Framework: AI’s impact on business models and value creation

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AI is reshaping business models and value creation across all industries. Forward-thinking leaders are considering how their business models will evolve and the legion new opportunities for enhanced value creation and capture.

We are very early in discovering the structures that work best, and how to configure across multiple dimensions, including internal value creation based on humans + AI, a diverse array of enhanced customer offers, ecosystemic value co-creation, model scalability, and the coming rise of AI agents as customer intermediaries.

The framework below distills the most important frames for understanding how business models are shifting. This is just an initial top-level view of the elements, I will be sharing more detail on many aspects of this in the near future.

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The Future of Higher Education: Unbundling and rebundling

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This week I gave the keynote for the leadership strategy session of a U.S. tertiary institution with over 120,000 students, on re-envisaging the future of higher education.

As part of my session I shared this framework on unbundling and rebundling higher education. I explain and expand below the image.

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Framework: Creative process mapping for AI augmentation

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For superior Humans + AI creative outcomes we need to focus on process.

LLMs are most effectively applied at well-defined points within broader processes, using precise prompts and context for highly specific tasks such as content generation, ideation, structure mapping, analysis, adaptation, synthesis, evaluation.

The first step is to pull back to the broader process and identify where AI can add value to complex cognitive and creative processes, as shown in this chart. Applications of the chart are shared below.
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Framework: Generative AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery

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The history of humanity has been one of accelerating scientific and technological progress. Now, by amplifying the cognition and capabilities of scientists with AI, we can dramatically step up the pace of discovery.

By the very nature of discovery, we cannot know what we will learn. The coming advances in life and brain sciences and medicine alone will be absolutely transformative, let alone those in energy, materials science, food, and more.

This framework is a high-level distillation of a few of the cognitive tools and techniques for GenAI to assist scientists. As always it is a Beta version 1, please let me know any feedback or input to improve it!
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The business models to support a prosperous future for news media

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I believe the media industry has a prosperous future. Today at the fabulous humAIn conference by Unmade I made that case in the concluding “debAIt”, arguing strongly against the proposition “AI is news media’s extinction level event”.

What this debate really boils down to is the business models for news media.

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Framework: Humans + AI in institutional investment portfolio decision-making

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The primary application of my Humans + AI work over the last 18 months has been in strategic decision-making, working with boards and executive teams to augment their decision-making processes and outcomes using generative AI.

The other major Humans + AI application I’ve been working on is in institutional investment decision-making. I am currently shifting more of my attention and work into this space. 

This framework provides a very high-level slice of a few of the many human and generative AI roles in different phases of portfolio decision-making.

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Jorge Luis Borges and the impact of AI on human creativity

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Jorge Luis Borges has been one of my favorite authors since my teens. Over the last couple of years I have often thought of one of his masterpieces, Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, written in 1939, which turns out to be extremely relevant to the age of AI. 

The story recounts how a contemporary writer, Pierre Menard, rewrites Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote word for word. However he writes it entirely from his own context, making the text laden with layers of meaning missing from the original. The reviewer played by Borges in the piece finds the new Quixote, coinciding word for word with the original, enriched, astounding, and more significant than the original.

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Humans + AI in financial decision-making: consumer, portfolio, and organizational

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Arguably the entire finance industry can be framed as a massive inter-related array of decisions, by both clients and financial insttutions.

In this world AI wil be transformative, in most cases not by supplanting humans in the decision-making process, but in playing a role in ‘Humans + AI’ decision-making.

I was recently interviewed for the NAB Digital Next podcast for an episode titled Futurist Ross Dawson on humans and AI achieving more together. You can listen here, with some distilled reflections below.
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The most dangerous idea ever is that humans will be vastly transcended by AI

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The advent of next-generation AI has brought into sharp focus one of the biggest divides of all: our perception of humanity’s place in the Universe.

I endlessly read people arguing that humans will be to AI as animals or insects are to humans. They envision a future where AI’s relentless advancement transcends every faculty we possess.

The countervailing stance is that human potential is unlimited. We have deliberately and consistently increased our capabilities and knowledge, and now we will use the tools we have created to continue to advance.

The rise of AI has intensified this debate, leading us to question: Are we, as humans, inherently limited or unlimited?

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University education still matters, especially for generational economic mobility

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Formal education is critical for generational mobility, allowing young people to transcend engrained perceptions to not just learn, but demonstrate their capabilities by recognised paths.

Jose Luis Alvarado, dean of the Fordham Graduate School of Education, has written an excellent counter-narrative to those saying that tertiary education doesn’t matter any more, om the deep inequity of the anti-college movement. He shares how he was told at school he shouldn’t aspire to going to college. Others didn’t see his potential, quite possibly because of his family background.
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