The argument, and how to apply it
Every concept at its first two depths: the idea, then what good looks like, how to run it, the traps, and the objection.
Question 1Is AI making our people faster, or changing how they learn?
Why this question
Every technology I have backed arrived on time and mattered late. The gap between the two was my job for twenty years, and for the first time I am not confident how long it is. That matters because the thing being automated first is entry-level work, and entry-level work was never only work. It was how a junior became someone whose judgement you could bill for.
So the question is not whether AI makes people faster. It does. The question is whether, in making them faster, it has removed the way they learn. A productivity shock changes the org chart for a while. A learning shock changes it for good. The evidence so far, and my own experience of measuring this inside a firm, says learning.
Question 2If the AI becomes the business, what is the business?
Why this question
This is the question underneath every value-creation conversation I have, and almost nobody asks it out loud. Strip the labour out of a people business and what remains had better be worth owning. It is entirely possible to disrupt yourself enthusiastically, remove the work that made your judgement valuable, and end up cheaper and worth less.
The question has an order. First, whether the process should exist at all, because the most dangerous number in AI is a big efficiency percentage on a process that should not. Then what to do with the time AI hands you, because time is not money until someone decides. Then what is left that is scarce once everyone can rent the same intelligence. Then the limit case, a company of one, which shows why the three questions on this site are one question. And finally what all of it is worth, to whom, and how each of them will test it.
Question 3Is autonomy earned or assumed?
Why this question
Being able to do the work should not automatically mean being allowed to. That sentence is the entire architecture. Agents can now take a ticket, do the work and hand it back. What they cannot supply, and what no protocol and no vendor supplies, is the answer to the questions anyone carrying risk asks first: who is this, on whose authority, what did it do, what did it cost, and who approved it.
Autonomy is a grade, held per agent and per jurisdiction, earned against criteria published before anyone started measuring, and lost automatically. The business owns four things that make that possible and assembles everything else: what it knows (the graph), what acts in its name (the register), the bar each agent has to clear (the gates), and the tests built from its own files (the harness). This question walks through the four, the plan that puts them in place in ninety days, and the mandate that owns them.
It is the longest of the three questions, ten concepts, because it is the one you can act on this quarter.