I advise the world's largest enterprises on frontier AI — how to evaluate it, where it's heading, and what it does to the people and organizations adopting it.
As a Senior Director, Analyst at Gartner, I lead our research on AI coding agents and the impact of AI on software engineering. I'm the lead author of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise AI Coding Agents, and I spend my year in 400+ conversations with CIOs, CTOs, and engineering leaders about how these tools change workflows, skills, team structures, and the daily work of thinking.
My research runs along two connected tracks:
The frontier itself: The transformative impact of agentic coding on software engineering, and how to reason clearly about AGI and machine consciousness.
What the frontier does to us: The impact of generative AI on human cognition, critical thinking, and agency. As AI takes on more of the cognitive work, the questions that matter most are about what we should preserve: judgment, understanding, the capacity to think for ourselves.
Before Gartner, I spent twelve years as an academic philosopher, with a PhD specializing in philosophy of mind (consciousness, cognition, and the relationship between language, thought, and perception). That training built a way of thinking: making fine distinctions, testing assumptions, distilling complex systems to their essence. It turns out to be exactly what this moment demands. The AI industry talks constantly about intelligence, reasoning, and agency — the very concepts philosophers have worked on for a very long time. When a technology purports to be intelligent, to reason, to understand, the conceptual questions become unavoidable. The only real choice is whether we address them well or badly.
What I am, fundamentally, is a philosopher. The question that has always driven me is a simple one: what is this, and what does it mean? These days I get to ask it about the most consequential technology of our time.
