A productive September, and some news to lead with. Simple has been named in the Sifted 100: Nordics & Benelux, the list that tracks the region's fastest-growing companies. The nod comes from Sifted, part of the Financial Times, and it lands well as we push to change how family offices actually operate rather than just talk about it.
We also ran our first Simplifying AI for Family Offices workshop, in Zurich, hosted by Oslo Family Office. It told us plenty. Offices can see the efficiency on the table. They also have sharp, practical questions about what it costs to implement and how to structure it, which is exactly the right instinct.
Read the fine print
Much of the month's noise came from an MIT report claiming 95% of AI projects fail. A big, quotable number, and worth reading twice before you repeat it.
The study looked at 52 executives and some public earnings reports, and counted any initiative not tied directly to revenue growth as a failure. By that definition a lot of genuinely useful work gets filed under "failed", which tells you more about the yardstick than the projects.
The two-hour tax
The more useful finding sat at desk level, away from the headline. A Harvard Business Review study of 11,250 US workers found that 40% had received what the researchers call AI work slop: low-quality AI output that a human then has to stop and fix. Each incident eats roughly two hours. Multiply that across a team and you have a cost that never shows up on any dashboard, because nobody logs "spent the morning correcting the robot".
There is a real distinction hiding in that number. Task-focused teams tend to pile up slop, because they point AI at the nearest job and hope. Outcome-focused teams use it for the thinking, the planning, the ugly first draft, and keep a human hand on anything that carries weight. The models are strong. The hard part was never the technology. It is the implementation: aim at outcomes rather than tasks, build in a quality check, and treat AI as an amplifier of judgement, not a substitute for it.
Our annual Technology & Software Report is in its final stages, with an October release. We are also growing the engineering team and bringing new talent onto advisory, which should tell you where we think this is going.