This story begins with failure.
The client didn’t renew the contract, so we downsized. It made sense operationally, but the decision revealed greater than a single role or contract: a growing tension inside modern leadership that is becoming increasingly difficult to disregard.
Our company includes a creative services business and an AI-powered software platform. This combination made one trend clear: the modern economy rewards software, automation and the investor and entrepreneur Sea Ravikant calls influence — “force multiplier for your work.”
Years ago, Ravikant lamented that labor – once the original form of leverage – had been “revalued” and that capital, code, and now artificial intelligence would define the next era. “You want a minimal amount of work that will allow you to use other forms of leverage,” he wrote.
Sam Altmanperhaps the “face” of artificial intelligence, he is famous for advocating advantages of artificial intelligence as the ultimate form of leverage, claiming that it will create “unicorns for one person” and that “[a]“Almost everyone will want more AI to act on their behalf.”
Investor enthusiasm throughout Cursor, Sympathetic AND Mercor — a company with extraordinary performance and extremely small teams — suggests he could also be right. Humanoid robots, while still early, extend this trajectory even further.
But behind their enthusiasm is something that AI’s most ardent advocates seem reluctant to say. In this brave recent world of AI, optimal business models still reward leverage, software, and automation, of course, but now in addition they appear to reward something recent: having significantly fewer files.
As a result, we return to the major query:
The economic pressure is clear, but the pressure is just as real. We all consider that AI will transform our workflows, but what about our culture – the elusive connective tissue beneath all of it? It’s no coincidence that before AI, the best corporations often had the best cultures. In fact, not only do we consider this dynamic will proceed as we adapt to AI, but we consider it can grow to be much more essential.
The future of work – and even perhaps the future – will invariably depend on how people and machines work together, but it can depend on the culture we create that holds that collaboration together.
The frameworks, norms, and practices that can ultimately govern partnerships between humans and AI are critical but remain undefined. And we’ll all have to build this culture largely from scratch.