# Kieran Gilmurray

Kieran Gilmurray writes and speaks about AI, leadership and business transformation, focusing on how organizations use intelligence to make decisions, govern risk and improve how work gets done.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/kieran-gilmurray/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kierangilmurray
- LinkedIn followers: 28,238
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC7PD8C3cLSLS_zpbDZpOZQ
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, ai-governance
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Most useful for thought leadership on strategic subtraction, AI governance and enterprise intelligence for executive audiences.

- Best for: A consulting firm or leadership campaign that wants frameworks and examples, not product promotion.
- Not for: A risk software vendor seeking sponsored posts, competitor comparisons, demos, tracked links or product-level implementation content.
- Check first: Confirm audience job level, Substack subscriber count, engagement figures and any partnership terms before contacting.

### Takeaways

- Strategic subtraction removes work, not budget lines, and tests efficiency, resilience and prominence.
- Integration is organisational problem before technical one, as functions can treat same customer differently.
- Governance lets intelligence scale; weak or retrofitted governance slows innovation more than strong oversight.

## Main ideas

- **Strategic subtraction removes the work, not the budget line**: Gilmurray distinguishes ordinary cost cutting from what they call strategic subtraction. Cost cutting starts with budgets, expense lines and headcount targets. Subtraction starts with the work itself, asking which activities consume more coordination, time, risk or complexity than they return in value. A business can remove people while leaving a broken operating process intact, or cut spending while preserving duplicated reporting and unclear decision rights — transferring pressure into the system rather than removing it. They identify six ways to subtract: elimination, substitution, consolidation, hiding complexity behind a simpler interface, pausing without killing, and abstracting complex back-end operations. Each mode carries its own risk: consolidation concentrates risk, hiding can reduce transparency, and pausing can become avoidance.
- **Judge removals on efficiency, resilience and prominence together**: Gilmurray proposes three tests to apply together. Efficiency asks whether a change reduces unnecessary time, cost, handoffs or duplication. Resilience asks whether it protects the organisation's ability to adapt, recover and avoid brittleness. Prominence asks whether it improves visibility, trust, customer experience or strategic distinctiveness. Their core argument is that efficiency measured alone is a false economy: leaders must distinguish waste from slack. Waste absorbs resources without purpose; slack provides adaptability, quality assurance or safety. They set this tension against conventional cost-cutting logic, which they say is attractive precisely because it is easy to measure.
- **Governance lets intelligence scale; it doesn't slow it down**: Gilmurray's counter-intuitive claim is that weak or retrofitted governance slows innovation more than strong oversight. When the criteria for sufficiency are clear, approval cycles shorten; when governance is improvised, every deployment becomes a negotiation and every incident requires a bespoke response. They describe trust as an operating property, not a communications strategy: it depends on whether decisions can be explained, questioned and traced to a named owner. Fairness is an operational risk, not merely a moral aspiration: models learn from historical data, so scaling without fairness controls automates past exclusion. Explainability, stress testing, documentation and the ability to halt a system are control categories that belong in the decision record.
- **Integration is an organisational problem before it's a technical one**: Gilmurray argues that intelligence creates enterprise value only when it operates as a connected system, not as capable silos. Functions are rewarded for different outcomes, tolerate different levels of risk and act on different time horizons, so signals are filtered and decisions negotiated at every handoff. They call the customer the organisation's "first systems integrator", because customer journeys expose the seams before executive dashboards do. Their conclusion: shared information without shared accountability produces more debate, not faster decisions. Integrating data is not enough unless authority, incentives and escalation paths are aligned too.
- **AI's real shift is execution, not access to information**: In a shorter argumentative essay, Gilmurray sets out three shifts enabled by generative AI: personalisation, as systems adapt to an individual's circumstances and goals rather than giving everyone the same book or pool of information; wider, cheaper access to expertise; and, in their view the most important, the democratisation of execution. Progress has always depended on more than the quality of an idea: people need knowledge, skills, funding and support to turn it into something useful. In their account, AI narrows the distance between spotting a problem and testing a response. The scarce resources then become the insight to spot a worthwhile problem, the judgement to shape a response and the willingness to act. Leaders must create conditions where people can experiment. They are clear about the limits: AI will not equalise talent or guarantee that good ideas succeed, and scaling still typically needs funding and organisational support.

## Work to read

- [Strategic Subtraction: The Difference Between Cutting and Cost Reduction](https://kierangilmurray.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-cutting-and)
- [Chapter 6: The Intelligent Enterprise — Integration, Coherence and the Joined-Up Organisation](https://kierangilmurray.substack.com/p/chapter-6-the-intelligent-enterprise)
- [Chapter 8: Governance, Ethics and Trust — Foundations of Responsible Intelligence](https://kierangilmurray.substack.com/p/chapter-8-governance-ethics-and-trust)
- [Talent Unleashed: AI and the Democratisation of Execution](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kierangilmurray_talentunleashed-activity-7486703051018375169--jAG)

## Brand relationships

- **The Executive's Guide to Strategic Intelligence** (owned_business)

## Partnerships

No partnership or sponsorship formats are documented in the posts here. The available posts show Kieran Gilmurray promoting Kieran Gilmurray's own book, newsletter, article library and audio series, not offering sponsored placements or branded content packages. Without a published media kit, rate card, disclosure policy or official partnership intake route in these posts, a buyer cannot specify operational requirements such as deliverables, approval steps, disclosure terms or pricing from these sources alone. Treat partnership options as unverified. Ask Kieran Gilmurray directly for current commercial terms before including a paid placement, sponsorship or co-created content in a campaign plan. The posts here do not provide partnership details; this is not a claim that Kieran Gilmurray never accepts sponsorships.

## Alternatives

- Fiona McSheehy: Choose McSheehy when the client’s subtraction problem is really a systems-leadership problem: local teams have changed something that works for them but creates cost, delay or governance risk elsewhere. Her two posts start from that situation. One describes transport booking systems redesigned for an emergency response that disrupted longer-term programmes, and local procurement or staffing arrangements that solved one problem while creating governance or equity problems elsewhere. The other describes overlapping teams in a large emergency response, where duplication blurred accountability, and sets out what clarity requires: purpose, interfaces, decision rights and collective accountability. A consulting firm selling to public bodies, humanitarian organisations or matrix-structured businesses would get a more credible draft from her than from a general strategy writer because she starts with the operating mess, not the framework.
- Sharron Crawford Corle: Choose Crawford Corle when the buyer is a learning-and-development, HR or people-function leader and the thing to subtract is a portfolio of courses, programmes, toolkits, events and platforms. Her October post is a direct fit: it names the accumulation problem, describes the tail every new resource carries (communicate, maintain, update, support, evaluate, retire), and offers four decisions a team can apply: protect, improve, combine and retire. She reframes the annual planning question as what the team has earned the right to stop doing, rather than what it should add next year. A consulting firm with an L&D practice, or one pitching a workshop to a chief learning officer, would find her more immediately useful than a general strategy voice because the examples and decisions are already in the buyer’s language. Her June post adds another angle: AI may make leadership development more important by exposing what is not leadership, such as polished decks, fast summaries and confident decisions, and shifting value to judgement, listening and developing people. That’s a strong thought-leadership hook for an HR audience.
- Dan Haagman: Choose Haagman when the audience is security, risk or resilience leaders and the subtraction question is how to remove the conditions that make attacks consequential. His August post describes a CISO Singapore fireside built around a Zero-Budget Test: if the cyber budget became zero tomorrow, what would you still do first? He turns that into questions about which temporary exceptions have become permanent architecture, where detection and response compensate for complexity or unnecessary access, and what should no longer be true. He argues that resilience can come from subtraction: remove unnecessary privilege, eliminate dependencies, challenge exceptions and simplify operating models. That’s a sharper security-specific version of the subtraction argument than a general strategist would produce. His September post adds research credibility: he describes an invitation to become a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and work expanding the CISO Global Study into a wider global research programme. For a consulting firm selling to CISOs or a cyber-risk practice, he would bring the piece a credible field voice and an existing community connection.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/