View / The AI era will redefine business

One of the most profound takeaways from my interview with Reflection AI co-founder and CTO Ioannis Antonoglou this week on Semafor’s Future Proof is his declaration that the AI era will force us to redefine what each business actually does and rebuild it from the ground up, using AI as scaffolding. And that is going to take decades, a lot longer than most people in Silicon Valley project.

Right now, we are thinking about data all wrong. Today, businesses mostly capture data that’s measurable or the result of some kind of work product. What’s usually not captured is the work itself — the difficult-to-define causal link that connects all of the actions that a company takes. “A lot of the context is like, ‘we jump on a call, or someone shared something or said something’” Antonoglou told me.

I’ve been thinking about that challenge with my own work. How can a journalist capture gut feelings about what might make a good story? (It’s a bit like that famous 1960s US Supreme Court case on pornography, “you know it when you see it.“) What about capturing how reporters decide who to call first, or what questions to ask to get the most revealing answers?

In the AI era, Antonoglou told me, companies have to throw out what they’ve done for decades and come up with new ways to measure and carry out their work. That’s part of what Antonoglou is trying to help customers do with his company’s open-weight models. “It will take maybe a decade or two decades before people really rethink how things are done and how they can just do them with AI in mind,” he said.

It won’t happen in every industry at the same time — probably a good thing for the economy’s stability — but it does provide another new entry for startups that move faster than incumbents to spring ahead.