A newsletter by Phoebe A. Bryant

AI is already changing how your company runs. Most leaders find out after the fact.

Model Behavior is for the executives running mid-market companies who have to turn AI into an operating decision, and then live with it on Monday morning.

The Audience

You run a company big enough to have real systems and small enough that nobody is coming to rebuild them for you. Your board wants an AI answer. Your vendors pitch it at every renewal. Half your team is already using tools you never approved.

Someone has to sort the hype from the leverage and decide what actually changes in how work gets done. If that someone is you, this is written for you.

What Model Behavior covers

AI keeps taking over things people used to hold. Every issue comes back to one of four of them, and to what your organization decides to do about it.

Judgment

What AI leaves out
Why judgment is changing
The future judgment risk
Where humans belong
Where AI agents belong

Authority

How AI authority is changing permission
Who should be accountable for AI
Why question authority now more than ever

Organizational design

How organizational debt is hiding behind every AI shortcut
New organizational design scenarios

Capability

Where junior people learn in the AI era
How capability is shifting with AI
What capabilities are becoming more valuable

Every issue ends with one question

Question for the Boardroom

I close each Model Behavior with a Question for the Boardroom. I don't hand you an answer, because your operating model isn't anyone else's. I hand you the question your leadership team should be able to answer about its own company, and probably can't yet. Bring it to your next meeting and see who speaks first.

Founder and Principal

I'm Phoebe A. Bryant. I've spent 25 years inside cross-border IT operations and enterprise programs, the part of the company where strategy either turns into working systems or quietly dies in a steering committee. I've sat with executives in North America, APAC, EMEA and China while they made exactly the calls this newsletter is about.

I hold a DBA from Temple University's Fox School of Business, where my research looked at how organizations behave under data breach fatigue. I'm also the author of Start Without Permission. Model Behavior is where I write about the operating model questions most AI coverage skips.

Stop finding out in the post-mortem.

New issues land every Monday. Read the next one before your next vendor meeting.