Embodied Assessment

Seeing What Strategy Usually Misses

Embodied assessment is an augmented form of thinking. It is not the only one, but it is the one we explore here—through a practice we discovered inside NVIDIA. Most organisations evaluate performance the way archaeologists study ancient ruins: by sifting through remnants. Dashboards, quarterly reviews, after-action reports. But by the time a pattern is legible, it is often inert. The question isn’t what happened. It’s what wants to happen next.

At NVIDIA, that question has been institutionalised.

Each week, tens of thousands of employees write their “Top Five Emails” — five short signals distilling what matters most in their work. These are not summaries. They are verbs: Design. Escalate. Align. Imagine. Resolve. Forty thousand voices, rendered not as roles or outputs, but as actions in motion. From this sea of signal, Jensen Huang reads a hundred a day.

The AI system that enables this sampling does not replace him. It orients him. It clusters emergent patterns. It surfaces weak signals. It extends executive proprioception—that embodied, whole-system sense of how the organisation is moving, sensing, stretching.

This is not employee feedback. In the emergent age of AI augmentation, it is embodied assessment: an evaluative practice not applied to the organisation, but enacted within it. It is how thought is lifted—out of silos, away from retrospection—and expanded into the shared cognitive field. The system doesn’t just report on the organisation. It enables the organisation’s capacity to perceive itself thinking—amplifying not just what is known, but what is knowable in time.

Not Information. Atmosphere.

Where most firms treat information as throughput, NVIDIA treats it as context. The point is not to collect more data, but to increase the dimension of human discernment. This is what strategy usually misses: that intelligence doesn’t come from visibility alone. It comes from vantage.

Traditional assessment instruments measure performance. Augmented, embodied assessment, such as what NVIDIA have implemented, enables the perception of emergence. It listens at the edges where strategy is still becoming: half-formed, improvisational, real. It doesn’t flatten nuance into categories. It lets patterns arise from verbs and allows people to interact with them through embodied practice. And what do you do with this? You act. You intervene. You move faster than you otherwise could, because you are now seeing what was previously invisible. These aren’t just signals—they are options, inflection points, moments of leverage. The organisation becomes capable of strategic movement at a velocity few others can match, because perception is no longer passive. It is practice.

These verbs are not part of a framework. They are instruments. They cut through abstraction and expose where real work—and real returns—live. This is the strategic insight behind the Luminous Group’s “Verbs for AI”: cognitive actions like Estimate, Detect, Generate, and Act, each overlaid with strategic meaning. These are not abstract categories, but strategic levers that help organisations hone distinctive competencies, prioritise investments, and surface value surfaces often invisible to automation logic. The original article is available via LinkedIn here.

From Measurement to Motion

Why does this matter? Because what strategy calls execution is often just the lagging indicator of perception. If you cannot perceive, you cannot prioritise. You cannot coordinate. You cannot act in time.

Embodied assessment closes that gap. It is not a new analytics method—it is an emergent sensory mode. available through AI augmentation. Unlike traditional assessments that extract and judge, embodied assessment enables organisations to feel where they are shifting, before those shifts harden into metrics. Our era marks the beginning of the post-data age: where the fantasy that “data is the new oil” is revealed as a dry well—promising depth, but delivering emptiness. Of course, data still matters—it always will. But when data becomes the centre of gravity, perception flattens, and judgement recedes. Machines doing things by themselves was never the point. The point is what humans can perceive—and do—when their thinking is scaffolded, surfaced, and extended. That is what embodied assessment makes possible: action rooted not in retrospective certainty, but in situated clarity. The organisation doesn’t just know more. It moves differently.

Embodied assessment recasts evaluation and judgement as a sensory organ of the organisation—but not one made of code alone. It is the human and the computer, in concert, that create this new perceptual capability: distributed, adaptive, and alive to context. And once in place, it produces effects that most firms try to buy through tooling or consultants: early warning signals, alignment without micromanagement, initiative-level situational awareness, leadership capacity that scales without dilution.

This is what Huang’s company has built and practised—systematically, with rigour. Not a dashboard. He reads them not to supervise, but to synchronise. On Sunday nights, scotch in hand, he reads to feel the hum of the company’s cognitive field. Not because it’s efficient. Because it’s alive. Because attention, practiced with ritual and rigour, is how you become a sensor for what matters most. A strategic sensing layer. A practice that turns cultural cognition into operational foresight.

What Emerges

And what emerges from this augmented practice is what strategy rarely captures:

• not just confidence, but confidence at the edge

• not just alignment, but momentum before consensus

• not just insight, but insight in time to act

These are the real returns of augmentation. They are not retrospective. They are not programmatic. They are felt, co-created, lived-in. They are embodied—and, crucially, they are measurable. They show up not just in culture or coordination, but in outcomes that land on the financial statements. This is what the Luminous Group’s Augmentation Premium makes visible: returns that automation alone cannot account for, but which embodied, augmented practice systematically delivers. For more, see the full articulation here.

And they cannot be generated by automation alone.

They require a new philosophy. Because there was always a philosophy—only it was invisible, mechanistic, and unexamined. The belief that machines should operate independently, that more data meant better decisions, that automation alone could deliver transformation. Embodied assessment topples that reflex. It insists: people are not sensors, but sense-makers. That assessment is not a mirror, but a method. That AI does not replace judgement, but raises it to a level where the organisation can see itself think—and then, act.

That is the altitude Jensen Huang has reached. Not by flying above the company. But by becoming one of its instruments of attention. And that—quietly, precisely—is what strategy has always missed.

What could your organisation perceive, if it stopped mistaking data for discernment? What altitude of attention could it achieve—if it chose to see itself, not from above, but from within?

Until now.