Neil Perkin- Only Dead Fish

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Neil Perkin is a consultant, author, and self-described polymath working at the intersection of strategy, digital transformation, emerging technology, and leadership. 

With roots in media transformation at Time Inc during the dot-com boom, Neil has spent the last 16 years helping organizations navigate change. 

He's authored three books on agility and transformation, and now writes extensively about how AI is reshaping the practice of strategy.

In this conversation, Neil shares his perspective on what it really means to work with AI—not as a replacement for human thinking, but as something far more nuanced and powerful.

Five Big Themes from Our Conversation

1. AI as a Genuine Thought Partner
Neil argues that the real opportunity with AI isn't automation—it's augmentation of human thinking through continuous dialogue.

"How you can really use AI as a bit of a thought partner... it's like fully integrated into a strategy workflow, or any other kind of knowledge or thinking workflow, in ways where you're going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between human and machine."

"Ideally what you are aiming for here, of course, is you're getting to places that you couldn't have got to on your own. And that's the possibility with AI."

2. The Danger of Cognitive Outsourcing
Neil warns against the temptation to let AI do our thinking for us—what he calls "cognitive outsourcing"—and the hidden costs of "work slop."

"This whole idea of cognitive outsourcing is a potentially big problem because if you are able to get the AI to do your thinking for you, you don't need to do any thinking, and thinking is hard."

"It's a big temptation because it's good enough, but it's not good. And so the person, the recipient has to then redo the work and it takes longer to actually do that."

3. Think, Prompt, Think
Before rushing to the AI, Neil advocates for starting with human clarity—a simple framework that changes everything.

"Think prompt think, basically. So the importance of actually just starting with humans. Before you go to the AI engine, just thinking about what it is you're trying to do, what good looks like... So you start basically with your perspective."

"Starting with you and then you having clarity and much greater depth with how you're then going to the AI... means that you're actually integrating it in a way which is not cognitively outsourcing or not disengaging your brain."

4. Five Roles AI Can Play
Neil offers a practical framework for understanding where AI fits—from full automation to human-led illumination.

"There's a model which I come back to a lot, which is just kind of like five sort of key roles that it can play... automator... decider... recommender... illuminator and evaluator. And they sort of balance human AI to different extent."

"The illuminator part is where the AI is augmenting your thinking. It's illuminating things in a way that actually you hadn't seen things before."

5. Don't View the New Through the Lens of the Old
Drawing from his transformation experience, Neil cautions against the natural tendency to apply old mental models to revolutionary technology.

"I learned a lot about not looking at the new through the lens of the old, the need to kind of reinvent and redesign as well as use technology to optimize."

"The first kind of versions of things were always kind of skeuomorphic... online magazines were like literally scans of pages of printed magazines. I think probably we're going to see a lot of that with AI."

Find Neil:

• Substack: onlydeadfish.substack.com
• Blog: onlydeadfish.co.uk
• Named after the Malcolm Muggeridge quote: "Only dea