A lot of companies are making a lot of bold moves of late.
Bold moves that are even bolder than all the other bold moves we’ve gotten used to since AI changed everyone’s definition of bold.
- Allbirds. A shoe company makes the oddest pivot and rebrand in the history of business, declaring they are now NewBird AI.
- Salesforce. A company that built an empire from an everything-for-everyone-right-out-of-the-box CRM platform announces the platform will become headless — meaning the underlying pieces will be offered separately from the user interface since everyone can build their own interface now.
- Apple. A company that prides itself on its reliable walled ecosystem announces an accelerated succession plan for the CEO who grew it and made sure it stayed reliable and walled, and it’s hard not to suspect that the company’s — let’s call it cautious — approach to AI was a factor.
And that’s before the now routine announcements of ever-more-ginormous investments in various AI plays.
For all its faults, Meta was among the first to stop AI-washing, stating upfront that the upcoming bold layoff of 10% of its workforce is to fund those investments and not because AI is making roles redundant. (What a boldly horrible thing to announce in advance, however, to the people who now have to worry for the next month about whether they’ll be chosen as tribute.)
Bold can backfire bigly
A fair share of these moves smack of desperation. (cough NewBird AI)
But you can sorta see why. There’s still oodles of guesswork on how this whole AI thing will turn out, and there’s no such thing as a calculated risk without anything to calculate against. So, sure, might as well undo a hard-fought corporate identity.
There’s also an element of FOMO. Nobody wants to be left without a chair when the AI music stops, and the technology is moving fast enough that incremental steps won’t keep pace. Thus, companies are racing against each other to prove who can do the most with AI, come hell or high water.
Some of the earlier moves in this direction are now backfiring. The backlash against the proliferation of slop content continues to grow, and the companies who proudly laid off swaths of “replaceable” workers learned the hard way they weren’t truly replaceable. Note: Companies are still doing this, but it’s because AI is a convenient scapegoat for poor business decisions. See AI-washing above.
The misstep in those early decisions was thinking AI could serve as a swap-in substitute in systems built for humans. For a short time, it seemed like it could, but those were the days when it still seemed magical enough that we were collectively ignoring signals to the contrary. Like chatbots not being able to do math reliably.
Yet companies continue to implement the human-substitute approach anyway, likely because it’s the “bold” path of least resistance. Demonstrating adoption of AI without truly adopting AI in a way that would have the bold results they desire.
The disruption dilemma
We’ve never seen a technology as disruptive as AI, nor one that has moved so quickly with the disruption.
The key there is disrupt not destroy. The risk-takers who are leaning into the disruption part will end up having the biggest advantage. Meaning, instead of letting their core business slowly atrophy as the dynamics shift, they’re reimagining it for an agent/human future post-haste. Which could indeed mean a good chunk of their current operating model — people, process, tools, etc. — goes away or is dramatically changed to make room for rebuilding.
The Salesforce decision is a good example. Yes, the SaaSpocalypse seems to be locked and loaded, but day-to-day business still relies heavily on these products. Meanwhile, going headless is a direction that seems reasonably certain given the state of today’s technology. Even if AI’s evolution stopped cold tomorrow, there’s already enough in place that people eventually won’t need an all-in-one platform that optimizes breadth over depth. They’ll be able to build their own, customized precisely for their needs. And it’ll be a lot easier to do it with road-tested core components they can assemble instead of building from scratch.
Disruption is always a huge risk, though. Over at Apple, new CEO John Ternus has some tough decisions ahead, and not just in the WWJD (What Would (Steve) Jobs Do?) sense that will now haunt him for eternity. Apple was a major disruptor in days of yore and the driving force behind the mobile devices we can no longer live without. But if it attempts to go down the disruption path now, it risks going too far, too fast and alienating its very loyal customer base. People might be able to build their own platform, but few can build their own mobile phone.
Who wins? Who knows
We won’t know the winners and losers of these bold decisions until enough time passes to bring new variables into the equation: Changing customer behaviors. Changing technology. Whatever the hell’s going on in the world at large.
Watching and waiting is more than a bit terrifying, however. Knowledge workers are along for the ride on the Chaos Express, which exacerbates existential worries about paychecks and obsolescence.
Remember when Covid redefined how we did work? Yeah. That’s what’s coming. Again, but times a thousand. In tandem with relearning your job — assuming you still have a job, which isn’t a given these days — you’ll also need to contend with an ongoing parade of bold decisions that will be inscrutable at times. Get comfortable with ambiguity and with learning to pivot direction on the fly. It’s OK not to have everything mapped out ahead of time as long as you’re moving toward something and not away from it.
The consensus at the moment is that human discernment and judgment will continue to not easily be replaced, no matter how sophisticated the technology gets. But different roles have different levels of those skills, and you’ll have to gauge where you fit along the scale. Keep your personal value prop in mind as your work evolves. What you’re doing a year or two from now could be very different than what you’re doing today.
And yes. The trend of cutting jobs to fuel AI investment will persist. It’s a fast way to free up cash. Many prognosticators, in fact, are saying we’re at the beginning of a new era in which the one-job-at-a-time career ladder is over, and portfolio careers (multiple income streams) will be the norm. You might hold multiple part-time jobs at the same time, or cycle through contract work. Personally, I think we don’t have enough societal safety nets in place to make that a viable reality anytime soon. But I don’t make the rules, and neither do you.
We’ll need bold moves of our own to win the game.
All opinions here are my own. All text is my own, too, including the em dashes. I welcome constructive comments and discussion on LinkedIn and Bluesky.