Editorial Intelligence is my experimental edge

I’ve realised what Editorial Intelligence is for me.

It’s my experimental edge.

The core has constraints, and it should

I spend my working life inside Sage, a large software company. That gives me something extremely valuable: real customers, real commercial problems, research, subject-matter experts, organisational complexity and the constraints that come with doing work at scale.

Constraints matter. At work, there quite rightly needs to be a reason to investigate something. Time has to be prioritised. An idea has to connect to customers, strategy or a business objective. You can’t chase every interesting question simply because it caught your attention.

But I’ve also realised I need somewhere that operates one step outside that system. Somewhere I can ask: what if?

What happens if AI changes the way a content team captures knowledge?
Can a meeting transcript become evidence rather than just meeting notes?
What does editorial judgement mean when producing another 1,000 words costs almost nothing?
Can I turn a methodology into an agent?
Could a research programme become a diagnostic, a tool or an interactive experience rather than another PDF?
And sometimes: what can a football match, a film, a game or something I noticed walking around Thailand teach me about narrative?

Not every one of those questions needs to become a Sage project. Some probably shouldn’t. That’s what the experimental edge is for.

Small, cheap, reversible

I can build something small. Try an unfamiliar tool. Talk to someone outside my normal professional circle. Develop a framework. Publish an argument. Discover that the argument doesn’t hold up. And move on.

AI has made this kind of experimentation much more powerful. A few years ago, crossing into another discipline often meant finding a designer, developer, researcher or analyst willing to help. Now one person can get surprisingly far — not because AI suddenly makes them an expert in every discipline, but because it dramatically lowers the cost of asking: could I try this?

That distinction matters. An experimental edge shouldn’t become an excuse for chasing every new AI tool or randomly collecting skills. It needs a centre. For me, that centre is increasingly clear: evidence, editorial judgement, narrative, organisational knowledge and AI. I can wander quite a long way from conventional content work as long as I can bring the learning back to those questions.

Why the edge has to sit outside the organisation

Large organisations inevitably develop an internal lens. You learn the language of the company. You understand its systems. You know how decisions get made. You become better at navigating the organisation.

That expertise is useful. But occasionally the most useful perspective you can bring into an organisation comes from outside it. Editorial Intelligence exposes me to different tools, different practitioners, different assumptions and different ways of organising work.

The Compare Notes research I’m starting is part of that. I don’t only want to know how I think content and AI should work. I want to know how other editorial, marketing and communications people are actually working. What are they experimenting with? Where is AI genuinely changing their work? Where is the hype running ahead of reality? What problems are appearing that we haven’t even named yet?

Some of what I learn may feed back into my work at Sage. Some may become part of Editorial Intelligence. Some may help me years from now. And some experiments will probably lead absolutely nowhere. That’s fine.

An edge, not just a ladder

I think I’d previously thought about professional development mainly as progression through the core of a career: get better at the job, take on more responsibility, move up a level, learn the next skill the role requires. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But perhaps there’s another dimension. Professional development needs an edge, not just a ladder. The core is where you solve real problems under real constraints. The edge is where you investigate what the work might become next. Ideally, the two keep feeding each other.

That’s what I want Editorial Intelligence to be. Not an escape from my day job. Not a laboratory completely detached from reality. And not necessarily a side hustle that has to justify itself financially.

A place where I can work at the edge of what I know — and occasionally bring something useful back.