PONTIFEX, MARCH 2026
ISSUE 1
THE THRESHOLD
The Romans called the office Pontifex — bridge-builder. It was a priestly role, but the word is architectural: one who constructs the passage between one shore and another. I’ve been thinking about that for a while as a description of how I actually work — moving between the world of enterprise data and AI, the world of grimoires and esoteric history, and the world of poems and stories. None of these are separate countries to me. They share a border that I seem to live on.
So: a newsletter. Monthly. Named accordingly.
For those who want the full etymology — the working concept name was Frater Pons Aedificator. Brother Bridge-Builder. It was too much for a masthead, but it’s what this is.
THE WORK
A significant change: I’ve joined Birlasoft as Data & AI Partner and BFSI Practice Lead, focused on helping banks, insurers, and financial institutions reach production-scale AI outcomes. After 25 years in this industry, I find myself more convinced than ever that the AI transformation of financial services will be won or lost on data fundamentals — and that agility matters more than scale in the current moment.
Organizations are dealing with the greater than normal uncertainty which seems to mirror the larger world, the natural caution with facing the unknown, and the need to be bold in an age of disruption.
My approach is anchored in three convictions:
Efficiency ratio over transformation theatre. Value realization must be aligned with economic outcomes. AI that can't answer that question cleanly isn't ready for the boardroom.
Specialisation over scale. The largest SIs bring breadth. We bring depth — and depth closes faster, delivers better, and earns longer relationships.
Agentic AI is the current inflection point in a journey that’s just getting started. The firms that move from pilots to production-scale agentic systems in the next 18 months will define the competitive landscape for a decade.
AT THE DESK
My poem The Disappeared has been published in Poems for Protest, an anthology edited by Charlotte Cosgrove and published by Rough Diamond Poetry (March 2026) — a collection of voices raised against injustice, silence, and oppression. I’m glad this poem found its home there.
Elsewhere on the desk: an unnamed anthology of short stories is taking shape — Unseen in the Crowd and The Onshore Blacksite Network are among them, stories that feel made for this particular moment in the world. A haiku collection is also accumulating. They say no one can agree how many haiku make a collection — so how many is enough? Asking for a poet.
Edits on The Magical Art, Vol. II are nearing completion. And I’m waiting — with some anticipation — for Hadean Press to publish The Song of Oberon.
THE ARTE
I was a guest on MAGICK.TV Episode 45, in conversation about The Magical Arte and the grimoire tradition. Watch it here.
The Stephen Romano Gallery is showing Vernacular, Esoteric and Anonymous Works — a remarkable collection of outsider and occult objects. The Pazuzu statue alone is worth the visit: the Assyrian lord of the southwest wind, bringer of disease and protector against worse, staring out of the page with the total composure of something that has been patient for three thousand years. See the collection.
Upcoming: The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory (Princeton University Press) traces the genealogy of conspiracy thinking from Machiavelli through Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” to QAnon. The lineage is longer and stranger than the current moment suggests. And: The Secret History of the Universe over on Substack — follow it here.
WHAT I’M FOLLOWING
Understaffing as a form of enshittification — Cory Doctorow. Doctorow has been the most clear-eyed chronicler of how platforms and institutions deliberately degrade their own services — what he calls enshittification. Here he applies the same lens to staffing: the productivity gains from AI are being used to justify headcount cuts, but productivity is not the same as resilience. When something goes wrong — an aircraft, a system, a crisis — there is nobody home. The air traffic controller situation is not an anomaly. It is the proof of concept.
The State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 — Deloitte. The annual temperature check. The headline is familiar: move boldly, the rewards are real, governance matters. What interests me is the delta between the organisations that are achieving production-scale outcomes and those still running pilots. That gap is almost never about the technology.
The Hater’s Guide to the SAASpocalypse — Ed Zitron. Zitron has been writing the most acerbic and accurate commentary on the tech industry’s current unravelling. This one is on the SaaS business model cracking under the weight of AI commoditisation and customer fatigue. He is not wrong and he is very funny about it.
Reading Capital with David Harvey — Free. Harvey has been teaching Marx’s Capital for fifty years. His free online lectures are one of the better intellectual gifts the internet has produced. Given the current political moment, understanding the original text — not the memes, not the slogans — seems more useful than it has in a while.
Tracing the Path of Modernity in the Navajo Pueblito’s Shadow — Jonathan Parkes Allen. Allen writes with unusual depth about the intersections of Islamic intellectual history and the wider pre-modern world. This piece is characteristically unexpected: what does modernity look like when approached from the margin rather than the centre?
The Most Haunted Cities in the American South. Sometimes a list is just a list. This list, however, brings the sensation of layers of American history that still pulse, bearing their trauma, grief, and emotional resonance through the years.
The Dry and the Wet Burn Together — Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, LRB. The title is Quranic — the dry and the wet are recorded in the clear book — applied to the war in West Asia. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is one of the more rigorous commentators on the region. Worth reading slowly.
— Aaman Lamba
Writing from the bridge between worlds.
aamanlamba.com · Reply to this email — I read everything.
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