Why the companies of the next decade will not be built by automating the companies we already have
Most companies are asking some version of the same question:
Where can we use AI?
Which processes can we automate? Which workflows can agents take over? Where can we reduce cost or become more efficient?
These are reasonable questions.
But I think they are too small.
Because before we ask how AI fits into the company we have today, there is a more fundamental question:
Was today’s company actually designed for the world that is coming?
Processes solved yesterday’s problem
Processes are not the enemy. They solved an enormously important problem.
As companies became larger and more complex, they needed a way to make good decisions repeatable. So we standardized. We created roles and hierarchies. We documented knowledge. We built processes.
Eventually, software made those processes more reliable, and automation made them faster.
There is a simple way to think about this:
A process is the memory of a problem we already know how to solve.
We understand the problem well enough to define a path. If A happens, do B. If X occurs, send it to Y. If a threshold is exceeded, ask for approval.
That works extremely well when we know what we are dealing with. But that is also the limitation.
Even a re-engineered process is still a known path
This is where I think many AI transformations remain more conservative than they appear.
We map the process. We redesign it. We re-engineer it. We digitize it. We automate it. And now, increasingly, we make it autonomous.
That can create real value. The process may become faster, cheaper and cleaner.
But it is still fundamentally the same thing:
a known path through a known problem.
Even if you completely re-engineer a process, you are still redesigning something you already understand well enough to describe.
And the future is interesting precisely because so much of it cannot yet be described.
What will customers expect three years from now? Which technologies will fundamentally change an industry? Which new business models will become possible? Which assumptions we rely on today will quietly stop being true?
The unknown has no process.
That is why autonomous automation, valuable as it is, is still mainly about making the known run without us. Intelligence becomes more interesting when we do not yet know what should happen.
Start with what must become possible
If your entire AI strategy starts from your current process map, then your AI strategy starts from what your company already knows.
But the biggest opportunity ahead of your company may not have a process yet. It may not have a department. It may not have an owner. It may not even have a name.
So perhaps the better question is not:
What can we improve?
But:
What must become possible?
What should the company be able to notice that it cannot notice today? What should it understand? What should it be able to decide faster? What should it be able to create? What should it be capable of becoming?
That changes the direction of the conversation. Instead of starting with today and projecting forward, we can start with the future and work backwards.
Competitive advantage may become speed of becoming
For decades, companies have been measured by efficiency, utilization, predictability, margin and scale. Those measures will not disappear.
But another capability is becoming increasingly important:
How quickly can a company become something it is not today?
Can it develop a new capability? Enter a new market? Create a new product? Respond to technological disruption? Change its business model? Learn something about its environment and translate that learning into action?
A resilient company survives a shock. An adaptive company becomes different because of it.
The competitive advantage of the future may not only be speed of execution.
It may be speed of becoming.
The most interesting companies do not exist yet
This is why the AI conversation is much bigger than agents, digital workers or automation.
The real opportunity is not simply to use new technology to operate the old company more efficiently. It is to ask what kinds of companies, products and business models can exist now that could not meaningfully exist before.
The most interesting companies of the next decade probably do not exist yet. Their processes have not been documented. Their business models have not been benchmarked. Their structures have not been copied from a competitor.
There is nothing to optimize yet. Somebody has to imagine them first.
And perhaps that is the most important shift in perspective:
In your next strategy meeting, identify one capability your company will need over the next three years. Then define the smallest experiment you can start today to begin building that capability.
The future is not something we arrive at.
It is something we design backwards from.
Sara Sadeghloo explores questions at the intersection of AI, systems, technology and the future of companies – especially the questions that require knowledge beyond AI.
Sara Sadeghloo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-sadeghloo-alyn-ai/