The focus shifts. More attention goes to sales, case studies, speaking gigs, packaging, and staking out new territory before it becomes old territory.
And sure, you don’t always have the bandwidth to zoom out and make sense of what’s happening across the industry.
But I’ve started noticing something strange: alongside the new positioning, the type of content has changed too. It’s collapsed into roughly two genres:
- We’re speaking at / running a workshop.
- Here’s our case study.
That’s it.
Okay, fair enough.
But when people who publicly talk about AI transformation barely discuss the fundamental shifts happening in the field — that raises questions.
Take Jack Dorsey’s manifesto: From Hierarchy to Intelligence.
This is about as foundational as it gets when it comes to AI disrupting how organizations work. And yet I almost didn’t see it discussed in my feed.
Maybe it just passed me by. But if it didn’t — that’s genuinely strange.
The piece has one really striking thesis: hierarchy is just an old solution to cognitive friction inside organizations.
Here’s the logic.
A company gets big. There’s a lot of context. No single person can hold it all. So layers of management appear:
- status updates flow upward,
- decisions flow downward,
- and in between — meetings, presentations, syncs, re-explanations, and so on.
At some point, this becomes latency — a delay between what the customer needs and what the company actually does. The delays stack up, cognitive friction accumulates, blockers appear. We just accept this as normal. We don’t know another way.
But there is another way.
Dorsey proposes thinking of a company as an intelligence system.
Every company — every single one — leaves a digital trail: documents, tasks, CRM data, metrics, code, meetings, decisions. And it’s now possible to build a model from all of that.
A model that can understand, in near real-time, what’s happening, where the blockers are, what customers want, what resources are available, what decisions have already been made, and what’s standing in the way of the next step.
In other words: the company stops being a collection of departments passing context back and forth, and becomes a system that converts customer intent into action — faster.
Customer needs something → organization does it. Not by routing it through layers of management, decks, and manual reports. But by reading the signal, assembling the right capabilities, and taking the next step.
And no — robots aren’t replacing people. Human judgment, taste, relationships, network effects — those are genuinely hard to replicate.
But management as manual context transportation? That’s slowly heading for the dustbin of history.
Pretty compelling, right?
Here’s my point. From people who write “AI transformation” in their bio, I want more than case studies and speaking announcements.
I want to understand what’s actually happening in the industry: what new organizational models are emerging, which management crutches are becoming optional, which roles are losing relevance, which are becoming more critical, what papers and research are worth reading, where AI is reducing cognitive friction and where it’s just adding beautiful chaos.
Give us that, people.
There’s always time to sell later.
