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AI Won’t Replace You. But Your Lack of Adaptability Might.
The ammonite had a good run. For hundreds of millions of years, this spiral-shelled marine creature ruled the ancient seas, its thick armor protecting it from prehistoric predators. But a giant meteor strike 66 million years ago changed everything. Acid rain triggered by the meteor made the shells a prison, dissolving the ammonites’ young. Almost immediately, it went extinct. Its armored defenses against well-established threats were useless against a new one.
Meanwhile, the octopus thrived. And it still does today.
The octopus doesn’t have a protective shell. Its advantage lies in its fluidity. With nine brains, eight arms, three hearts, and the ability to edit its RNA in real time, the octopus is built for flexibility. It doesn’t wait to evolve over eons; it transforms within hours. And that’s exactly the model organizations need to follow as AI upends our work environments.
Today’s headlines ask whether AI will take your job or replace your business. But these are the wrong questions. A better one is: Will you adapt quickly enough to remain essential in a world where change accelerates by the day?
We Don’t Lack Technology. We Lack Imagination.
Every week in AI brings a new model, benchmark, or capability that makes last month feel quaint. But what’s holding back most companies isn’t the technology—it’s people.
The early adopters are already using AI to build predictive supply chains, deploy autonomous customer service, and run R&D cycles in months instead of years. Some companies are shrinking their size while expanding their impact. Others are becoming global behemoths, seamlessly integrating thousands of AI-informed decisions every hour across geographies and functions.
The key is in how work is organized to make the most of AI. Rigid hierarchies weren’t built for this. In fact, they were built to do the opposite: preserve stability, minimize deviation, and reward slow, careful decisions. They were built to be ammonites.
In a world where AI can simulate scenarios, adjust processes, and deliver insights at scale, traditional management becomes a bottleneck. Worse, it becomes an artifact of a time when people were the only processors available.
Your Organization Has a Nervous System Problem.
The classic org chart operates like a dinosaur’s nervous system: slow, centralized, reactive. Messages must travel all the way up the spine before anything gets done. By the time the signal returns, it’s often too late.
An octopus, on the other hand, doesn’t wait for a central command. Two-thirds of its neural tissue lies in its arms. Each can operate semi-independently, sensing, learning, and acting in real time. That’s how it escapes predators, navigates mazes, and solves complex problems.
This is the future of effective organizations: distributed decision-making enabled by AI. AI makes it work by giving people the contextual knowledge and recommendations they need at the frontline, while also providing management visibility into what’s going on so they can delegate with confidence.
Delivering Information to the Right People at the Right Times
The fastest-growing firms are pushing cognition to the edges of their organizations. They’re using AI to deliver the right insights to the right people at the right moment. Frontline employees are making decisions that once required VPs. Middle managers are becoming coaches, not controllers. And executives are spending more time steering ships than swabbing decks.
Consider the meal kit company HelloFresh. AI has enabled a massive proliferation of menu options, tailored to individuals’ unique ordering histories. This makes production planning in its kitchens a massively complex undertaking that only AI can handle. Middle managers who used to spend their time making those plans in Excel now monitor what AI recommends, spot what it might be missing, and coach their frontline employees. Their roles haven’t vanished, but they’ve fundamentally changed.
Adaptability is the Real Competitive Advantage.
Adaptability is now non-optional. AI makes it both more necessary and more possible.
Let’s be honest: most companies don’t fail because they lack data. They fail because they didn’t act on it. Or because their data lived in silos. Or because their people didn’t trust the tools. Or because they let legacy processes become permanent.
In other words, they fossilized.
But the real winners aren’t just reacting faster. They’re sensing sooner and building options.
All this requires a fundamental reassessment of your organization. You’ll likely need to:
- Redesign roles, so people work alongside AI and get the most out of its productivity enhancements.
- Rewrite incentives, so experimentation is rewarded, not punished.
- Rethink trust, so people see AI as an enabler, not a threat.
Adaptability isn’t just reacting to what’s already happened. It’s building the muscles to flex before others even notice the pressure.
The Time to Transform Is ‘Before You Have To.’
The AI tidal wave isn’t just coming—it’s already lifting and sinking ships.
A wait-and-see strategy might feel safe, but the opportunity cost is enormous. If you’re only dipping your toe into AI with pilots, you’re not preparing enough. The future shape of your organization is unlikely to come from simply scaling up pilots.
The companies that will dominate the next decade are already making bold bets. HelloFresh, for example, rethought what it sells to customers, how it produces its goods, how it sources its now far-more-diverse ingredients, and the way managers conceive of their jobs.
That kind of transformation takes time, and that’s exactly why you should start now. You don’t want to be adapting under duress when your competitors have already finished the job.
The Octopus Has the Answer.
So, what should your organization look like in an AI-driven world?
It should be supple. Sensing. Fast. Curious. Collaborative. It should make decisions at the edges and learn at the center. It should move with the agility of an octopus.
And what about you?
You don’t need to be an AI engineer. You need to be changeable. You need to be willing to rewire your thinking, your team, and your assumptions. You need to help others move through uncertainty with clarity and resolve.
Because in the end, it’s not the AI meteor strike that’s coming for your job. It’s your unwillingness to adapt that poses the real threat.
Just ask the ammonite.
Stephen Wunker is Managing Director of New Markets Advisors, a global consulting firm helping ambitious innovators—including 32 of the Fortune 500—find their next wave of growth. One of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, he’s led a decade’s worth of AI initiatives, advised hundreds of organizations, and authored five bestselling books.
Jonathan Brill is the Futurist-in-Residence at Amazon and Executive Director of the Center for Radical Change. Ranked the #1 futurist in the world by Forbes and described as “the world’s leading transformation architect” by Harvard Business Review, Brill converts the chaos of AI, geopolitical shifts, and economic disruption into bold advantage. He’s unlocked tens of billions for multinational corporations, frontier tech firms, and national governments.
Their new book is AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Superintelligent Firm. Learn more at www.aiandtheoctopus.com.
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