Leading IT - APAC Insights

There are genuine operational insights buried in the episode - the shift from 'short and fat' multi-year implementations to faster incremental delivery, the AIOps cost-blowout cautionary tale, and the Microsoft IQ taxonomy - but they are heavily diluted by extended banter about King's birthday, the Hamilton coronation anecdote, collective nouns for agents, and domain name jokes. The insight-to-filler ratio is poor for a 55-minute runtime.

“the old way of doing it were these kind of short and fat engagements where you might make millions of dollars or millions of pounds, millions of euro over a one to three year period and then you were done and you were going to go away for 10 years”

“there's an organization that my team was called in kind of on an emergency basis. Essentially what they did was they deployed some agents into production and they spiked almost US$150,000 of Azure consumption in 36 hours”

The Frontier Campus three-blueprint architecture and the 'Human Context Protocol' concept show genuine original framework-building, and the framing of embedded vs. extensible AI workloads on a spectrum is a cleaner model than most. However, the bulk of the episode is Microsoft ecosystem commentary - Power Platform dead-or-not discussions, Copilot adoption truisms - that circulates widely in this community.

“Blueprint C is offline and what it does is it prescribes an architecture for how to build and deploy AI, how to build and deploy agents that are powered by small language models and everything operating on a single device”

“if I can write a markdown file that provides guidance to Copilot or Claude and essentially gives that general purpose AI, that embedded AI a new skill, am I extending it or am I just telling it what to do?”

Andrew Welch is a legitimate practitioner - he runs a consultancy and a think tank, has been parachuted in on live AIOps emergencies, has worked on SAP implementations at scale, and is publishing original architectural frameworks. He is not a pure thought-leader; he has done the thing. The limitation is he operates as a Microsoft-orbit consultant-advisor rather than as an operator who has held an internal technology leadership role at scale.

“In 2007 there was a big merger of multiple rental car companies. And I remember being sort of socked away in a warehouse somewhere working on the SAP implementation for this new, newly minted mega rental car company”

“there's an organization that my team was called in kind of on an emergency basis. Essentially what they did was they deployed some agents into production and they spiked almost US$150,000 of Azure consumption in 36 hours because. And then they had no idea what the lineage of these things were”

The episode produces a handful of concrete anchors - the $150K Azure blowout in 36 hours, the 57% salary premium stat, the 73-page framework length, and the Frontier Campus paper's publication date - but the sourcing is thin (the 57% figure is attributed secondhand with no citation) and the majority of claims rely on vague constructions like 'we're seeing these technologies,' 'most financial services institutions,' and 'over the years.'

“they spiked almost US$150,000 of Azure consumption in 36 hours”

“there's research now that indicates that there's a 57% salary premium for individuals who demonstrate who are really good at integrating and weaving AI into their work”

The host does push back at a few meaningful moments - notably forcing the guest to give concrete examples on Power Platform rather than accepting 'it's not dead' - and Tom asks a useful clarifying question on the 57% stat. But the episode is bookended and interrupted by sustained mutual admiration, filler anecdotes, and softball setups, and neither host challenges the guest's self-referential framework promotion or the vague sourcing of key claims.

“But you haven't said why. You said it's not. But you haven't said how or why.”

“So let's flip it around to the customer side of the table.”