The age of AI has arrived. Most of us still cannot imagine the complete impact of it on our work, companies, lives, and families. Our brains need to get used to a new paradigm, a new syntax for how we perceive the world. I don't mean the difference between fake and real like we see in social media, but more deeply the question who am I communicating with? A human being or a computer, a company or a computer? Or am I dealing with a mix? This is so essential for how we stand in the world. And it is also essential for how we organize our companies.
Most companies are still organized like an army, a clear hierarchy, chiefs in charge, specializations nicely structured in departments: clear responsibilities, detailed budgets, clear lines and walls. But, if I step back a bit and compare a company with a swarm of birds, then I see a different organization. A swarm is amazing, how it moves coordinated from left to right, high to low, etc. Synchronized. If a bird on the outside sees a danger, it triggers its neighbors who again trigger their neighbors, and so on, in a split second. It is a perfect network, living objects with connections. Isn't a big AI system (LLM) like a swarm? It contains small knowledge (language) objects that have many, billions relationships in its neural network. Endless. Give it a Prompt (like the Swarm sees a danger) and it will activate its network, like the swarm. No departments. Holistic per definition.
My idea is that managing an innovative company as if it is an intelligent swarm, as if it IS an AI system, in fact a knowledge system, is required to move forward in the new economic era: integrated and holistic, flexible and agile, no walls, but still well organized. This demands of course new management approaches, new governance methods, new organizational structures, new systems.
Interesting, isn't it?