The art of management is mostly a story of efficiency and alignment. We have optimised the exercise of managing within tight time, labour and capital constraints so fully it is what we routinely consider as management itself. Any other thinking is routinely dismissed or at least huffed at in the corridors of power where the question returns often to “growth is uncertain, efficiency is much more manageable”. Aside from rare entrepreneurial moments, we aren’t used to thinking in terms of abundance. The new wave of AI gives us an opportunity to reconsider where the bounds of our business opportunities lie. That will demand new skills of all managers. Our path to those skills is new questions to ask.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 1
Exploring AI Practice
When I highlighted four clusters of use cases of AI, I finished noting that AI offers a generative opportunity to rewire business models by breaking constraints and transforming value chains. As I have expanded conversations with entrepreneurs and AI practitioners, these are the stories that are most intriguing and captivating because they push hard against our management expectations.
Here are some examples (anonymised to focus on the general implications):
- the start-up that is struggling to hold a product backlog as their engineers productivity lifts and the non-engineers vibe code
- the CEO who deployed a new interactive website in an afternoon of experimentation
- an enterprise transformation where data mapping that normally takes months happened in minutes and suddenly the ability to explore that data map became a generative opportunity rather than a drudge
- organisations considering whether traditional enterprise software models get in the way of AI value creation because these systems are built to lock in both the data and the process
- using AI to turn a depth of unused historical data into a competitive moat for the proposition
- bringing hours of analysis, insight and preparation to bear on interactions, conversations and decisions in minutes
- organisations breaking historical constraints of budgets, resources, capital or time using AI powered approaches and suddenly seeing new possibilities
When the AI conversation starts to become about the cost of tokens and the returns on the massive investment in data centre infrastructure, we may be starting to see new constraints. Yet each of the examples above highlights, ways organisations are creating new value from AI by removing constraints of time, labour, or capital from their historical value chain.
To you the earth yields her fruit, and you
shall not want if you but know how to fill
your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth
that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Khalil Gibran, On Buying and Selling
Embracing Abundance
A number of books, blogposts, and articles have argued that the implications of these changes offer us the opportunity for a new wave or even an age of abundance. Yet to pursue these opportunities we need to move beyond the constraints of managements traditional efficiency mindset. We need Forward deployed entrepreneurs pursuing abundance with new questions.
To pursue these clusters of AI Use case, we need to embrace new management questions and learn new skills. Questions that arise include:
- What more can we do today with what we have?
- What would be do if traditional labour or time or capital constraints didn’t exist?
- What would happen if we didn’t have to queue for coding capabilities, or data access, or analysis, or processing steps to happen?
- How can we deliver more faster?
- What’s the most we can do?
- What will our customers or competitors do with AI around our propositions?
The need to embrace an abundance mindset is driven in most part by the competitive dynamic. Consumers are already working out what they can do for themselves. Your competitors will soon follow on the path to abundance.
Thinking this way is not something you do in an AI strategy team, a skunkworks, a silo or any one technical function. AI efficiency projects might work that way but abundance demands more. Realising transformative opportunities in your value chain takes cross functional collaboration to bring the best of all your resources to bear and to see the whole of the opportunity.
Are you ready to discover where the new constraints really are?
but now—and now—one old,
abundant flower just screws up the room.
Graham Foust, Time I'm Not Here
After experiencing a number waves of technology innovation, Simon Terry is seeking to understand a new wave of AI capabilities and put its opportunities and challenges into context. This blog is where he works out loud on what he learns from reading, conversations with practitioners and experiments.
