Agency or abdication:
AI, empowerment, and
the futures we are choosing.
I work on one organizing question: when AI is adopted, who gains agency and who loses it? The research spans education, organizational management, labor markets, knowledge production, and strategic foresight, unified by a single analytical commitment: distinguishing genuine empowerment from dependency dressed up as adoption.
I am based at Narxoz Business School in Almaty, where I lead research on AI governance, institutional futures, and the application of these frameworks in a Central Asian context. I publish through working papers because conventional academic publishing often moves too slowly for the world it is trying to describe.
Four Walls Observatory
A live evidence system tracking four pressures on mass higher education in the AI transition: proof, cost, legitimacy, and jobs. Developed from The Proof and Trust Shock (Wachtel & Simpson, 2026), it combines reviewed UK and US evidence, selected international comparators, counter-signals, and a transparent evidence ledger.
A connected body of work on AI, agency, proof, and institutional design.
The site brings together research papers, public tools, advisory frameworks, and live dashboards. The common thread is practical governance: how institutions keep human judgment, evidence, and accountability visible when AI makes plausible output cheap.
