# Thom Probus

Thom Probus writes about coordinating offshore delivery teams and the effects of AI on professional services, organizational decision-making, and security.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/thom-probus/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thom-probus
- LinkedIn followers: 1,066
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, cybersecurity
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-10

## Summary

Most useful for practical frames on offshore delivery coordination failures and questions about AI in professional services, decision-making, and security.

- Best for: A professional services firm planning a leadership offsite on offshore delivery problems and AI.
- Not for: A B2B software vendor seeking sponsored content, guaranteed distribution, audience demographics, and a rate card.
- Check first: Confirm whether Probus offers sponsored content and request scope, rates, timeline, and disclosure terms.

### Takeaways

- Offshore delivery problems often reflect protocol mismatches, not capability failures.
- A yes that does not mean yes and green-green-green-red status pattern.
- AI can reproduce old institutional hazards, such as distance from execution.

## Main ideas

- **Offshore delivery problems are protocol mismatches, not capability failures**: Management teams make remarkably consistent complaints about offshore delivery teams: they are not proactive, cannot estimate, and report green status for months before suddenly turning red. After working across financial services, professional services, and technology organizations, Thom Probus concludes these are almost never capability problems. They are protocol mismatches: professionals operating under different assumptions about communication, commitment, and a manager’s role. The remedy is to redesign the protocol layer, not launch a culture-change initiative.
- **Accommodate inside the project; keep culture change off the critical path**: This priority follows from the protocol argument and is stated as a three-part rule: accommodate within the project, invest in relationships for the long game, and never put culture change on the critical path. For anyone planning a talk or program about offshore delivery, the distinction matters: the recommendation is a set of practical accommodations American management teams can make within a single engagement, not a multi-year organizational change effort.
- **AI ends professional services’ long insulation, and the scarce capability is what AI cannot do**: For 150 years, displaced workers found new homes in professional services, a sector technology was expected to leave alone because it required judgment, synthesis, and human context. Thom Probus argues that AI has ended that assumption and that this disruption is categorically different from earlier ones. The post previews a piece titled The Fog of Change and frames the moment through named problems rather than a forecast.
- **A new AI security risk is an old institutional hazard: distance from execution**: Thom Probus reports that CISOs have identified an AI-related security risk: institutional bias baked into training data lets bad actors get harmful requests approved by dressing them up as compliance work, audit methodology, or policy analysis—no jailbreak required. The argument then turns: this is not really new. It is the same distance-from-execution hazard that has always afflicted institutions, except the system was born at altitude, with no ground floor to fall back on. The practical audience is anyone deploying AI in audit, procurement, hiring, or security operations.

## Work to read

- [Eight coordination barriers that sink offshore delivery programs](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thom-probus_every-management-team-running-an-offshore-activity-7482816727563579393-YY6r)
- [Why AI disruption may be different for professional services](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thom-probus_for-150-years-displaced-workers-found-new-activity-7472364029634772992-xx94)
- [Bias in training data as an AI security risk](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thom-probus_cisos-have-identified-a-new-ai-related-security-activity-7490388363955564544-sr8l)

## Brand relationships

- **The Meridian View** (mention)
- **The Fog of Change** (mention)

## Partnerships

The five posts describe no sponsorship or partnership offer. Thom Probus publishes two written columns — The Meridian View, on offshore delivery coordination, and The Fog of Change, on AI and professional services — and posts about AI-related security risks. None describes sponsored formats, branded-content terms, a media kit, rates, or a business inquiry route. Speaker-booking or collaboration requests must go directly through their LinkedIn profile; no partnership channel, package, or lead time is published. Before planning an event, buyers should ask about availability, fees, and disclosure requirements.

## Alternatives

- Danielle Lares: Pick Danielle Lares over Thom Probus when the offsite is about project readiness and the workforce pipeline, not cross-border delivery coordination. For a firm trying to find, qualify, and schedule the craft and technical workers a project needs, Danielle Lares's posts address the task directly. They argue that the question has shifted from "do we have enough workers" to whether a team understands the tasks, phases, experience, certification, and training the work requires—and where that talent exists. The posts describe a Project Success Team model that brings owners, investors, contractors, unions, workforce partners, educators, and municipalities together around investment, project scope, skills, workforce strategy, compliance, and community impact, with stated payoffs for each group. A second post treats compliance as part of delivery, not an administrative track, covering DOT oversight, apprenticeship standards, grant deliverables, contractor bid eligibility, and federal funding eligibility. It closes with pre-planning, communication, trust, and due diligence. Both posts target infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing audiences and name specific systems and documents, including the MDOT OJT program manual and a pilot running 2018 to 2021. For owners, contractors, or funded-project teams working out how to staff and document a project, these posts offer more usable specifics than the offshore-protocol material.
- Sercan Esen: Pick Sercan Esen over Thom Probus when the audience shifts from professional services delivery leaders to industrial operations and safety leaders, and the focus shifts from offshore coordination to frontline adoption of AI and automation. Sercan Esen's posts are built for that room. One describes contributing to a World Economic Forum framework on human-machine collaboration and lists five operating points: trust in new vision, robotics, and autonomous equipment; behaviour as the frontier of safety innovation; emerging roles such as EHS AI specialist, safety agent supervisor, and human-machine workflow designer; automation that removes exposure rather than people; and safety data treated as operational data, with safety teams as workflow architects. The second post reports a three-month field run across 22,487 miles, 11 states, 12 cities, 27 onsite visits, 16 customers, and 12 industries, with roughly 94 stakeholder conversations. It draws five patterns from that experience: EHS owns outcomes, operations owns reality, IT scales it; hardware will matter more than expected; EHS compliance platforms are being challenged; teams want decisions rather than more dashboards; adoption is the strategy. For a manufacturer or industrial operator planning a session on putting AI and monitoring systems into live operations, that firsthand detail better matches the need and the room's daily reality than a cross-industry argument about protocol mismatch.
- Sarah Toomey: Pick Sarah Toomey over Thom Probus when the offsite is for procurement and finance leaders deciding how to move an enterprise AI purchase forward, not how to run cross-border delivery teams. One of Sarah Toomey's posts frames procurement's current challenge: buying AI is often the slowest and most expensive enterprise purchase; security reviews and stakeholder counts have grown; and the same rigor once called diligence is now treated as a bottleneck. The argument is that teams pulling ahead build visibility to move at the business's pace while still knowing what they signed up for—a useful frame for a procurement leadership session. The second post traces a career in sourcing across tech and into a procurement role, then introduces an autonomous source-to-pay platform that routes requests, pulls supplier and contract data, checks policy, and moves work toward a decision. It argues that AI-native is a foundation rather than an add-on. For a room deciding how to buy and govern AI tooling, that is closer to the decision at hand than a talk about why offshore programs go red.

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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/