Why the winners of the AI era will not be the organisations that picked the best tools.
On 31 March, Jack Dorsey and Sequoia's Roelof Botha published an essay, From Hierarchy to Intelligence, arguing that corporate hierarchy is an obsolete information routing system. Their claim is that AI can now perform the coordination functions that management layers have always existed to provide, making the entire structure redundant. The essay is compelling, the direction is real, and it is already being cited in boardrooms as evidence that the future of organisational design has arrived.
It has not arrived. Not for most organisations.
Dorsey is describing what a finished building looks like. The architecture is coherent, the logic is sound. What the essay does not contain is anything about the ground it needs to be built on. For most organisations, that ground is not prepared. The foundations are not laid. And nobody is talking about what it takes to prepare them.
Block, with millions of daily transactions flowing through Cash App and Square, has spent years building those foundations. Clean, machine-readable data across its entire operation. A culture that defaults to technology when it faces any problem. A leadership team that has already made peace with a fundamentally different conception of what the business is.
Most businesses are not starting from that place. And their leadership teams, if they are honest, have not yet looked hard at what that distance actually means for them.
The Comfort of Being Equally Behind
Most leadership teams look around their sector, see that everyone is roughly as far along on AI as they are, and take quiet comfort in that. It is the most expensive mistake they will make this decade.
The organisations that will beat them are not in that comparison group. In our experience, they never are. They stopped asking, "How do we use technology to support the way we work?" and started asking a different question entirely: "How do we build an organisation in which technology is central to how people think, decide and operate?"
That is not a technology upgrade. It is a different conception of what the organisation is. Different in its structure, its culture, its economics and its speed. We see it in the work we do with our clients every day. And the leaders building it are not announcing it.
The gap between a tech-supported organisation and a tech-centric one does not close with a new tool or a productivity initiative. It closes with a leadership team that has genuinely reimagined what their organisation needs to become and then built the operating system to get there.
Most exec teams have not had that conversation yet. I fear many never will.
The Mistake Hiding in Plain Sight
Walk into most businesses today and you will find some version of the same pattern. A few AI tools in use, mostly productivity focused. A handful of enthusiastic individuals who have gone deep on the technology. A leadership team that is broadly supportive but has not fundamentally changed how it thinks about the business. And a growing anxiety that something important is happening that the organisation is not quite keeping pace with.
The typical response is to accelerate implementation. Find more tools. Launch a customer-facing AI initiative. Hire someone with AI in their job title. Move faster.
This is where most organisations compound the original mistake.
Customer-facing AI, deployed before the internal operations are understood and optimised, tends to produce visible failures at exactly the moment the business needs to be building confidence. Complex solutions, built before the organisation has developed the judgement to evaluate them, consume resource and generate noise without generating value. And all of it happens without addressing the actual problem, which is not a shortage of technology. It is a shortage of organisational capability to adopt technology well.
The businesses getting traction are not the ones moving fastest on implementation. They are the ones that started somewhere less glamorous: their own internal operations, their own processes, their own people. They banked the easy wins first, because easy wins prove the business case, build internal confidence, and teach the organisation something about what AI can and cannot do in their specific context. That knowledge compounds. The businesses skipping that phase are not moving faster. They are accumulating a different kind of debt.
The Debt Nobody is Measuring
Technology debt is a concept most leaders understand in its conventional form: you are behind on implementation, your systems are outdated, you need to catch up. That is a real problem, but it is the visible one. It shows up in IT audits and vendor conversations.
The debt that is silently compounding in most organisations right now is harder to see and significantly more dangerous. It is the absence of an operating model for adoption itself: a repeatable way to identify opportunities, test them quickly, measure value, build capability and scale what works.
No clear mechanism for identifying where technology creates genuine value. No cultural norm that makes technology the first response to a problem rather than an afterthought. No shared leadership conviction about what the organisation needs to become or why.
That debt does not appear on a balance sheet. It does not show up in a board report. It shows up when a competitor who has been quietly building that capability starts moving faster than you across multiple fronts simultaneously, and you discover that your response time is structural rather than circumstantial. You are not slow because you made a bad decision. You are slow because you never built the machine that makes fast decisions and rapid execution possible.
By the time that gap is visible, it has usually been widening for two or three years.
What the Leadership Conversation Actually Needs to Be
In our experience working with leadership teams across professional services, financial services, and PE-backed businesses, the organisations that make genuine progress share one characteristic that has nothing to do with technology. Their leadership teams have sat together and done something uncomfortable: they have looked honestly at what their competitive environment is becoming, imagined the organisations that will thrive in it, and then looked back at their own business with clear eyes.
That exercise tends to produce a specific kind of discomfort. Not panic, but recognition. The realisation that the question they have been asking, "How do we adopt AI?", is not the right question. The right question is: "What kind of organisation do we need to become, and what will it take to build it?"
Those are different conversations with different implications. The first is a technology project. The second is a leadership mandate. And until a board is having the second conversation, the first one will continue to produce patchy results regardless of how much is spent on tools.
What follows from that conversation is not a technology strategy. It is an operating model for how the organisation identifies, tests, measures and scales technology adoption as a continuous capability. The people structures that enable distributed thinking about technology. The governance that makes fast decisions without creating chaos. The data foundations that make AI genuinely useful rather than theoretically interesting. The cultural norms that make every person in the business a participant in the adoption process rather than a recipient of it.
Why No Technology Position Lasts, and Why That is the Point
Here is the claim that most boards are not yet willing to sit with: no technology position is likely to hold for long. In many cases, the advantage from a specific tool, workflow or implementation may last only 12 to 18 months before it is matched, commoditised or overtaken. The organisations that are currently ahead on a specific AI implementation will not stay ahead by virtue of that implementation. The advantage will erode.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a clarification of what the actual prize is.
The organisations that will win the AI era are not the ones that picked the right tools in 2025 or 2026. They are the ones that built an organisation capable of adopting, extracting value from, and moving on from technologies faster than their competitors. Continuously. As a core competency. Every wave of new technology becomes an opportunity rather than a disruption, because the machine built to ride it is already running.
That is a fundamentally different objective than the one most leadership teams are currently pursuing. It shifts the question from "what should we implement?" to "how do we build an organisation that is permanently better at this than anyone else in our market?"
The businesses building that capability quietly right now are not talking about it. They are not publishing essays or briefing journalists. They are doing the work. And the advantage they are compounding will be very difficult to close once it becomes visible.
The Conversation Most Boards are Not Having Yet
Twelve months ago, it was reasonable for a leadership team to treat AI as an important initiative requiring attention and resource. That framing is now insufficient.
The organisations that will define the competitive landscape in your sector over the next five years are not the ones that treated AI as an initiative. They are the ones whose boards and executive teams understood that the shift from tech-supported to tech-centric was an organisational transformation requiring a different kind of leadership commitment, a different set of structural foundations, and a different conception of what the business is for.
That conversation starts with leadership genuinely imagining the destination. Dorsey and Botha are pointing in a direction that is worth taking seriously. But the path there runs through a shift most organisations have not yet made: from tech-supported to tech-centric. And that shift does not begin with technology. It begins with foundations. It is a clearer picture of their own business: faster, leaner, more adaptive and more capable than the one they are running today. What does that look like? What does it require? What stands between here and there?
Most boards have not had that conversation in any serious depth. The ones that have are already building.
The question worth asking in your next leadership meeting is not which AI tools to invest in. It is whether you are building the kind of organisation that can ride every wave of disruption that follows, faster and more effectively than your competitors.
That is a different question. It requires a different conversation. And the longer it is deferred, the more expensive the gap becomes.
Footnote: This argument is most visible in mid-market businesses, where the capability gap tends to be sharpest and the consequences most immediate. But the pattern holds across organisations of every size and sector. The question of whether a business is building the operating system for sustained technology adoption is as relevant in a FTSE 100 boardroom as it is in a 200-person professional services firm.
Adrian Tripp is a Partner at Prosper AI Consulting, leading the business strategy practice and advising boards on the shift from tech-supported to tech-centric organisations.
Article | Prosper AI Consulting, UK