Simon leads HR technology strategy at BHP.
Enterprise AI is sold as a system of rules. It now reaches into the working lives of people who were never reducible to rules, and someone has to answer for what it does there. That, increasingly, is Simon's work: the judgement that begins where the rules give out.
What Simon governs
At BHP he sets the HR function's technology strategy and governs the capital behind it: SAP SuccessFactors, ServiceNow, and the data estate they stand on. He also advises SAP and ServiceNow, the two vendors whose platforms he runs, which puts him on both sides of the table at the companies setting the direction of the field. And he chairs the HR AI Governance Committee, the body that decides how AI enters the function, so it can be adopted well and the enterprise can realise what the technology is worth. The system that committee governs by, Simon built.
Most enterprises try to govern AI with instruments built for a different kind of technology: systems that behave the same way every time, checked once against a specification and signed off. AI does not oblige. A model that screens a job applicant makes a judgement about a person, at scale, and makes it afresh every time. Governed by the old rules, it is the wrong thing being governed. What it asks for instead is judgement, and accountability seated with the judgement.
Phronesis without accountability is power calling itself wisdom.
Governed well, this is what lets an organisation use the technology rather than fear it. No one has yet worked out fully what that governance should look like. The unfinished problem is Simon's work, and part of why he writes.
The track record →Phronesis
He writes under the name Phronesis: fortnightly essays on workforce strategy, AI governance, and enterprise transformation, thought through from inside the decisions rather than from the commentary box. Phronesis is Aristotle's word for practical wisdom, the judgement that formal knowledge cannot supply. It is an unusual banner for a technology executive to write under, and it is the truest description of what the work asks.
Read Phronesis ↗The measure
One commitment sits under all of it. Simon holds to the utilitarianism of Bentham and Singer: a system is worth the good it returns to the people inside it, summed across every one of them. That is the standard he holds his own systems to, and the reason a badly governed one is never, to him, an abstraction. Somewhere in the design there is always a person on the other end of the friction.