Mind the Gap
Who's It For
Positioning note — internal reference · four concentric rings
The one-line answer
For the serious user of AI who has already felt the gap — the drift, the confident wrong answer, the odd foible — and started asking why it happens, where it comes from, and why they can’t quite smooth it away.
Ring one — the serious user (the core reader)
Not developers. Not the people building the models. The rest of us — the community of users who don’t code, who have got to a serious or semi-serious level of use, or who know they are about to. Their company has gone in this direction, or is going, and they simply know they need to get there.
Above all, this reader has spotted the gap for themselves. They have watched the system drift mid-conversation. They have caught it hallucinating. They have noticed its foibles and asked the questions this book exists to answer: why is it doing that, where is it coming from, and why can’t I remove it? They arrive already holding the question. The book gives them the instrument to read it.
Ring two — the C-suite, and the people they answer to
Very senior people in very big, very important companies — facing very serious questions about their AI set-up. The shape of the question is now concrete: “We have seventy thousand AI users inside this business. What is this thing actually doing?” Understanding that has become critically imperative — to senior leaders, to their direct reports, and to the people the leaders themselves report to: the board, and the investment community.
They are being asked to commit enormous sums — to AI, and to AI-related companies. They walk into rooms and are overwhelmed with technical jargon, vendor wisdom, and noise. This book cuts straight through that. What the thing is actually doing under the bonnet, in words and language they can understand, from someone who can read both the technology and the behaviour it produces. For this reader the book is not curiosity. It is due diligence.
Ring three — the therapy, coaching and mental-welfare community
This book is covered in the fingerprints and footprints of a working life. Twenty years in therapy and coaching. Methods developed, ideas evolved, practices polished over many hundreds of hours with clients facing trauma, difficulty, grief, loss, and emotional pain of every kind.
That community will recognise its own discipline turned onto a new object — and will find insight here for their practice and for their clients. The instrument the book describes is the one they already hold; the book shows them it reads the machine too.
Ring four — friends, family, and people who know me
Last, and named plainly: the people who know the author and will read it because he wrote it. No inflation. They are part of who it is for.
Who it is NOT for
• Developers and engineers wanting the build — this is about behaviour, not code. The machinery is explained only as far as it lights up the behaviour.
• Readers wanting a prompts-and-tools how-to — technique is not the subject.
• Readers wanting AI-utopia or AI-apocalypse — the book refuses both.
Why this author
Forty years of paying attention to human behaviour — factory floor, boardroom, therapy room — and four of paying attention to AI. Senior commercial leadership and a clinical practice, in the same person. A behavioural practitioner writing about a machine, not a technologist writing about people. He has sat in the C-suite’s seats and in the therapist’s chair, and survived the thing that calibrates the rest. That intersection is the book’s authority and its difference.
The promise, in one sentence
By the end, you will not use AI less — you will use it with your eyes open, reading the gap the way the author has spent a working life learning to read it.