As I sort, Microsoft Copilot suggests methods to proceed, restructure, and even rewrite this very sentence. On the floor, it looks like a small factor, no extra exceptional than Gmail ending an electronic mail or Google predicting a search—however small issues can have outsize affect.
Simply because the regular drip of water on rock can carve out new channel over time, so predictive textual content has already reshaped how we write. Analysis from Harvard has proven that predictive textual content methods don’t simply make texting simpler—they modify the content material of these texts, lowering lexical variety and making our writing extra predictable.
This flattening impact is starting to increase past language. Filmmakers have been apprehensive for a while now concerning the rise of “algorithm films”—films whose kind and content material are dictated by what advice algorithms inform corporations about viewer preferences, as a substitute of by the inventive creativeness of writers and administrators. And if executives aren’t cautious, we are able to quickly anticipate the emergence of “algorithm enterprise”—technique, operations, and tradition flattened out by the rise of LLMs and the race to undertake AI.
AI Fashions as Consensus Machines
Giant language fashions have turn out to be the invisible architects of enterprise technique. For an growing variety of executives, these AI methods have turn out to be default first advisers, strategists, and thought companions. And, as we’ve got already seen with language and flicks, this type of development can measurably slim the vary of concepts out there to us.
Social media is the canary within the coal mine right here. Anybody with a LinkedIn account is aware of that posts from completely different people usually sound very related and that the identical concepts are sometimes recirculated many times. Taken in isolation, this may very well be seen as a characteristic of the homogenizing impact of social media algorithms. However the phenomenon just isn’t localized to posts that may be pushed by the calls for of a advice algorithm. Pitches are starting to sound similar, advertising and marketing copy is turning into surprisingly generic, and if the method continues unchecked, we are able to anticipate that the interior paperwork, analyses, and firm methods will start to reflect these present in different companies. In the long term, we might even see firm cultures lose their distinctiveness as differentiating elements start to blur collectively.
Smarter Alone, Narrower Collectively
Generative AI can massively increase efficiency and productiveness. A current meta-study discovered, for instance, that people working with AI have been considerably extra inventive than people working alone.
Nonetheless, as each that examine and a paper in Nature present, whereas utilizing LLMs improves the common creativity of a person, it reduces the collective inventive variety of teams. People discover their entry to new concepts boosted however collectively we find yourself tapping in to a narrower vary of concepts.
The result’s that AI’s promise of supercharged innovation may very well slim the frontiers of risk.
Aggressive Convergence
Nearly 20 years in the past, Michael Porter launched the concept of “aggressive convergence”. Briefly put, this can be a phenomenon that sees corporations starting to resemble their opponents. They chase the identical prospects in the identical methods, their methods and pricing fashions turn out to be indistinguishable, their operational processes and provide chains find yourself trying similar.
This course of traps corporations right into a race towards the center, the place distinctiveness disappears and income are squeezed. With AI, companies danger falling sufferer to an accelerated and intensified model of this course of: a Nice AI Convergence through which operational playbooks, strategic imaginative and prescient, and tradition turn out to be more and more generic as organizations more and more drink from the identical conceptual fountain.
AI can optimize effectivity, however it could possibly’t seize the human fingerprints that make an organization actually distinctive. Your group’s struggle tales, hard-won classes, contrarian beliefs, and cultural quirks don’t stay in any coaching set. They stay in reminiscence, apply, and identification.
And when technique, messaging, or tradition is outsourced to AI, there’s a actual hazard that these differentiating components will vanish. The chance is that corporations will find yourself dropping the genuine, unusual, and typically counterintuitive options which can be the automobile for his or her uniqueness—the issues that makes them them.
The Three Pillars of Enterprise Homogenization
Enterprise homogenization could be damaged down into three pillars.
1. Strategic Convergence: When Each Plan Appears the Identical
Your competitor asks Claude to research market alternatives. You ask ChatGPT. What’s the outcome?
Effectively, the impact is delicate somewhat than dramatic. As a result of the identical fashions are shaping the identical executives, the outputs don’t collapse into outright uniformity a lot as drift towards a slim band of acceptable choices. What appears like unbiased strategic judgment is commonly only a remix of the identical patterns and playbooks. And so, over time, the strategic selections corporations make lose their texture and edge.
2. Operational Convergence: The Automation of Averageness
Firms are already performing on the massive potential that AI has within the realm of operations. For instance, Shopify and Duolingo now require workers to make use of AI because the default start line for all duties, and one of many main causes for that is the prospect of the effectivity positive aspects that AI can ship.
It’s completely proper that corporations use AI to remodel operations. However when each firm makes use of related AI instruments for operations, we are able to anticipate a drift towards related processes. Customer support chatbots may converge on the optimum patterns for buyer interactions, for instance—and on this convergence lies each hazard and alternative.
The chance is optimized effectivity. The hazard is that corporations lose what differentiates them and drives their distinctive worth proposition. It’s important that leaders acknowledge this hazard to allow them to start to suppose deliberately about authenticity as a possible edge in operations. As an example, it may be value sacrificing a small degree of buyer dealing with pace for a chatbot that delivers quirky and fascinating responses that replicate the corporate’s genuine tradition and character.
3. Cultural Convergence: When Firms Lose Their Souls
Maybe probably the most insidious danger is cultural convergence. When AI drafts your organization communications, writes your worth statements, and shapes your worker handbooks, it imports the common company tradition encoded in its coaching knowledge. The quirks, the precise language, the distinctive methods of pondering that outline your group—all get smoothed into statistical averages.
Over time, the impact won’t solely dilute exterior model notion but additionally diminish the sense of belonging workers really feel. When individuals can not acknowledge their firm’s voice in its personal communications, engagement erodes in ways in which spreadsheets gained’t instantly seize.
From Synthetic Intelligence to Genuine Intelligence
If AI accelerates sameness, then aggressive benefit comes from defending and amplifying what makes you completely different. Right here’s how:
- Audit your uniqueness
Determine the information, tales, and views your organization holds that no AI mannequin can entry. What are you aware that others don’t? - Create proprietary datasets
Feed AI your distinctive knowledge—buyer insights, area notes, experiments, failures—as a substitute of counting on the generic pool of data out there to everybody. - Set up “AI-free zones”
Intentionally defend areas the place human judgment and lived expertise matter most—technique off-sites, cultural rituals, moments of buyer intimacy. - Adversarial prompting
Don’t simply ask AI for solutions. Ask it for the contrarian view, the blind spot, the uncomfortable perspective.
Genuine Intelligence
In a world through which each firm has entry to the identical synthetic intelligence, the true aggressive benefit isn’t having AI—it’s having one thing AI can’t replicate. And that may solely come from genuine intelligence: the messy, contradictory, fantastically human insights that no mannequin can generate.
AI is the value of admission. Authenticity is the way you win.
