Every CEO has a version of the same recurring conversation. The CIO presents a roadmap that runs into hundreds of crores. The CFO asks what the return looks like. Someone mentions AI. Someone else mentions technical debt. And underneath all of it sits a question that almost no one in the room can answer with real conviction — are we spending the right amount, on the right things, in the right way?
This series is an attempt to answer that question — not as a survey of frameworks, but as a working theory of how to think about technology investment in the AI era, distilled to twenty-four principles across three essays. The first is about the mindset. The second is about returns and execution. The third is about strategy itself. Each builds on the previous one.
Written for senior leaders who have noticed that the cost of getting this wrong has gone up — and that the firms quietly pulling away are the ones whose CEOs have changed how they think about this category of decision.