Someone stood up in a session today and said two things I found interesting.
First: Copilot is not an AI strategy. Second: every firm now needs an AGI strategy.
He was right about the first. But the leap between the two beggars belief.
AGI (systems that genuinely match or exceed human cognition across most domains) could arrive in five years, fifty years, or not at all. The only thing serious forecasters agree on is that nobody knows. Most boards were not built to govern that kind of uncertainty. An AGI strategy is next to impossible to construct in any meaningful way, and any board that believes it has one is probably confusing ambition with analysis.
But the answer to “Copilot is not enough” is not “therefore you need an AGI strategy.” It is “therefore you need to do the work that sits between those two things.” And that work is neither speculative nor superficial. It is the hard, structural, unglamorous redesign of how your organisation actually operates around AI that exists today.
Three questions worth asking
Where are you genuinely dependent on scarce human cognition that AI could replicate?
Where are you slow because of how you are structured, not because of regulation or market conditions?
What would an AI-native competitor do that you currently cannot, or will not?
These are not technology questions. They are questions about how power, accountability and work are organised inside your business. Most leadership teams have not had that conversation. Many are actively avoiding it.
The firms that will absorb whatever comes next, AGI or not, are the ones doing that structural work now. Not because they predicted the timeline correctly. Because they did not wait for certainty before starting.
The board question
The board question worth sitting with is simpler and harder than any forecast.
Is your organisation genuinely built to absorb radically cheaper cognition, whether that arrives in three years or thirty?
Most boards haven’t asked it, probably because few could yet answer it.
If your leadership team would like to work through these questions together, I would be glad to help. You can read about our AI strategy and operating model work on our services page or get in touch.
This article was first shared as a post on LinkedIn.