3 days ago

The Trusted Advisor vs. The Vendor: Why the Distinction Defines Every Long-Term Technology Leadership Career

By Martijn Baecke

6 Min Read

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26September

The distinction between being perceived as a trusted advisor and being perceived as a vendor is the single most consequential positioning decision in a technology leadership career. Most people in technology leadership roles are closer to the vendor end of this spectrum than they realise, and the consequences compound over time.

3 weeks ago

Sovereign Cloud, AI Regulation and the European Digital Decade: A Field CTO’s Honest Assessment

By Martijn Baecke

7 Min Read

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11September

The European Digital Decade agenda is creating a regulatory and investment landscape that will shape enterprise technology strategy for years to come. The sovereign cloud debate, AI regulation, and digital infrastructure investment are converging in ways that require strategic clarity from European enterprise leaders.

1 month ago

Why Technology Transformations Fail: The Process and People Patterns I Have Seen Across 20 Years in EMEA

By Martijn Baecke

8 Min Read

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28August

Twenty years of enterprise technology transformation across EMEA produces a clear pattern library: the process failures that repeat regardless of the technology chosen, the people dynamics that defeat even well-resourced programmes, and the leadership behaviours that determine outcome more than the technology does.

1 month ago

The Next Infrastructure Shift: What Comes After Cloud-Native in the Age of AI Workloads

By Martijn Baecke

6 Min Read

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20August

Cloud-native infrastructure was the last major infrastructure paradigm shift. AI workloads are forcing the next one. Understanding what is changing, and what is not, is the architectural judgment that will define enterprise infrastructure strategy for the coming decade.

2 months ago

Agentic AI and the Token Multiplication Problem

By Martijn Baecke

5 Min Read

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14August

Multi-agent workflows multiply token consumption non-linearly — agents calling agents, re-planning, retrying. Without observability and governance in place first, scaling agentic AI is scaling an unmetered cost problem.

2 months ago

Who Owns the Token Budget? Governance and Chargeback for AI Cost

By Martijn Baecke

5 Min Read

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07August

IT owns the bill, business owns the usage — a split that breaks down for token spend specifically. Chargeback and showback models adapted from cloud FinOps, and what accountability actually needs to look like.

2 months ago

The Token Optimization Playbook: Architecture Decisions, Not Cost-Cutting Retrofits

By Martijn Baecke

5 Min Read

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31July

Model right-sizing, prompt and context engineering, caching, and retrieval design are cost levers as much as performance levers. Optimization has to be owned at design time, not applied after a bill shocks someone.

2 months ago

Token Consumption Observability: The Real-Time Visibility Enterprises Do Not Have

By Martijn Baecke

5 Min Read

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24July

Most enterprises cannot answer what they spent in tokens this week, on what, and whether it was worth it. Real-time token metering is an architecture decision made at design time, not a reporting problem solved after the fact.

2 months ago

Token Economics: The New Enterprise AI Cost Frontier

By Martijn Baecke

5 Min Read

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17July

Token cost is becoming the defining AI cost-control problem for enterprises, the way cloud spend was a decade ago. Most organisations have neither the real-time visibility nor the operating model to manage it. This is the conversation that needs to start now.

3 months ago

Domain Expertise Is the Foundation That Makes AI Work

By Martijn Baecke

5 Min Read

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05July

AI is a powerful execution engine. But the expertise required to know whether its output is right, where it will fail, and what to do about it remains irreducibly human. Domain knowledge is not a legacy requirement in the age of AI. It is the foundation that makes AI work.