Your autonomic nervous system keeps your heart beating and your lungs breathing so your conscious mind is free for everything that actually requires you. An Autonomic Enterprise™ works the same way: AI runs the routine operations of the business at machine speed, while people concentrate on strategy, exceptions, and the decisions that cannot be delegated. In this clip I explain what that means for how a company competes, and how it scales up into the Autonomic Economy™ now emerging.
Video Transcript
Where are we headed with this?
How many people remember high school biology class? Anybody recall what the autonomic nervous system is? I saw a hand go up over here – somebody in the back. Just shout it out, quickly: what’s the autonomic nervous system?
From the audience: it’s the nervous system that does all the things you don’t think about doing.
Right – the nervous system that does all the things you don’t think about doing. And why is that good? Because you need to breathe, and your heart needs to beat. But what else do we have to do, besides making sure we can breathe and beat our hearts?
From the audience: I don’t know where you’re going.
Fair enough. Everything we do in life. In other words, we make decisions about how we’re going to live our lives. What are our goals? What are our plans? If we had to spend 98% of our time thinking, “Got to keep my heart beating, got to remember to breathe,” we would never get much done.
So imagine, then, your business working the same way.
We’re not talking about taking people out of the business. What we’re saying with the Autonomic Enterprise™ is that the routine operations of the business are all self-managing. With AI handling all the routine activities, people work in the strategic roles – managing high-level exceptions as they come up, overseeing the integration of emerging technologies like AI, the Internet of Things, blockchain, and so forth, and putting adaptive, responsive systems in place. Still overseen and managed by people, but generating continuous cycles of innovation at a far higher rate than we’ve ever been able to before.
That, in turn, is just a part of how – as a society, as a global society – we are evolving toward the Autonomic Economy™, where businesses and organizations of all types interact with one another in highly automated ways. We not only can automatically place an order for a new part we need; our supplier can automatically fill that order, with no human intervention required on either end – with automated systems tracking and managing everything to make sure the right orders are delivered to the right places at the right times.
More videos in this series
Tactical AI vs. Strategic AI: The Framework Manufacturers Are Missing
From Weeks to 10 Minutes: Inside AI’s Near-Future Factory
For more of Jack’s video visit the Video Archive and contact Jack Shaw to book for keynote speaking engagements and executive briefings. Also, check out Jack’s new book series The AI Imperative Series available now on Amazon.