Chika

Thought Eats AI For Breakfast

The fundamental irreducible core of matter is thought.

Atoms and molecules are the latest components in the stage of immaterial expression to physically interactive matter.

In every prosperous venture, there are several layers distinguishing the various levels of service a product journeys through to reach the consumer’s hands.

For example, the more complex, nuanced and bureaucratic a market structure is internally, typically, the faster and more valuable its resulting value streams become to its stakeholders. Likewise, the faster and more deeply entrenched an institution’s value artefacts become within common tribal standards, the more complex, heavily bureaucratic and “slow” the machinery producing them tends to become internally.

Read that again.

Now think PwC.

Slow. Hierarchical. Heavy jargon within in-house specialty silos. Yet, they are industry standard. They have decades across entire human time structures, carrying accumulated knowledge through economic cycles, technological revolutions, institutional changes and the occasional black swan.

Yet, when reduced to its most simplified offering, their product, their value offering is simple:

Advice.

You would then assume that there are three key players in this metaphysical interaction, metaphysical in that it features both the immaterial cause entities and the material consequences.

Party A: The Sender.

Party C: The Receiver.

And the middle player, B, often the value itself and the value delivery mechanism in one. Here is where Parties A and C become one.

Note that the two human host players are interchangeable in cyclic terms. It is perspective that determines the order. But the party that binds both can remain constantly evolving but ever central. It is the meeting point forever.

In essence, Parties A and C were two sides of one coin, oppositionally directed only because a problem had not forced interrelational marrying.

Back to our earlier example.

Who is Party A?

PwC.

Who is Party C?

Tech companies.

What is Party B?

The bespoke technology audit solution, advisory engagement, framework, report, recommendation, implementation architecture, whatever particular artefact is required for the thought to successfully travel from one party into the other.

The artefact is the physical manifestation of the thought.

PwC has a thought about the condition of a technology company. The technology company has a thought about its own condition, its risks, its ambitions, its blind spots and its desired future state.

The engagement creates a temporary marriage between these thoughts.

The report is merely what survives the marriage.

This is why value chains become increasingly interesting the closer we look at them.

A corporation may have thousands of employees, hundreds of departments, elaborate procurement structures, legal entities, proprietary systems, offices across continents and an almost incomprehensible number of internal processes. Yet the value that finally changes hands may be contained in a sentence.

A recommendation. A diagnosis. A decision. A design. A piece of code. A contract. A number. A new way of seeing the problem.

The complexity exists in the machinery required to reliably produce and transfer the simplicity.

This is also why institutions become more valuable as their value artefacts become more deeply embedded in collective standards. The institution is no longer merely producing an object. It is producing something that an entire tribe has agreed means something.

A PwC report means something because PwC means something.

The logo carries thought before the document is opened.

The institution has effectively compressed decades of accumulated thought into an instantly recognisable symbol. Its bureaucracy is part of the compression mechanism.

This is where AI becomes interesting. Because AI eats the machinery.

It does not necessarily begin by eating the product. It eats the distance between thought and expression.

The silos.

The jargon.

The administrative latency.

The translation layers.

The research assistant.

The analyst.

The first draft.

The meeting about the meeting. And the document explaining the document.

The human being whose principal function was to carry a thought from one room to another.

AI is extraordinarily good at consuming these intermediate layers because intermediate layers are, fundamentally, patterns of thought that have already been made legible.

Thought eats AI for breakfast because AI is built to ingest expressions of thought.

But there is a more interesting implication.

If AI progressively compresses the distance between Party A and Party C, then Party B changes.

Certain forms of B become increasingly commoditised. The machinery of delivery becomes cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous. What remains valuable within B is the interpretation that makes A’s thought useful to C.

B is not merely the mechanism. It is the point of translation, where a thought encounters a problem and becomes an artefact capable of changing the receiver’s condition.

The meeting point becomes the market.

The problem becomes the market.

The interpretation becomes the market.

The ability to know what ought to be said, built, recommended, designed or rejected becomes the market.

AI can produce ten thousand answers. It cannot make the question matter.

It can multiply expressions. It cannot automatically originate significance.

And so the future of value creation may become increasingly concentrated around the irreducible core.

Thought.

The sender with something worth transmitting. The receiver with a problem worth solving. And the evolving middle, the value artefact that allows one consciousness to meet another across the material world.

This is what every business is ultimately doing: moving thought.

From imagination into architecture. From architecture into product. From product into culture.From culture into common sense.

Matter is simply where thought goes to become touchable.

And AI has arrived at the breakfast table hungry.

The question then is, what are you serving?