Deciding whether to build
The year generative AI stops being a watch item and becomes a question asked in meetings, usually badly. And the year my place in those meetings changed.
Two shifts in the same year. Generative AI arrives in committees, where I am asked less to make it work than to say whether it should be used. And the frame I work from shifts. Both push towards the same reading: books that teach informing a decision rather than executing an instruction.
The brevity is the argument: it delivers a survey you actually finish, which beats an abandoned treatise. Enough to know what you will not know without help.
A lesson in method more than in economics: what can be claimed about an intervention, and at what experimental cost. The transfer to business is immediate and almost never made.
The book furthest from the trade and the most useful of the year. Its thesis, that ancient philosophy was a daily exercise before it was a corpus, transposes without effort to a trade practised more than it is known.