Opinion: Brad Gurrie Chief AI Officer, Digitial Frontier Partners
In my work with leadership teams, I’m seeing the same pattern we’ve seen in every boom.
Then: towns sprang up overnight. A few prospectors struck gold. The lasting value flowed to those who built the railways and services that scaled.
Now: unstructured “AI” everywhere. Credit-card tools. Shadow AI. Instant productivity… and little control.
ChatGPT. Claude. Copilot. Every team experimenting. Few asking: Who owns this? Where’s the risk? What happens when it scales?
The real winners won’t be first-movers on consumer tools. They’ll be the operators who build the AI Operating Model — the enterprise “rail”:
- Governance you can run, not shelf-ware policy.
- Secure platforms over sandboxes.
- Scalable delivery instead of one-off pilots.
- Clear strategy tied to measurable outcomes.
It’s not as flashy as a prompt demo. But it compounds: controlled, auditable, strategically aligned AI that lifts performance across the whole organisation.
The gold rush is on. Prospectors won’t win. Infrastructure builders will.
Which side are you building for — tools, or the rail?