concerned about.

I would draw the same line.

Three observations from inside the work:

1. The bottleneck has moved from the model to the operating model. The obstacle to scaled AI will not be the algorithm. It is data ownership, classification, lineage, and the access discipline that makes a model trustworthy enough for production. The foundations come first — identity, governance, classification — before any AI workload leaves the lab. Most enterprises I advise have AI ambitions that are years ahead of their data discipline.

2. The Gulf is outpacing continental Europe — and the gap is structural, not technological. The UAE has fewer veto points, a clearer top-down mandate, and a willingness to fund the unglamorous foundation: governance, identity, regulatory alignment, audit. Without that layer, what you have is a demo — not a system that survives contact with regulators, customers, or auditors.

3. AI is an operating model rewrite. It is not a workstream. At a German bank I worked with, it was the BaFin-aligned ITSM and information classification work that made the cloud and AI roadmap credible to the board — not the other way around. Treating AI as a project alongside ERP, CRM, or ITSM, Cybersecurity Defence Modernisation is one of the most expensive mistakes I see senior IT leaders make today.

The chip stack will be solved. The energy build-out will be solved. They have capital, competition, and national strategy behind them. The adoption stack is the CIO’s responsibility. And that is where the next decade of enterprise value will be created — or lost.

If you are rebuilding the foundational disciplines — identity, governance, classification, audit, and the emerging layer of token security — so that your organisation can truly absorb what AI can now do, I would be glad to compare notes.

#AI #DigitalTransformation #DataGovernance #TokenSecurity #CIO #IAM #UAE #Germany