Five steps, in the order most clients take them
Every one of these ends with something written that a board can hold you to: which decisions the machines may make, who can stop each one, and how you would know if it went wrong. That is what you are buying: control you can show, rather than advice you have heard.
The Executive Read. A short anonymous survey of your executive team before anything else happens. What they can no longer do unaided, who would notice if a system were wrong, how often anyone has overridden one, and what would still be possible if it stopped. Bought on its own, and the cheapest way to find out whether there is anything here worth your time. How it works.
A second opinion on your AI strategy. Send me the strategy you have built and two working days later you have an independent written view: the assumptions I would challenge, the decisions that lack a clear owner, and the three things I would put back in front of the executive team. A fixed fee, agreed before you send anything, and most are four figures. I sign your NDA first if you want one. Send it to rahim@thesuperskills.com.
Rules Before Tools. One day with the executive team. You leave with the organisation’s rules written in the room’s own words: the decisions AI may inform, recommend and execute, and the ones it may never own. Ask about a date.
The Drift versus Design review. Across a function or the whole organisation. A written view of where you are designing the relationship between your people and these systems, and where you are drifting into one. Four steps: diagnose, map, design, commit. The instrument.
Standing advisor. Monthly. The trusted second opinion as the decisions arrive, and a written brief each month on what has changed and what it means for you. A handful at a time, never more. How it works.
For boards: a briefing, a written view on one decision, or a non-voting seat held over a period. Board advisory
Assignments are scoped one at a time, and most are five-figure. Retainers are monthly, and I take on no more than three or four at once.
The five named instruments behind all of this, in the order they are used, are at the instruments. All five are published in full and none of them needs me to run it.
Rules before tools
The argument was set out in Rules Before Tools in August 2025: four layers, ten rules, and the instruction to write the rules before another tool is bought, because tools slot into a system that has been designed and fall out of one that has not. A year on, McKinsey’s survey of 1,491 organisations found the two things most associated with profit from generative AI were the chief executive owning the rules and the redesign of workflows, held by 28 and 21 per cent.
An independent second opinion on the strategy you have built
Send me your AI strategy. I sell no software, take no vendor’s money and will not build anything, so nothing in the read depends on what you decide.
The read takes two working days for a fixed fee, as above. It is private, and it ends with a list rather than a proposal. Send it to rahim@thesuperskills.com.
If it is urgent, send your mobile number and how soon you need a reply: within the hour, within six hours, or today. Same address, subject line “Please call me”, and I will call or WhatsApp you in UK working hours.
The Rules Before Tools session
A day with the chief executive and the executive team, applying the ten rules to this organisation. The morning maps the decisions the organisation makes and marks each one: the machine may inform, recommend or execute, or it may never own it. The afternoon puts a name against each, decides what the organisation keeps practising unaided so that somebody can still tell when the machine is wrong, and settles how the disagreement rate will be measured.
The output is the rules, written in the executive team’s own words, which a board can then hold the executive to.
That written list is the organisation’s custody list: what you have decided not to delegate, settled before the tools arrive. Ask for it by name and you will know whether a session will produce one.
I have done this job
I am not an AI engineer. I have run, grown, bought and advised businesses with AI in them: growing a business by putting AI to work across it, leading the acquisition of an AI company and directing it afterwards, scaling a business whose thesis rested on what AI could do with its data, and advising early-stage AI-first companies I cannot name. The fuller record is at AI adviser to CEOs and boards.
What sits outside it
No Copilot rollout, no AI roadmap, no vendor selection, no model choice, no agent deployment, no data architecture. Those are real disciplines, done well by firms built for them. The rules make them easier to buy well, which is the reason they come first.
On stage at, on air and in print
- Echo360
- EdtechX
- CIPD Festival of Work
- London Tech Week
- Korn Ferry
- BehSci Meets AI
- Imperial College
- Dubai Arbitration Week
- The Oystercatchers Club
- BBC Radio 5 Live
- BBC World Service
- The New York Observer
- Entrepreneur
- The European Business Review
- CEOWORLD
- Arab News
A regular commentator on AI for the BBC, and endorsements from Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School, co-author of Competing in the Age of AI; Sherry Coutu CBE, non-executive director; and Rudy Karsan, formerly chief executive of Kenexa, among others. The full record is on the media page and the speaking record.
