Business in the age of AI: From economies of scale to ecosystems of success
World Central Kitchen/ZDNETIf you wanted to provide food relief to crises around the world, how would you start?Most of us, wanting to do the most good possible, would look at the money we have available and go “OK, how can I make as many meals as humanly possible with what I’ve got?”Reasonable right? You go in thinking that if you minimize the cost of each meal you can feed the most people. This is standard, time-honored resource management at work. It’s about being efficient and getting the most out of what you have. This is how all of our businesses and institutions are organized and run.Also: Six levels of autonomous work: How AI augments, then replacesBut, wait! If you start with the unit cost per meal as your key variable, you’ll probably end up using centralized commissaries (food factories), the cheapest ingredients, and a volunteer meal production workforce. You’ll probably air-lift the meals to a safe place and arrange for them to be handed out to the locals from there.And — this is in no way a criticism — when you start with your resources first and with a high-volume, low-unit-cost mindset, a mindset that’s all about “doing more with less” and economies of scale, that’s the operating model you’ll end up with. You’ll have unintentionally built a silo, an organization that is designed to accumulate resources and then protect and extract the most value from them possible.The thing about silos is — they work. They’re successful (at least for their owners and managers). And they’re easy to implement. Silos are the simplest way to manage resources — centralize and protect. Organizations have done it this way for years — actually, for thousands of years. More
