Ursula Rosenstein and Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Saturday 2nd May 2026

SATURDAY: The Great Transformation Race (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vapid LinkedIn Word-Salad of the Techno-Toffs)

I was reading LinkedIn the other day. I know. I know. It’s a cry for help. LinkedIn is the only place on the internet where people talk like they’ve been lobotomised by a McKinsey PowerPoint presentation and then fed through a shredder. It’s a digital business park where everyone is wearing an invisible lanyard and shouting “Synergy!” at a pigeon.

And there he was. Bernice Carr. The Bernice Carr. A man whose job title, “Strategic Business & Technology Advisor,” is basically Latin for “I possess a library of blasers and a subscription to ChatGPT, and I will use both to make you feel slightly anxious about things that don’t exist.”

He’s written a piece. A “thought leadership” piece. The title? “Europe is Winning the AI Adoption Race but Losing the Transformation Race.”

Read that again. Let it wash over you like the lukewarm grey sludge they serve in the canteen of a failing logistics firm in Slough. Winning the “Adoption Race” but losing the “Transformation Race.”

What does that even mean, Bernice? You marvelous, glistening shill for the intangible. It’s like saying, “I’ve successfully bought a pair of running shoes, but I’m failing the ‘Metaphysical Journey Toward Being a Cheetah’ race.” It’s like saying, “I’ve adopted a cat, but I haven’t yet undergone the feline paradigm shift required to cough up a hairball on the rug of history.”

It’s the classic grifter’s move, isn’t it? It’s the Mark Steel realisation: if you can’t sell people something they need, like a functioning railway or a sandwich that isn’t 80% cardboard, you sell them a “Gap.” You invent two terms that sound vaguely like they were birthed in a TED Talk’s bins, and then you tell the entire continent of Europe that they’re trapped in the middle of them.

“Oh, you’ve got AI, have you, Europe? You’ve got your little algorithms? You’re using them to sort your emails and diagnose tumors? That’s just adoption, you pathetic, continental losers! You haven’t transformed! You haven’t fundamentally altered the molecular structure of your corporate DNA to become a shimmering, borderless cloud of pure, monetised ‘Agility’!”

It’s Alexei territory, this. You can see the LinkedIn “Influencer” now, can’t you? Standing there in a suit that cost more than a nurse’s annual salary, shouting at a Greek fisherman: “Listen to me, you peasant! Your octopus-drying technique is high on adoption but low on digital transformation! Where is your blockchain-enabled cephalopod-scaling ecosystem?! You’re losing the race, Stavros! The race to nowhere, run by people in chinos!”

And what is Bernice’s solution for Europe? Is it “Pay your workers more”? Is it “Maybe don’t let Silicon Valley strip-mine your privacy”? No. It’s, and I’m quoting here, because I have a high pain threshold, “cultivating a culture of continuous learning” and “strategic imperatives.”

Strategic imperatives! Of course! Why didn’t we think of that? We were too busy trying to keep the lights on and stop the seas from boiling, while Bernice is up there in the stratospheric heights of “Business Intelligence,” telling us we need more imperatives. It’s like someone standing in a burning building and shouting, “The problem here isn’t the fire; it’s the lack of a robust, heat-centric exit-strategy-alignment-protocol!”

Stewart Lee would appreciate the repetition of it all. The way the word “AI” is used not as a technology, but as a sort of liturgical chant.

“Europe is winning the AI adoption race…” (pause for effect, look mournfully at the camera) “…but losing the transformation race.”

And you say it again. And you say it again until the words lose all meaning. Until “Transformation” just becomes a sound you make to indicate that you’d like some money, please. Until the “Race” is revealed for what it is: a hamster wheel powered by the frantic anxiety of middle-managers who are terrified that if they don’t “transform,” a 22-year-old with a crypto-wallet and a TikTok account will steal their parking space.

It’s a scam, Bernice. It’s a beautiful, polished, LinkedIn-premium-subscription scam. You take the genuine, terrifying complexity of modern technology and you boil it down into a “Transformation Journey.” You take the fact that corporations are using AI to sack people and you call it “Human-Centric Evolution.”

It’s the language of the boardroom vampire. It’s the “Hasbara” of the tech-bro, a relentless, oily stream of justifications designed to make the extraction of value look like the liberation of spirit.

“We aren’t making you redundant, Brenda from Accounts! We are simply accelerating your personal transformation race! You’re now free to adopt the ‘Unemployed Lifestyle’ ecosystem! It’s very agile! You can scale your poverty in real-time!”

Europe isn’t “losing” anything, Bernice, except perhaps its patience with people who write articles that read like they were composed by an automated buzzword generator that’s been dropped down a flight of stairs.

We don’t need “Transformation.” We need a reality check. We need to stop listening to the high priests of the “Strategic Imperative” and start asking why the people who talk the most about “The Future” are always the ones trying to sell us a map to a place that doesn’t exist, using currency they just made up in their garage.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and “adopt” a pint of lager. I’ll worry about “transforming” into a man who can’t stand up later. It’s a strategic imperative.