The next 'winners' in the B2B AI products space will probably be the ones who enable teams to operate with shared intelligence. The logic of almost all current AI products is focused in the individual worker.
The next stage will probably be to enable the collective intelligence of organizations that operate as Team of Teams. And the next stage will probably be to unlock ecosystem level collaborations of Team of Teams of Teams (teams collaborating across traditional organizational boundaries)
Loved reading Reshuffle and this post. Can't get enough of your writing!
I can see parallels to the world of office productivity software. When we moved from desktop based (legacy MS office) to cloud based (Google Docs/sheets), some of the shifts you call out happened i.e. 1/ simultaneous collaboration between multiple participants 2/ single source of truth 3/ processing moved to cloud, but the unit of work still remained the file. The unbundling/ re-bundling never happened. Therefore, MS was able to provide collaboration in Office 365 and (AFAIK) still remains the leading office productivity software.
Interesting to see how the unbundling/rebundling creates a counter-positioning like effect where incumbent is not able to fully copy the features as it would conflict with their legacy file-based systems. Curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Yes, this is exactly the issue with the collaboration narrative. As MS demonstrates, Adobe could have easily replicated collaboration if the unit of work had remained the file. But with the unit of work shifting, it simply couldn't.
Stripe and Ramp have had similar effects on financial software and AI will have similar effects on many forms of knowledge work tooling.
That explains a lot about Business Intelligence tooling too. Tableau and Power BI have their unit of work as the workbook file. At the same time. Lakehouse architectures are decomposing components of them into shared resources (metadata in shared Catalogues, data itself stored within a single security/governance surface, so no need for local copies). Hence the weed like growth of products like AI/BI/Genie on Databricks, and Sigma on Snowflake or Databricks. Cloud based, ground up shared resources.
Sangeet. Fantastic Piece. Love how you show the change in unit of work, organizational design and competitive set shifts. Looking forward to our recording later this week. Rishad
I'm looking forward to our recording later this week. Would also love to hear more about your work and see if there are interesting points of intersection.
Warren Buffett once said, "The more you learn, the more you earn."
While everyone's chasing internet and chatgpts’,I do something decidedly old-fashioned and read/refer to Mr.Sangeet books/articles and now his Substack newsletters.
The FIGMA insight by Mr.Sangeet has every word worth GOLD and tells untold story of Figma’s strategy that succeeded,and,if not Mr.Sangeet, Renowned Author, Advisor to 50 of the Fortune500 & one of greatest thinkers of our times,who else. And I learned- -the context and wisdom of ‘AI-native’ architecture.
The next 'winners' in the B2B AI products space will probably be the ones who enable teams to operate with shared intelligence. The logic of almost all current AI products is focused in the individual worker.
The next stage will probably be to enable the collective intelligence of organizations that operate as Team of Teams. And the next stage will probably be to unlock ecosystem level collaborations of Team of Teams of Teams (teams collaborating across traditional organizational boundaries)
Yes, this is one of the ideas I explore in Reshuffle.
Loved reading Reshuffle and this post. Can't get enough of your writing!
I can see parallels to the world of office productivity software. When we moved from desktop based (legacy MS office) to cloud based (Google Docs/sheets), some of the shifts you call out happened i.e. 1/ simultaneous collaboration between multiple participants 2/ single source of truth 3/ processing moved to cloud, but the unit of work still remained the file. The unbundling/ re-bundling never happened. Therefore, MS was able to provide collaboration in Office 365 and (AFAIK) still remains the leading office productivity software.
Interesting to see how the unbundling/rebundling creates a counter-positioning like effect where incumbent is not able to fully copy the features as it would conflict with their legacy file-based systems. Curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Yes, this is exactly the issue with the collaboration narrative. As MS demonstrates, Adobe could have easily replicated collaboration if the unit of work had remained the file. But with the unit of work shifting, it simply couldn't.
Stripe and Ramp have had similar effects on financial software and AI will have similar effects on many forms of knowledge work tooling.
That explains a lot about Business Intelligence tooling too. Tableau and Power BI have their unit of work as the workbook file. At the same time. Lakehouse architectures are decomposing components of them into shared resources (metadata in shared Catalogues, data itself stored within a single security/governance surface, so no need for local copies). Hence the weed like growth of products like AI/BI/Genie on Databricks, and Sigma on Snowflake or Databricks. Cloud based, ground up shared resources.
Great examples. Stripe and Ramp are two other examples which I really like.
Data warehousing has similar effects of unbundling.
Data lives in centralized storage with shared governance and versioning.
Metadata (schemas, lineage, metrics) is registered in shared catalogs.
Logic and views are increasingly materialized and exposed via query services - which rebundle and present output.
Sangeet. Fantastic Piece. Love how you show the change in unit of work, organizational design and competitive set shifts. Looking forward to our recording later this week. Rishad
Thanks Rishad!
I'm looking forward to our recording later this week. Would also love to hear more about your work and see if there are interesting points of intersection.
Warren Buffett once said, "The more you learn, the more you earn."
While everyone's chasing internet and chatgpts’,I do something decidedly old-fashioned and read/refer to Mr.Sangeet books/articles and now his Substack newsletters.
The FIGMA insight by Mr.Sangeet has every word worth GOLD and tells untold story of Figma’s strategy that succeeded,and,if not Mr.Sangeet, Renowned Author, Advisor to 50 of the Fortune500 & one of greatest thinkers of our times,who else. And I learned- -the context and wisdom of ‘AI-native’ architecture.