A Conversation With Morten Wendelbo

Morten Wendelbo is a behavioural economist and data scientist who advises leadership teams at the intersection of strategy, organisational design, data, and technology. In this conversation with Debbie Richardson and Seth Hawthorne, he makes an uncomfortable argument: most organisations are pointing AI at the wrong problems entirely.

The issue isn't the technology — it's the foundations underneath it. When AI is built on fragmented data and tangled systems, it doesn't create clarity, it accelerates the mess. Morten describes the "digital concrete" and spaghetti architecture that quietly limits growth, and why a single source of truth is the precondition for AI to deliver anything of value.

For agencies, the takeaway is a strategic opening. The businesses your clients run are full of structural problems no tool can fix until someone names them. Helping leadership teams see how their systems and data shape their decisions is exactly the upstream, advisory work that AI can't do — and that clients will pay for.