Contents

• 1 When the World Remade Work 26 min Every technological revolution in the last 250 years followed the same script: new technology arrives, a speculative frenzy overbuilds infrastructure, a crash wipes out the speculators, and then, decades later, the real productivity gains show up. Not because the technology improved, but because organizations finally figured out how to use what they already had.
• 2 The Jagged Frontier 29 min In a controlled experiment at Boston Consulting Group, 758 consultants outperformed their unaided colleagues by forty percent across eighteen tasks. Then came the nineteenth. The AI produced a confident, well-structured, completely wrong answer, and the consultants who had just watched it outperform them on everything else trusted it.
• 3 When Code Gets Cheap 21 min Every time a new tool has made writing code cheaper, the bottleneck moved somewhere harder: specification, verification, system design. The same pattern is now unfolding in law, medicine, finance, and research. If your work runs on text and judgment, software engineering is showing you what comes next.
• 4 Agent Delegation Engineering 25 min Two federal courts sanctioned lawyers for briefs citing judicial opinions that didn't exist. The AI had generated them. The models performed exactly as designed. The firms had no process for checking. The discipline of making machine work reliable turns out to be organizational, not technological.
• 5 The seventy percent 24 min When Moderna's AI lead started his job, he conducted 270 interviews across the company. Before anyone mentioned artificial intelligence, they mentioned conference rooms without working plugs. Within six months, Moderna reached 100 percent companywide AI adoption. BCG's research explains why: seventy percent of AI value comes from people, process, and culture.

Practical guide

• — The field guide 17 min Every practical recommendation from the book, organized by what you do, in what order: assess your proficiency gap, build the cultural foundation, stand up the infrastructure, design delegation workflows, and measure what actually matters.

Research Wiki

30 articles exploring the concepts, frameworks, and research behind the essays.