The AI Industrial Revolution

We are enamored with AI. Everyone is experimenting, everyone is declaring they are “AI first.”

AI is being integrated into as many workflows as possible. It’s writing our emails, cranking out thousands of emails faster than any individual could. It’s cleaning our inboxes, updating our CRMs, managing our calendars, doing our call prep. Agentic AI now completely takes over entire workflows, answering customer emails, handling calls, doing outreach. Not only are these agents cheaper, they don’t need coffee or bathroom breaks, vacations, and they don’t slack off or complain.

Most or our focus on AI today is about one of two things: Plugging into our existing workflows, doing much of the work for us; or completely replacing people in those workflows. We are excited about it’s efficiency comparing the workflow before AI and after AI, reveling in how much more work is done.

You can tell I’m building up to something. Let’s try a thought experiment.

Let’s go back over 100 years to the electrical industrial revolution.

Incorporating electric motors into industrial manufacturing changed everything. But, for the sake of this experiment, let’s imagine we incorporated electricity into our industrial workflows in the same way we are leveraging AI today.

To understand this, we have to look at how industrial manufacturing worked before the electric motor. At the time, manufacturing plants were powered by giant coal or oil-fired steam engines. Or they were located by rivers where water flowing over a water wheel powered a rotating drive shaft. These rotating master drive shafts drove the entire plant through a maze of drive belts and gears.

This worked very well, it was a vast improvement over the prior “craftsman” era. But the system had some constraints:

• Each master drive shaft had limited capacity, only a small number of machines could be driven off it.
• To minimize power loss, all the machines had to be clustered close to the master shaft.
• When the master shaft stopped, everything stopped.
• Expanding capacity required building another massive steam engine, a master drive shaft and the machines clustered around the shaft.

Then the electric motor was invented.

Now imagine if industry had adopted the electric motor in the same way we are adopting AI today. They would have simply created d giant electric motors to replace the steam engines, hooking these motors to the master drive shafts. Thins would have been faster, cheaper, more reliable, but the same constraints that had existed with the steam engine would have remained.

What actually happened with the invention of the electric motor was a massive transformation in manufacturing. People realized it didn’t just replace the work that had previously been done by the steam engine, but manufacturing could be completely re-imagined. They were no longer limited by current workflows, creating entirely different ways to work and manufacture products.

But in the electric motor changed everything. People immediately understood incorporating electric motors into the existing workflows was missing the entire potential the electric motor offered. People realized each machine could have it’s own electric motor, all the machines didn’t have to be driven off a central drive shaft.

• Machines no longer needed to be clustered around a master drive shaft.
• Manufacturing lines could be reconfigured at will.
• Plants could expand more flexibly without needing a massive central engine.
• Entirely new forms of production became possible.
• Entirely new forms of machinery became possible.

If you took before and after snapshots of manufacturing lines, they were irreconcilable.

Now let’s look at where we are with our current thinking about AI.

We are creating the AI equivalent of the “giant electric motor.”

We are integrating it into our current processes and workflows. Making each of us far more efficient, or replacing us at higher levels of efficiency–but still doing the same old things. We are simultaneously excited and fearful about the jobs that are being replaced by AI. We hear executives announcing massive layoffs because those jobs are now being done by AI.

AI’s true power isn’t replacing humans in existing processes, it’s re-imagining the work itself.

We have the opportunity to completely redesign our organizations and our industries. We have the opportunity to completely redesign workflows. For example, our traditional GTM workflows and bow-ties may no longer be relevant. The traditional awareness, evaluate, close, implementation, adoption, realization, growth cycles in so many of our GTM motions, may be the Steam Engines of the past. What might the new process look like in an AI centric world, how will our customers re-imagine their business improvements, problem management, change initiatives? How can we imagine intercepting and intervening in completely different ways?

We are at the beginning of the AI Industrial Revolution. We can learn from these past revolutions. Some things to think about:

1. We have to stop asking how AI can do what we are currently doing, only better. Instead, we have to think, “What can we do now that we could never do before?”
2. We have to challenge the workflows themselves, not the workers doing the work. Are the workflows even relevant? Is there a totally different way to achieve our goals? What does it mean for the work that people do in those new workflows, what does it mean for the work AI can do?
3. We have to start designing for flexibility and adaptability. Our rigid workflows restrict our ability to experiment and change. At the same time, we have the opportunity to think how we can dynamically reconfigure our work to be more responsive to the opportunities we see emerging.
4. We are in a world of “unknown unknowns.” To work in this world we have to engage experiments within our own organizations and with our customers. In those experiments we will rapidly learn, adapt and start to define the new workflows. As leaders we have to embrace rapid experimentation, knowing some will fail, but in each we learn.

We have to move from focusing on efficiencies, to thinking about possibilities.

It’s now easy to look back at how electricity changed the world. Not because it created more efficient higher performing steam engines, but because it created whole new ways of working and creating.

We should, also, remember, it took a few decades to really understand the power of electricity and the electric motor. It will take us time to understand the real power of AI.

We should expect the same of the AI industrial revolution. The question is, will we settle for “better steam engines,” or will we have the imagination, creativity, and courage to redesign the “factory.”

Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this article.  I have mixed feelings about this discussion.  It’s a good discussion, it gave me new ideas, but it wanders a bit.  In spite of it, the perspective is interesting.  Enjoy!