This Time, It's Different. (Or Is It?)

I appreciate the overwhelming response I received from my role change post last week. I promise to get back to all the comments and personal reach-outs as soon as I can.

I'm excited about the path ahead – lots of exciting opportunities are out there despite the immediate market turbulence.

As noted in my prior post, I want to take some of my newfound freedom to reflect on how private equity, TMT, and the world of work have evolved over the past three years. I hope these posts will be engaging, thoughtful, and provocative. At the end of this post, I will share some topics that have been swirling in my mind. But first, I want to tackle the elephant in the room:

Twenty Years of Technological Progress

I've spent the last 20 years or so in and around media, information services, telecoms, and tech (both consumer mobile and enterprise). This vertical interest morphed into what we all started calling 'digital' in the early 2010s.

As a quick recap, the world over the past 20+ years has been marked by amazing technological progress:

• Increasing compute power
• Rapid miniaturization
• Integration of features and functions into more and more capable devices and software
• Higher and higher speeds of connectivity
• Vast arrays of sensors
• Unlimited swathes of data across all dimensions

We all know this story. We also all know the profound benefits these technological advantages have provided us:

• The information intensity of the world has exponentially increased
• The information transparency (including availability, price, etc.) of the world has markedly increased
• The transaction costs for information exchange have plummeted
• The speed of connectability (e.g., APIs) and integration (e.g., turnkey SaaS) of capabilities has increased, and the cost and technical complexity of doing so has plunged

Yet, despite all these advancements, we didn't really see the wholesale re-wiring of the world that you might have expected. RPA didn't change the labour intensity of front, middle, and back offices as many had hoped, and the ROI of successful implementations was just okay. Constant connectivity allowed for greater amounts of meetings and closer integration of time zones. Yet, global expansion for an organization was still hard and fraught with obstacles.

During this time, we saw a blizzard of business buzzwords emerge. "Industry 4.0", "the Consumer Experience Revolution", "Intelligence at the Edge" and hundreds of other well-defined terms were borne to describe the evolution of our brave new world. Yet, somehow despite enormous progress – like when's the last time you referred to a paper map? – we still yearned for a great unlock like that ushered in by the iron ploughshare or standardized electric utilities.

Recently, we have witnessed the meteoric rise of LLMs and other associated tools loosely lumped into the grab bag we call GenAI. So much promise, so much capital, and so much rhetoric poured into these mysterious new capabilities.

So, Is It Really Different This Time?

I am uncharacteristically going to answer unequivocally: Yes, this time it's different.

I answer this way because I am living the huge promise of these new tools every day. Things that used to take a fully-staffed advisory team can now be done at a fraction of the time, human capital intensity, and effort of the past. And the quality of search, summarization, synthesis, and re-presentation of insights is as high or higher than ever before.

There are a few reasons why these tools have unlocked this promise:

Adoption barriers are far lower: The natural language interfaces fronting most of these models allow anyone who can state a desire or ask a question to engage with them. 'Deep prompt engineering' which was a few months ago a sort of arcane art best performed by psychologists or playwrights is already far less necessary to achieve great outcomes. We don't need to learn Python or HTML5 or any other language to drive impact – and the tools can even code stuff up for you if you ask them nicely.

Data is much more malleable: We used to have to undertake significant transformations of data. We built very expensive data warehouses or slightly less expensive data lakes. Now, we can upload PDFs and other unstructured data artifacts directly into a personal container and can interrogate them almost immediately.

Impact is more direct: Instead of deep re-engineering of workflows and establishment of standard operating procedures, we can use these tools in our day-to-day tasks with no more than a "copy, paste" into existing enterprise tools.

Managerial skill is leveraged: You can direct these tools like you would a more junior tenured colleague to achieve things in a natural managerial way. You can provide them example outputs and it will match your level of depth and precision for a whole bunch more output.

The Implications

Yes, the 'Hype Cycle' is still a thing. But it's arguably a much smaller thing than since the introduction of the first widespread roll out of spreadsheet and word processor programs in the 1980s. These tools will change the way you work soon – if they haven't already. They will be embedded in the tools available to you. They will manage traditional systems of engagement and systems of record that power our enterprises. And many will work silently behind the scenes without even your notice.

Professionals and organizations that have not yet deeply explored the impact of these capabilities will be left behind quickly. No, this isn't a call for another sweep of "GenAI use cases" to be piloted by some central team in HQ. It's a call to examine fundamentally your business model, your supporting operating platform, and your long-term customer, supplier, and talent propositions.

I have had the privilege of leading, integrating, and transforming many wonderful organizations over the last 25 years. I know it's hard. It will still be hard. But now it will also be different. Technological progress at this level can create fear and resistance, but the opportunity for all of us is also enormous.

Coming Up

Over the coming weeks, I'm committing myself to putting my thoughts on digital paper and letting all of you mix it up. Here are a few topics I plan to address:

• "I know Kung Fu" and the increasing returns to EQ, IQ, and Expertise
• "Tasks, Processes, and Journeys (Oh my!)"
• "The Apprenticeship Conundrum" and how will we train the next generation of leaders
• Levels of analysis and how new tools will disrupt differentially business models
• "Knowledge Management: The Pull and the Push"
• "Whither private equity" and the upside/downside of this new world

I hope all of you find some bit of my contribution to this space helpful. There are many great thinkers, writers, and leaders on this subject. I shall name check and refer to many over my coming posts.

The falsely attributed Chinese proverb says, "May you live in interesting times" (probably first coined by Joseph Chamberlain in the 1890s). We are indeed.