ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
An AI-native strategy firmGlobal Advisors: a consulting leader in defining quantified strategy, decreasing uncertainty, improving decisions, achieving measureable results.
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consulting
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We are hiring experienced top-tier strategy consultants
Quantified Strategy
Decreased uncertainty, improved decisions
Global Advisors is a leader in defining quantified strategies, decreasing uncertainty, improving decisions and achieving measureable results.
We specialise in providing highly-analytical data-driven recommendations in the face of significant uncertainty.
We utilise advanced predictive analytics to build robust strategies and enable our clients to make calculated decisions.
We support implementation of adaptive capability and capacity.
Our latest
Thoughts
Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Getting the Balance Right
By Kate Barnes
I am a working mother, as are many of my friends and past colleagues. Naturally we often debate the challenges of getting the balance between work and family right.
Personal circumstances vary widely and have a big impact on the choices one has, but my solution has been to work on a part-time basis. I have been lucky enough to do so for the past seven years and to me it seems like an excellent compromise. Yet there are many times when it feels like balance is the last thing I am achieving – in fact, I have the distinct feeling that I am failing on every front – my kids, my husband, and my boss, colleagues or direct reports, all want more of me.
Perhaps the truth is that I want too much. I want to be stimulated, challenged and to feel like I am adding value in the work place, but I also want to see my children more than the average, full-time working mother.
Many working mothers have made decisions involving changes to their working day in order to manage the work-family balance better. Unfortunately, I have found that one of the biggest issues is that one cannot simply decide on an approach, agree it with your employer, and then settle into whatever routine that entails. You might agree an arrangement to work 5, or 6 or 7 hours a day, or 30 hours a week, or to arrive at work early and leave by 3 or 4pm. But in most jobs, you will have to consider the balance equation on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day. Is today the day I give more to work because there is a demanding deadline and everyone else is working late, or is it the day I give more to my child, because he is receiving an award at school or swimming in a gala?
And often the call has to be made taking into consideration not only what is happening today, but also looking at where the pendulum fell yesterday, or last week, or over the past couple of weeks.
As with any decision there are consequences, even if at first they are unforeseen. In the early stages of my career, I like many, was an idealistic youngster with dreams of holding a very senior, leadership position. I was ambitious, and some might say that I had much of what it takes to achieve my goal. Some years down the track I was being interviewed for a prospective job and the potential employer noted from my CV that the achievements in my career (or lack thereof) were not in line with my academic record, and he wondered why this was. I can’t remember what my response was, but I know I knew the answer. I even knew at exactly which point in my career the upward trajectory slowed. It was the day I was working at a large corporate, and I asked for flexitime. I negotiated that on two afternoons a week, I would be allowed to leave at 2pm and I would make up the time in the evening, after my young children were asleep.
Shortly thereafter, when a potential internal move to a new position was being discussed I was informed that I could not be considered for the role as I was “part-time”.
This was a wake-up call.
Read more at http://www.globaladvisors.biz/thoughts/20170719/getting-the-balance-right/
Strategy Tools
Strategy Tools: ‘Price-Volume-Profit’ Part 1 – A strategic take on cost-volume-profit analysis
By Eric van Heeswijk and Marc Wilson
Eric is an analyst and Marc is a partner at Global Advisors. Both are based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Almost every person who has studied financial or management accounting at school or university is probably familiar with cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis. It should be the basis of financial planning in most companies. However, in our experience, most managers do not apply the analysis and get it wrong in its most basic form (e.g. planning for similar / increased volumes together with price increases). The outcome? At best: results that fail to meet budgets. At worst: firms trigger the “margin-price-volume death spiral”. Whether you are a production manager or a CEO, you should understand how CVP analysis applies to your firm. Your business’s survival may be at stake.
Fast Facts
White meat consumption has grown with increases in per capita income and growth of the middle class
- South Africa has experienced rapid growth of middle-to-upper-class citizens fuelled by the parallel increase in disposable income of this socio-economic group
- The GDP per capita of South Africa has grown by 54% in real terms from R45 580 in 1981 to R70 184 in 2013
- As the poor emerge from poverty and the emerging middle class consumers are able to afford more protein in their diets, chicken, being the most affordable and versatile, has emerged as the meat of choice for this burgeoning population group
- The result has been growth in white meat per capita consumption ahead of red meat coupled with added benefits of being easy to produce and with less cultural constraints than pork
- White meat consumption per capita has grown by 223% from 11,93 kg/capita in 1981 to 38,5 kg/capita in 2014
- Consumption of white meat has also been fuelled by the growth of QSRs like KFC and to an extent, people trading down for a cheaper source of protein
- Red meat, being more expensive, is growing at a slower pace
- Pork and sheep meat i.e. Lamb (the most expensive of all red meat) and mutton consumption have remained fairly flat while beef consumption has grown since 2001
Selected News
Quote: Nate B Jones
“The pleasant surprise is how much you can accomplish when you properly harness your agents, and how big companies are leaning in and able to actually get volume done on that basis.” – Nate B Jones – AI News & Strategy Daily
Context of the Quote
This quote from Nate B Jones captures a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI agents within enterprise settings. Delivered in his AI News & Strategy Daily series, it highlights the unexpected productivity gains when organisations implement AI agents correctly. Jones emphasises that major firms like JP Morgan and Walmart are already deploying these systems at scale, achieving high-volume outputs that traditional software cycles could not match1,2. The core insight is that proper orchestration-combining AI with human oversight-unlocks disproportionate value, countering the hype-driven delays many companies face.
Backstory on Nate B Jones
Nate B Jones is a leading voice in enterprise AI strategy, known for his pragmatic frameworks that guide businesses from AI hype to production deployment. Through his platform natebjones.com and Substack newsletter Nate’s Newsletter, he distils complex AI developments into actionable insights for executives1,2,7. Jones produces daily video briefings like AI News & Strategy Daily, where he analyses real-world use cases, warns against common pitfalls such as over-reliance on unproven models, and provides custom prompts for rapid agent prototyping2,4.
His work focuses on bridging the gap between AI potential and enterprise reality. For instance, he critiques the ‘human throttle’-where hesitation and risk aversion limit agent autonomy-and advocates for decision infrastructure like audit logs and reversible processes to build trust3. Jones has documented production AI agents at scale, urging leaders to act swiftly as competitors gain ‘durable advantage’ through accumulated institutional intelligence2. His library of use cases spans finance (e.g., JP Morgan’s choreographed workflows) to operations, emphasising that agents excel in ‘level four’ tasks: AI drafts, humans review, then AI proceeds1. By October 2025, his briefings were already forecasting 2026 as a year of job-by-job AI transformation5.
Leading Theorists and the Subject of AI Agents
AI agents-autonomous systems that perceive, reason, act, and learn to achieve goals-represent a shift from passive tools to proactive workflows. Nate B Jones builds on foundational work by key theorists:
- Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig: Pioneers of modern AI, their textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach defines rational agents as entities maximising expected utility in dynamic environments. This underpins Jones’s emphasis on structured autonomy over raw intelligence1,3.
- Andrew Ng: Dubbed the ‘Godfather of AI,’ Ng popularised agentic workflows at Stanford and through Landing AI. He advocates ‘agentic reasoning,’ where AI chains tools and decisions, aligning with Jones’s production playbooks for enterprises like Walmart2.
- Yohei Nakajima: Creator of BabyAGI (2023), an early open-source agent framework that demonstrated recursive task decomposition. This inspired Jones’s warnings against hype, stressing expert-designed workflows for complex problems1,4.
- Anthropic Researchers: Their work on Constitutional AI and agent patterns (e.g., long-running memory) informs Jones’s analyses of scalable agents, as seen in his breakdowns of reliable architectures6.
Jones synthesises these ideas into enterprise strategy, arguing that agents are not future tech but ‘production infrastructure now.’ He counters delays by outlining six principles for quick builds (days or weeks), including context-aware prompts and risk-mitigated deployment2. This positions him as a practitioner-theorist, translating academic foundations into C-suite playbooks amid the 2025-2026 agent revolution.
Broader Implications for Workflows
Jones’s quote underscores a paradigm shift: AI agents amplify top human talent, making them ‘more fingertippy’ rather than replacing them1. Big companies succeed by ‘leaning in’-auditing processes, building observability, and iterating fast-yielding volume at scale. For leaders, the message is clear: harness agents properly, or risk irreversible competitive lag2,3.
References
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obqjIoKaqdM
2. https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/executive-briefing-your-2025-ai-agent
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjtPH8VMAU
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FKxyPAJ2Ok
5. https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/2026-sneak-peek-the-first-job-by-9ac
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNcEgqzlPqs
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