An Editor’s Note: The Right Book at the Right Time

The Last Mile Is Still Human!

One month since launch and 2000 unique visitors from 30 countries, including the US, UK, Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, and India. There are billions of websites, but you chose to visit readintersections.com. Thank you for choosing to include us in your learning path. This encourages us to keep going on our mission:

to capture and curate first-hand operating wisdom from CXOs, Founders, and Senior Leaders, and make it genuinely useful to peers.

Every month, we aim to surface a pattern emerging from the views our authors share. It's not surprising that AI is central to most articles. Across the stories that we recently published, one pattern repeats: AI compresses the learning loop but doesn’t complete the last mile. It speeds up sensing and analysis, but outcomes still depend on judgment, trust, adoption, and follow-through.

A telecom leader described how his teams used to live by “fail fast.” When AI can flag issues in near real time, waiting for failure makes no sense. Engineers now fix problems before anyone logs a ticket. Customer signals that once took months now show up in days. But the limits are clear. AI can predict churn and surface patterns. A leader still has to decide what to do and understand what’s really driving disengagement. This gap also appears in preventive child health. Schools using digital health passports catch anemia and vision problems early, before they affect learning. But the last mile remains human. Technology can recommend interventions, but cannot earn a doubtful parent’s trust or ensure a child wears glasses daily. In education, the point is stark: as one EdTech leader said, the best technology is the one teachers actually use.

Once you observe this “last mile” theme, you start seeing it beyond AI too. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have disrupted the supply chains, energy costs, and investment decisions. A clean energy leader building EV infrastructure described the current market moving faster than planned, forcing a shift from proving the concept to running it at scale daily.

Net, net, AI speeds up the analysis. But the execution, the judgment call, the work of actually changing how people behave, that still sits with humans. What makes human decision-making harder right now is that it is being exercised in genuinely difficult conditions.

That is exactly why this platform exists. Not to document what worked in stable times. But to capture how leaders think and decide when the ground is moving under them.

To every author who contributed this month, thank you. You didn't just share what went well. You shared where things got hard, where the plan hit a wall, and what it took to make a call anyway. Those are the moments worth writing about.

Read. Reflect. Share. We are just getting started.

Why We Built Read Intersections

In 2006, I was in a boardroom full of banking executives, remote in hand, walking them through a new solution and its business case. Over the next 15 years, the industry changed, and my work shifted from enterprise banking to financial inclusion. Still, my focus stayed the same: finding solutions.

I learned that the solution on paper often doesn’t work in practice. What really makes a difference is often simple: timing, trust, clear language, and people adopting them.

Over time, I stopped seeing solutions as straightforward. They appear where technology meets strategy, where industry changes overlap with global events, and where rules, culture, and real-world execution come together.

During this journey, I relied on leaders and field teams who had faced challenges and still moved forward. It was then that I wondered: why do so many valuable lessons stay hidden inside people and companies?

My partner shared a similar experience with a different lens. He had seen C-suite leaders and founders make tough decisions with little information and real consequences. But once the moment passes, the lessons often stay behind, unshared.

Hence was born the idea of  Read Intersections.

Read Intersections is an independent publication sharing first-person stories from C-suite leaders and founders. It’s for peers who want to learn from real experiences, not just what was supposed to happen.

We focus on decisions made where markets, customers, technology, people, rules, and risks all come together. Most big decisions don’t happen in isolation. They happen when many factors overlap, with limited time and incomplete information. That’s where the most important lessons are, if we’re honest about them.

Bringing this first edition to life wasn’t easy. Leaders took a chance on us and shared honest stories, not just successes. I’m thankful to our founding authors from across industries. Despite different fields, they faced the same realities: uncertainty, hard choices, and balancing immediate pressures with long-term goals.

I invite you to read, reflect, and join the conversation. Share your thoughts and stories, and help us build a community where real lessons are brought to light.