CTO Craft

Your AI metrics might be measuring the wrong thing. Dr. Catherine Hicks explains how to fix the theory, not the dashboards.

At a CTO Craft Dinner in Toronto, I sat down with engineering leaders from more than a dozen tech companies and asked where AI has actually landed. The free-for-all is over and we need to be realistic.

What economist Charles Goodhart said in 1975 is completely applicable in 2026: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

There is a gap most engineering leaders prefer not to explore: the distance between the clarity they believe they're projecting and the confusion their teams actually experience.

The case for cutting junior engineers looks airtight at the CFO level, but wrong from every other perspective.

This March at CTO Craft Conference in London, I sat down over dinner with 13 senior leaders and CTOs and had the kind of conversation you rarely get at conferences. There were no slides or presentations, just talk about how AI implementation works in different companies.

Andy Skipper, founder of CTO Craft, warns that even seasoned CTOs struggle with the pressure to deliver AI-driven productivity while balancing innovation and reality.