The Exec x AI desk
Practitioner AI guidance for the boardroom
Short, frank reads for the AI-sceptical executive: CFOs, CIOs, CISOs, general counsel and boards weighing AI risk. Scan a briefing, listen on the commute, then book a principal.
Look Out #4: Your Chatbot Is a Liability
$190 billion in shareholder value destroyed across 24 chatbot failures. The guardrails protect the vendor, not you.
By Khaled ShivjiListen 12 min
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How a GCC bank cleared its AI model review backlog in 30 days
A GCC bank cleared a 40-model AI review backlog in 30 days, fixed price, with a regulator-ready audit trail.
Khaled Shivji
Look Out #3: A Briefing on AI Agents, for Executives Who Prefer Facts, not Hype
Desktop AI agents are everywhere, and your employees already use one. The guardrails reflect the vendor's reputational risk, not your risk profile.
Khaled ShivjiListen 8 min
Look Out #2: Legal In London, Banned in Brussels: The AI Regulatory Arbitrage Problem
One AI system can be legal in London, banned in Singapore and a lawsuit in Brussels at once. Insurers are pulling cover and clients are pushing compliance risk onto you.
Khaled ShivjiListen 22 min
Exec x AI Serves the World's Most AI-Ready Markets
Of the top 30 most AI-ready nations, we cover 26. The markets adopting AI fastest face the most complex compliance and governance challenges.
Khaled Shivji
Look Out #1: A Quick Word on OpenClaw. And a Security Warning
Don't install OpenClaw on your laptop. Personal AI agents are a new attack vector, and recursive self-improvement is now a procurement question.
Khaled Shivji
Your AI assistant is about to get a promotion
An AI agent is a digital full-time employee: tireless, fast, and devoid of common sense. Manage your digital workforce with the same rigour as your human one.
Khaled ShivjiListen 8 min
The Unseen Horizon
AI trains on the digitised corpus and goes blind to everything that never fit a database. The risk is not power, it is misalignment.
Khaled ShivjiListen 5 min
Is AI Moving Too Fast?
An AI proof of concept is not a technology project, it is a political one. The winners are not the first movers, they are the smart movers.
Khaled ShivjiListen 7 min
Stop Treating Legal Like a Cost Centre: Agentic AI Is Ready to Deliver ROI
Legal is not a compliance burden, it is a performance multiplier. Agentic AI turns contracts, litigation and compliance into balance-sheet levers.
Khaled ShivjiListen 14 min
Your Biggest Competitor Just Launched Their AI Strategy
Your rival went public with their AI roadmap first. Holding the line may be the best strategic choice you make this year.
Khaled ShivjiListen 13 min
Prompt or do not prompt. There is no try.
A prompt is a set of instructions, not a search query. Master the five-element syntax and you lead AI agents instead of guessing with them.
Khaled ShivjiListen 10 min
Inside the AI Black Box
Proprietary frontier models are black boxes by design, and even open-source weights stay opaque. A robust responsible AI policy keeps humans accountable.
Khaled ShivjiListen 12 min
We're not Hallucinating, Anthropic got it right!
Gen AI confuses fluency with truth, and a single hallucinated citation can become enterprise risk. Anthropic's response: launch a model, then raise the alarm.
Khaled ShivjiListen 10 min
The Regulatory Vacuum: Why Class Actions Might Arrive Before the Government Does
Government regulation is still buffering, so lawyers and citizens are moving first. Build a minimum viable governance stack before the subpoena, not after.
Khaled ShivjiListen 8 min
The Weekly and resources
Reading lists, podcast round-ups and the weekly digest. Built to subscribe to.
🎧 Briefed by the Best: Executive Podcasts Discussing AI
Three executive AI podcasts, each takeaway mapped to one of McKinsey's eight agentic AI dimensions.
Khaled ShivjiListen 10 min
The Exec X AI 2025 Summer Reading List
Four books on AI, ethics and power that will recalibrate how you think about the future we are shaping.
Khaled ShivjiListen 6 min
AI Weekly Update - June 23rd, 2025
Apple faces a 900 billion dollar AI-disclosure suit, only 25 per cent of adopters hit their ROI, and boards are told to lead AI governance or watch value erode.
Khaled ShivjiListen 6 min