Introduction
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Most businesses, including ones Trent Peek and I built ourselves over the years, are fundamentally designed around one thing:
More work = more people.
Need more customer support? Hire. Need more reporting? Hire. Need more output? Hire.
That was just how growth worked.
What AI quietly changed
AI has changed something quite profound underneath all of that. For the first time, cognitive output doesn’t scale neatly with headcount anymore.
From talking to many businesses over the last few weeks, I don’t think most have fully processed what that means yet.
Using AI vs. being built around it
A lot of companies are “using AI”. They’re creating content. Summarising meetings. Automating bits around the edges.
But the actual business itself is still wired exactly the same way it was five years ago. Same bottlenecks. Same silos. Same dependency on human repetition. Same whiteboards as sources of truth.
The real question is structural
The businesses that really win over the next decade probably won’t be the ones with the fanciest AI tools. They’ll be the ones willing to rethink how the whole thing operates.
How information moves.
How decisions get made.
How quickly teams can execute.
Where humans genuinely add value — and where friction simply shouldn’t exist anymore.
That’s the bit I’m finding most fascinating working on AI projects at the moment.
Two worlds forming
You can almost feel two worlds forming.
Businesses using AI as a feature.
And businesses quietly rebuilding themselves around it.
The second group are going to move frighteningly fast.