If something similar plays out with AI agents, then the most important AI customers will primarily be new companies, and probably a lot of them will be long tail type entities that take the barrel and ammunition analogy to its logical extreme. Traditional companies, meanwhile, will struggle to incorporate AI (outside of whole-scale job replacement a la the mainframe) the true AI takeover of enterprises that retain real world differentiation will likely take years.
Ben Thompson argues that many incumbents will struggle to benefit from AI agents. The reason is that autonomous agents in an existing organization have to replace humans – and there are too much tacit knowledge that isn’t documented well enough to let that happen. Organizations that starts from scratch are, in his view, much better positioned to create value from the technology advancements.
He base this reasoning on a comparison on how incumbents in consumer package goods, like Procter and Gamble, struggled to benefit from digital, personalized advertising online, while internet-first companies didn’t. He sees it reasonable to expect this to be repeated with AI (agents).
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