Every company has a CFO. Almost none has anyone whose job is time.
Dr Atif Ansar has spent fifteen years at Oxford measuring what happens to the world's biggest projects between the promise and the ribbon cutting. Dams that double their budget. Rail lines that spend four years building a schedule and open four years late. And an uncomfortable finding: the countries famous for building well suffer the same overruns as everyone else.
His argument is that we have built an entire profession around controlling cost while leaving time almost ungoverned. There is no double-entry accounting for time. Nobody invoices for it. Yet time is the scarcer commodity, and it is far easier to measure than money.
He talks about where AI genuinely changes this and where it is still a slide in a pitch deck, why he thinks contracts should guarantee a maximum time rather than a maximum price, and what that would do to professional indemnity.
Plus a question from an architect in Dublin that almost nobody in the industry wants to answer out loud.
Dr Atif Ansar is co-founder and executive chairman of Foresight, an Oxford-based platform that uses AI to forecast and accelerate delivery on major capital projects. He is also an academic at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, where he has worked since 2006. For fifteen years he and his colleagues have studied why megaprojects, anything costing roughly a billion euros or more, come in late and over budget.