My article Redesigning the Operating Model: Shifting from AI Tool Rollouts to Workflow Integration appeared on CXOToday two days ago. Here’s how it happened.
29 May 2026: Palash mailed me that we have an “Email interaction opportunity with Digital Terminal” and they shared six questions:
- What are the key reasons behind this “last-mile problem” in scaling AI to production?
- While much of the focus is on models and tools, how critical are content readiness and data quality in determining whether AI delivers real business value?
- (… and so on.)
He’d already drafted the responses and “sharing below the link for your feedback and approval.”
A few hours later I replied, saying I’d rather write my own article. Here it is (Markdown):
You’re welcome to share mine with my name. Or you can share the earlier version with anyone else’s name - not mine. Either option works for me.
Palash preferred my version and shared it.
24 Sep 2026: 12 weeks later, the article appears, and with a few differences - 🟢 good and 🔴 bad. They:
-
🟢 Added a title and a photo - edited from my speaker photo to remove shadows and wear a jacket in an office. (The original was at PyCon 2025 and I was wearing a T-shirt).
-
🟢 Changed
--and-to em-dashes:—; also the double quotes"to smart quotes“and”; single quotes'to apostrophes’(which is interesting because I told my agent to remove those to avoid it sounding agent-y). -
🔴 But failed to fix my punctuation. For example, a missing full-stop in
... fundamentally redesigned workflows In a separate workplace report... -
🔴 Also added paragraph breaks mid-sentence. This happened thrice. For example, here’s one broken sentence:
High risk actions need approval. -
🟢 Removed a duplicate question and my
Anand:quote prefixes. -
🟡 But prefixed a two paragraph summary that’s more pompous and jargon-y than me.
-
🔴 Removed every hyperlink and changed it into underlined text that looks hyperlinked but isn’t. My links were to McKinsey, NIST, and arXiv. None are clickable.
- The underlining is sometimes unbalanced. In
(McKinsey & Company), the opening paranthesis isn’t underlined, but the closing is. - The links are sometimes split into multiple underlined segments.
A Survey ofandData Agentsare two separated underlined blocks - though it used to be one link.
- The underlining is sometimes unbalanced. In
-
🔴 Added poor / unsemantic HTML markup. All six interview questions are encoded as
<h6>headings directly under the article, not H2/H3. There is also a stray final<p> </p>after the article.
On the margin, this may be more damage than good. “Editorial slop”, I guess.
PS: I make more mistakes than any editor and hate being called out. But I don’t mind. I’m a happy hypocrite.
PPS: I’m not moralizing “Humans generate slop too, so don’t blame AI”, etc. I’m more mature for that. I’m just saying, “Hee hee, you made a boo-boo 🙂”.