The Method
Richard reads what organisations put on the public record, and finds what they are not saying. What is missing is often the finding.
Reading the record
The evidence is already public. Companies file annual reports, publish governance documents, and speak on the record to their investors. Richard reads that material closely, and looks for the distance between what an organisation says it is doing with AI and what it can actually show.
The work uses no surveys and no interviews. Everything it rests on is already on the public record, so any finding can be traced back to its source and checked.
Often the finding is an absence. What a set of organisations does not say is harder to notice than what it does, and it tends to be the more telling of the two.
One finding
In a study of 22 large companies, he counted 404 public statements about adopting AI, and two about whether it had changed what the company could do.
The Reporting study, published at MKAI and on SSRN.
The wider set of studies, on how organisations describe AI, how they classify it in governance, and how they report its effects, is published in the open at MKAI, Richard's research programme.
MKAI
Richard founded MKAI in 2019 and chairs it as a research programme. The studies are published in the open, where they can be read in full. His book, The AI Gap, brings the research together, and is forthcoming from Kogan Page.