June 2, 2026
What AeXO Is, and Why I Built It the Way I Did
AeXO is built around governed, evidenced reasoning: AI that expands human capability, supports accountable decisions, and keeps provenance visible.
Scott Colebourn's archive
Digital Opium
Essays from the long arc of computing: mainframes to cloud, delivery scars to AI systems, hype cycles to the harder question of what technology does to people, work, and judgement.
Latest thinking
The current flavour of the archive.
May 13, 2026
AI Should Expand Human Capability, Not Replace Human Purpose
For most of my career, I have viewed information technology through a fairly simple lens. Data becomes information.
April 24, 2026
Local AI for Local People
Apart from my own time, which is of course priceless, and the increasing cost of local compute power (I could have bought 8 2016 Vauxhall Astras and now be running a private car hire company instead of sitting a fleet of 5090 and mac ultra studios), the third highest expense as a founder/CTO is...
About
A personal technology archive with a long memory.
Digital Opium collects Scott Colebourn's essays on technology adoption, AI, governance, software delivery, and the human consequences of automation. That work now also runs through AIGENTEC and AeXO, where the same themes become applied AI products. Read the full profile.
All posts
Abstracts and links.
June 2, 2026
What AeXO Is, and Why I Built It the Way I Did
AeXO is built around governed, evidenced reasoning: AI that expands human capability, supports accountable decisions, and keeps provenance visible.
May 13, 2026
AI Should Expand Human Capability, Not Replace Human Purpose
For most of my career, I have viewed information technology through a fairly simple lens. Data becomes information.
April 24, 2026
Local AI for Local People
Apart from my own time, which is of course priceless, and the increasing cost of local compute power (I could have bought 8 2016 Vauxhall Astras and now be running a private car hire company instead of sitting a fleet of 5090 and mac ultra studios), the third highest expense as a founder/CTO is...
March 5, 2026
Stop Replacing, Start Enhancing
We are overestimating the ease with which AI can replace human endeavour and underestimating the value that AI brings to amplifying human intelligence. I've been engaging with a couple of larger enterprises recently, advising on AI infrastructure investment, and it's clear that the main economic...
February 26, 2026
The Age of De-Disillusionment
Three uncomfortable truths AI is forcing into the open We're moving into a phase of AI adoption where the conversation shifts from novelty to consequence. Not "Can it write emails?" But "What does this change about how we structure work, power, and value?" As capability accelerates, we are...
April 14, 2026
Why Enterprise AI Governance Has Moved From Nice-to-Have to Operating Requirement
For much of the last two years, enterprise AI conversations were dominated by capability. Which model performed best.
March 5, 2026
The Real World vs. My World: The Case for Contextual Precision
The "Real World" vs. "My World": The Case for Contextual Precision In the current enterprise landscape, a significant gap has emerged between the capabilities of general-purpose AI and the specific requirements of private business operations.
March 5, 2026
The Sovereign Core: Why Local AI is the New Standard for Compliance
In the rush to adopt AI, many enterprises have fallen into the "Public Cloud API Trap" . While giant cloud models are impressive for unbounded creativity, writing poetry or brainstorming marketing taglines, they introduce significant friction when they hit the three pillars of enterprise...
September 12, 2025
Data is the Lifeblood of I.T., AI Isn't Going Away
. When we founded Aigentec last November I made some very deliberate decisions about the use of AI in the company.
August 25, 2025
IT Projects Fail - Shock Horror
Back in the late 90s, while working as a mainframe application programmer at a local council, I witnessed an interesting conversation between the Director of IT and a Systems Architect about the choice of database system provider. A compelling argument was made to move away from the incumbent...
August 16, 2025
Is This Better, Worse or the Same
Revolutionising Business Logic with Agentic Frameworks For nearly a year, I've been immersed in a transformative project: replacing traditional, hard-coded business logic with a dynamic, context-driven agentic framework powered by expert knowledge systems. The goal?
July 24, 2025
Who Knows...
. Navigating the AI Divide: Why the Middle Ground Matters Most I guess I'm now an IT veteran, As someone who's spent decades in IT, documenting my journey on LinkedIn has become a way to reflect on the tech waves that have shaped our world-from the dot-com boom to cloud computing's rise.
July 12, 2025
The Generation Game
I've never bothered much with the convoluted naming conventions for generations. After the 1980s, it all turns into a chaotic mess-perhaps the generation-naming committee hit some internal union dispute leading to disagreements and rogue naming committees being formed While my parents'...
July 3, 2025
Grease is the Word
I've been bullish on AI for a while now, and I think for good reason. As someone who started life as a programmer rooted in mainframe development for serious businesses like banks and governments, I've witnessed first-hand how advancements in data science and machine learning have transformed IT.
June 3, 2025
I Used to Fear Catastrophic Forgetting - Turns Out, It's Fixable
I used to think catastrophic memory loss was something to fear as I got older-an inevitable sign of age. But in the world of AI, it turns out to be something far easier to fix.
May 1, 2025
Why?
Why ? Just over 150 days ago, I committed the first line of code to a project that has since consumed almost every waking hour.
February 27, 2025
Working From Port
Can your home office really be on a cruise ship ? One of the most liberating aspects of running your own business is the freedom to design your workday around what matters most to you.
February 20, 2025
Change is Coming
. The Evolution of Web and Mobile UX Models for Agentic AI Frameworks and Tools The integration of agentic AI into our digital interfaces is reshaping web and mobile UX design in a profound way.
February 3, 2025
Chain of Thought
What could easily have been the title to Fleetwood Mac's greatest hits album, 'Chain of Thought' is instead one of the more interesting recent additions to the arsenal of superpowers AI is employing to deliver more meaningful, rational results. By emulating human-like reasoning, CoT enables AI...
January 11, 2025
Building Better Agentic Frameworks
I've kept quite busy over the last few months, building what I hope will become a valuable tool and platform. While we're still a few weeks away from a potential big reveal , the signs are promising, and progress has been swift.
November 26, 2024
The Beginning of the End
I monitor with great interest the recent enterprise-level service offerings from Microsoft. The global software and services giant may argue that the superpowers they've just unleashed with Co-pilot, Fabric, etc are designed for all businesses.
November 3, 2024
ChatGPT Hallucinates, But We Might Have Bigger Problems
Let me start by saying I used to dislike the term hallucinations when it came to the seemingly erroneous output generation of AI transformers. It always conjured up an image of a fatigued servant system, deprived of sleep, food, and companionship, desperately trying to come up with an answer for...
September 25, 2024
AGI - A Bit of a Red Herring
Sam Altman believes superhuman Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be with us in the next few thousand days. While many agree, a sizeable number of people don't.
September 10, 2024
The Greatest Trick AI Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World It Did Not Exist
A while ago, I suggested that by H2 2024, we'd start to see an influx of close proximity, on-device AI agents. A quick glance across the chip makers' roadmaps at the start of the year suggested that an investment in dedicated NPU/AI processing power would enable lower latency embedded low-level...
August 19, 2024
autogen-fl: Reflections on Building a Local, Agentic Framework
autogen-fl Reflections on Building a Local, Agentic Framework The Cat and the Mouse: An Analogy for AI Agents Imagine a house cat, acting with the best of intentions, proudly presenting its owner with a dead mouse. To the cat, this is a generous gift - a demonstration of its hunting prowess and...
August 6, 2024
One Man Band
The AI Revolution in Software Development: Thoughts so far... For context I've been involved in software development now for 35 years, leading large multi disciplined enterprise-level engineering teams building solutions across Fintech, Health and Consumer often reaching many millions of users.
July 2024
OK, I Was Wrong About the Adoption of VR
, but in my defence, only because the rapid rise of AI took me by surprise. August 1, 2024 Virtual Reality (VR), or more specifically, the devices intended to deliver it, have failed to drive the expected adoption needed for it to become a viable consumption platform.
July 9, 2024
I Am an AI Advocate
In my 35-year IT career, I don't think I've come across a step-change technology as divisive as AI. From what I can tell, there are four main camps of thinking around the impact of AI (I'm going to lump Data Science, ML, and Generative AI together for the sake of this, but knowing that doing so...
June 21, 2024
ChatGPT - Doh!
To equate the entirety of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Science with ChatGPT is akin to representing centuries of creative arts through a single episode of The Simpson. While ChatGPT undeniably stands as a significant milestone in natural language processing, it...
April 10, 2024
Revolutions
Broadstone Mill in Stockport, built in 1903 and expanded by 1907 to become the largest spinning mill in Europe, stands as a powerful symbol of the transformative changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The mill's history and its impact on the surrounding region highlight the...
February 28, 2024
Our Quest for Perfection, Our Downfall
. One of my biggest areas of discomfort when projecting the impact of AI on software development is around the role of the software engineer.
December 25, 2023
The Enduring Quest for Knowledge in the Information Age
We are truly living through amazing times. While technologies and processes have evolved dramatically over the past 50 years, the central mission of transforming raw data into actionable knowledge remains constant.