The Jagged Frontier: Why AI Is Brilliant and Useless at Once, How Executives Make Decisions That Hold Up

Neither oracle nor toy. Decide accordingly.You are tired of being whipsawed. One week a headline swears AI will run your company by Friday; the next, a pundit calls the whole thing a bubble about to burst. Your board wants a number. Your team wants a mandate. And you are supposed to bet real capital, real jobs, and real reputation on a technology you keep being told is both inevitable and a fraud. Both stories are wrong, and both lead to expensive AI decisions.The Jagged Frontier hands leaders a third position: calibrated, evidence-based, and grounded in how AI actually works rather than how it is marketed. Because here is what neither camp tells you. The same model that drafts a flawless legal brief will invent three court cases that never existed, and sound just as confident citing all six. That gap, not raw capability, is where careers and capital are quietly lost.This book teaches you to read the gap. You will learn to tell where today's AI is genuinely superhuman from where it is dangerously clueless, why the leaderboards and demos you trust stopped meaning what they used to, and how to set reliance exactly where the evidence puts it, not where the swing pulls you.The payoff is judgment that survives the next hype cycle and the next obituary alike: a repeatable way to separate signal from theater and make AI decisions your future self will defend. It's the calm, no-jargon AI strategy guide for business leaders and boards who have to act, written by a peer who did the homework. Stop reacting to the swing. Decide from the edge.Read chapter one free with Look Inside.Part of the Lead, Govern & Apply AI series, in The Verifier's Library.