When AI Changes the Work

There's a lot of talk about becoming an AI-native business. I've been trying to work out what that means.

If you run a global company with 50,000 people, are you really going to become AI-native? Maybe it's more useful to think about which parts of the business could work fundamentally differently because AI now exists. The goals haven't changed: grow revenue, improve margins, reduce costs, grow customer value, reduce risk, make better decisions.

What AI changes is how you might get there.

Take customer understanding. Most companies already have huge amounts of information: behavioural data, transactions, how many products they buy, seasonal patterns, loyalty, customer interviews, complaints and research. Then there's revenue, margin, costs, operations and market data.

Imagine being able to bring more of that together and ask: why are our best customers spending less? What are they doing differently? What have they told us? What's likely to happen next? What should we do about it? That's more interesting than building a better report.

It also changes how you design the work. Start with the outcome. Look at the work that creates it and the decisions being made. What intelligence would improve those decisions? What can AI retrieve, analyse, reason about, predict or act on? Where does human judgement add the most value?

Then think about what else has to change: organisational knowledge, roles and skills, decision rights, technology, governance, trust, and how you measure whether any of it worked. What interests me is bigger than productivity. How much more could an organisation achieve with the people, knowledge and assets it already has?

That's the question behind this Product Note: if AI changes the work, what else has to change?