Lesson 10. Everything Will be Smart

Artificial intelligence will soon be embedded into every device, system, and industry, automating and optimizing them all. Along the way, almost every process will be automated and optimized.

To date, we’ve automated almost all manufacturing with algorithms and AI. And that’s only part of the story: literally every month sees yet another domain of modern life—from credit-card fraud detection to electronic commerce recommendation systems—automating in some manner. One of the most common experiences of life today is the replacement of human operators by automated “intelligent” systems that are, in many cases, able to anticipate our needs.

But that, of course, is only the beginning. Soon, we will automate entire organizations. Everything—from strategic planning to sales, from business decisions to marketing, and almost everything in between—will be run by new generations of ever-more powerful and human-like algorithms and AI. Even what many consider the last bastion of unique human capabilities, namely creativity, is increasingly being done better, cheaper, and faster by AI. During the decade ahead, every human profession will have an “AI co-pilot” to help us to do more, faster and more accurately. In the decade that follows, expect to see a wide range of autonomous AIs independently handling services ranging from legal and architectural design to drug discovery and medical services.

If you haven’t started your AI transformation, please begin now—you cannot gamble on having extra time. You need to start working towards becoming a fully AI-driven company, right now. What does that mean? It means experimenting with the leading technologies, algorithms, and systems and working to incorporate them into your business operations model. As Peter says, “At the end of this decade, there will be two kinds of companies, those that fully utilize AI, and those that are out of business.”

According to Google’s Bard AI, here are the leading AI platforms in 2023:

• Google AI Platform (Bard)

• Amazon SageMaker

• Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

• IBM Watson Studio

• TensorFlow

• OpenVINO

• Azure OpenAI

• Google Vertex AI

• Hugging Face

• ChatGPT/GPT-4 (OpenAI)

• Caffe

The more you think about it, the more ways you’ll discover for AI to be utilized in your organization. And if you can think of those ways, be sure that somebody out there is already coming up with the algorithm to make your ideas reality.

Speaking of R&D: why can’t AI come up with hypotheses and then run its own experiments—a thousand times a day? How fast can your current human scientists perform the same task with the same precision? Wouldn’t you prefer to save them for really intractable problems that require impressive leaps of imagination?

AI eventually transforms the way your companies are structured. We’ve talked in this book about smart contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and how many organizations (especially in the public sector) will eventually become DAOs and be managed automatically by smart contracts. That will only be possible with AI, especially when all of the employees, suppliers, and customers operate under their own, individualized smart contracts.

Imagine a world where your network always knows the status of your people on a project, suppliers’ delivery dates for parts, and customer usage of your products.

If a lot of this is new—even mind-boggling—you aren’t alone. Most people, even very forward-thinking people in the business world, have little idea how far the AI revolution is going to go. Indeed, it will extend into human interaction and judgments. Now that you do understand, you have the opportunity to beat the competition to this new reality.

Why do you want to get there first? Because decentralized systems scale. And interfaces to that system will enable anybody to come, self-provision, and temporarily (or permanently) join the company or your community. And that, we believe, will become the operational nature of the ExO of the future.