Reshuffle - My next book is now available for pre-order
Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy
My next book Reshuffle is now available for pre-orders.
There is no dearth of books on AI.
But Reshuffle is different because it doesn’t try to explain the impact of AI through the familiar lenses of automation and productivity.
At best, these lenses help uncover first-order effects of AI.
Instead, it looks at explaining the impact of AI through the lens of systems thinking:
How AI both unbundles and rebundles economic systems, reshaping the future of work and competition,
Why some changes that we predict will actually happen, while others won’t, not because the technology isn’t there but because our prophecies ignore the theory of constraints. The book takes a fresh take on system constraints once AI comes in, applying them to structural issues instead of operational ones, to clarify which changes will actually happen, which won’t, and what conditions must be met before they do,
Where value will flow next, revealing which parts of an economic system will gain power and which will be left behind, and
Who gets a bigger slice of the pie, with clear frameworks for understanding how AI-driven shifts in power will determine the winners and losers of the new economy.
If these are issues that you’ve been thinking through and that fascinate you, read on.
Reshuffle tackles them head-on!
Let’s dive in… but before we get started…
Pre-order the book here
Reshuffle is now available for pre-orders. All pre-orders leading up to the launch date (July 20, 2025) are at 70% off.
Beyond AI hype and fearmongering
The AI debate is polarized today. Technologists with Altman-esque delusions hype new tools and the impending arrival of AGI. Policymakers disconnected from ‘why this time is really different’ cling on to outdated frameworks to debate job losses. Businesses, caught in between, are confused as they struggle to distinguish AI snake-oil from the real deal.
Taking these opposing views makes no sense. And yet, it gets the memetic spread that any polarising debate will.
Reshuffle grounds these discussions on some core principles and cuts through the noise. It provides a framework to understand the fundamental nature of AI systems - and their impact on economic interactions.
Reshuffle grounds itself in a few core issues, including:
the tension that workers have always had with tools,
the tug-of-war that tool providers have with their customers,
the nature of workflows and their impact on organization design, and eventually, the division of work, value, and power across an ecosystem,
the importance of knowledge management in making organizations - and more importantly - ecosystems function,
fundamentally new ways to build companies in an economy that is revisiting basic assumptions on knowledge work.
It takes these few core issues, grounds them in a lot of historical evidence, and then examines what’s truly different about AI and to what extent previous shifts can help us make sense of what’s about to unfold.
A systemic framework to understand issues
The book tackles a wide range of issues
which jobs lose value, and which ones gain value,
how the nature of software will change in the age of AI,
which fundamental assumptions in how we charge for work will shift,
what happens to junior workers,
how today’s talent can move upwards into capital or downwards into labor,
how countries will use AI for diplomacy,
which types of knowledge get commoditized, and which types don’t,
what it takes for software providers to sell ‘work’,
how customers fight back as AI manipulates their already fragmented attention,
how organizational structures change around AI-infused workflows,
what capitalism looks like at the intersection of algorithmically managed markets and AI-driven market activity,
how agents create new competitive concerns,
how the internet restructures when we move from a network of users to a network of users and agents,
how the intersections of AI, energy, and biology unleash new innovation.
You’ve probably read ‘hot takes’ on all these topics before.
Where Reshuffle is different is in its approach to
first identifying the connections between these seemingly separate topics,
building cohesive frameworks to connect them together, and
then explaining every topic based on the frameworks to show how our assumptions on one front will change outcomes on another.
What stays the same
Reshuffle isn’t a book about the current state of AI. And I’m not going to waste time debating AGI or sharing proof of how ‘stupid’ AI hallucinations are.
We could debate endlessly whether AI is truly intelligent, but that’s a distraction.
The reality is that AI systems will continue to improve; not necessarily in the form of today’s LLMs, but more likely through future model breakthroughs and through recombinant innovation in developing new compound systems.
What matters more is:
(1) the fundamental properties of AI and how they interact with how value is created through knowledge work,
(2) how AI shifts power across the knowledge economy.
Reshuffle explores these mechanics of value creation and power in an AI-driven economy.
To engage with this book, you don’t need to believe in AGI or speculate on the limits of LLMs. You just need to accept one simple premise: tomorrow’s AI will be better than today’s AI - and that fact alone will reshape today’s institutional structures and the basis of competition.
The book is built around a few key themes that I’m going to lay out below:
How to think about AI
The dominant approach to analyzing AI today is as a technological tool. This comes with all the mental models of tools and technologies - we look at AI through the lens of mechanization, automation, and optimization.
While AI does perform these functions, these mental models are insufficient for understanding its true impact - they limit us to the first order effects of AI.
Reshuffle introduces a systems perspective, arguing that AI should be understood primarily as a coordination mechanism, rather than merely a tool for automation.
Automation affects tasks.
Coordination reshapes entire workflows, organizations, and economies.
To see AI’s full impact, we need to explore its second-order effects, particularly how it restructures knowledge-based work and the systems within which work happens.
The four key tensions
Current discussions about AI focus heavily on its impact on workers and their tasks - a tool-centric view. However, this perspective is incomplete. AI’s real impact emerges when we examine how it transforms systems of work.
The book introduces four key levels at which AI reshapes work:
1. Workflows – The structured sequences of tasks workers perform.
2. Organizations – The broader structures that define how work is coordinated and executed.
3. Business Models – The way organizations combine workflows and structures to create solutions.
4. Ecosystems – The external environment where businesses interact with customers, partners, and competitors.
To fully understand AI’s role, we must analyze its impact across all four levels rather than limiting the discussion to AI’s effect on individual tasks.
The Reshuffle of value and power
Reshuffle examines how AI drives shifts in value and power through cycles of bundling and unbundling. These cycles shaped the industrial economy when containerization drove the rise of global supply chains (dynamics I closely investigate in the book) and these cycles have turned faster in the digital economy.
AI triggers a new phase of unbundling and rebundling. By altering how knowledge is managed and where and to who it is made available, AI reshuffles power dynamics.
The companies that win in this reshuffle will be the ones that understand:
Where value is moving next and how to reposition themselves in the new value chain.
When to bundle and when to unbundle - to aggregate control or to decentralize and commoditize.
How to spot shifts when they happen and capitalize on them.
Who wins and who loses
Reshuffle examines AI’s impact at different levels - individual workers, workflows, organizations, and broader economic structures. The core argument that runs throughout is that analyzing AI solely at the level of individual workers or jobs and the impact of AI on jobs is an insufficient - even erroneous - lens for looking at the issue. You need to look at the entire system.
Discussions about AI which focus on the worker alone miss the real point - it’s a bit like trying to understand the impact of electricity by only asking whether it puts lamplighters out of work.
AI restructures workflows, organizations, and economic structures. And its effects must be studied at all those levels to eventually understand which jobs get created, which ones get commoditized, which ones retain the ‘human touch’ that everyone seems to talk about - yet become irrelevant - and which ones innovate in new ways because of the new forms of capital and labor made available by AI.
One of the key themes throughout the book is that there is no debate about whether AI will expand economic output. The pie will grow. However, the question that matters - and is often ignored - is not about growth itself but about how the pie will be sliced. Even if AI expands the economy, many workers and businesses may lose out rather than maintaining or increasing their share of value.
Reshuffle focuses on the conditions under which individuals, organizations, and industries can benefit from AI-driven growth - and under what conditions they will be left behind.
Get the book now
If you’d like to get a hold of the book while on pre-orders (70% off), grab it at the link below:
And join the preorders community where you will receive one abstract per week from the book, every week from now all the way up to the launch on July 20, 2025.
Here’s an abstract from Chapter 1.
Reshuffle - an abstract from Chapter 1
We live in an era shaped by ‘exponential technologies’. The challenge, pundits say, is that most people struggle to grasp exponential effects because we think in straight lines. We expect change to be gradual and predictable.
To illustrate this, a common parable that is used is that of a farmer who approaches a king asking for a single grain of rice, doubled on each square of a chessboard - just 64 squares. The king, amused, agrees. The request seems modest - one grain for the first square, two for the next, then four, then eight. Even after 20 squares, it’s barely a sack. But soon, the numbers start to balloon: by the 20th square, the king owes over a million grains; a trillion by the 40th. By the end of the board, the total exceeds all the rice in the kingdom.
This story is often used to illustrate the power of exponential growth: slow and deceptive at first, then overwhelming all of a sudden. The magic is attributed to compounding. Small gains stack up with time; then suddenly, you’re the Oracle of Omaha.
Compounding is an easy story to tell. It’s why the most common parable of exponential growth involves nothing more than a simple doubling pattern; a story of grains of rice on a chessboard and a king who didn’t do the math.
And yet, when we look at how economic systems actually evolve, compounding turns out to be a surprisingly incomplete explanation.
Compounding might explain how technologies evolve - faster chips, improving models, more data. But economic and social systems don’t scale just because things get bigger. They scale because things start working together in new ways.
This is the untold story of global trade - the story we started this book with.
At first, the impact of containerization seemed obvious. Ports got more efficient as they adopted containers, ships spent less time waiting, dock work declined and dockworkers lost their jobs. But these were first-order effects - the initial incremental gains and obvious automations you’d expect from a compounding model.
But the real transformation played out over time - not through scale, but through scope. Standardized containers were coupled with standardized contracts to enable intermodal transport - with one contract, you could now ship across trains, trucks, and ships. And intermodal transport made freight faster, cheaper, and more reliable. That reliability broke the logic of vertical integration - you could now manufacture overseas because the cost of freight was negligible.
Firms started to specialize and outsource components. And as companies specialized in individual components, they were incentivised to constantly innovate and improve at the component level. Improving components led to greater product innovation, leading to the rise of component industries like semiconductors, which, in turn, drove hi-tech innovation, from personal computing to AI.
And the cascade continued. High-knowledge work was separated from high-efficiency production - Nike could manufacture around the world while managing branding and design in Beaverton. Inventory management changed as just-in-time inventory became possible. And with all this, trade accelerated further, determining the fortunes of entire countries based on their participation at critical points on container routes. This didn’t happen because of compounding. It happened because of cascading effects - one solved coordination problem unlocking the next layer of opportunity.
This is the secret to exponential system change: not compounding acceleration, but cascading coordination.
Compounding is about scale; cascading effects drive scope expansion.
The first breakthrough looks like cost savings. The second creates new industries. By the time of the third, all economic activity is restructured. With each solved coordination problem, new layers of activity are unlocked and the system’s scope expands.
This is the untold story of global trade - and it’s the real story of AI. AI might follow a compounding trajectory in terms of raw capability, but its true impact will come from how well systems coordinate to harness it. You might miss the point if you stay focused on the scale of processing power. What matters more are the cascading effects that emerge when AI-enabled coordination unlocks entirely new possibilities.
Your move!
If all this sounds up your alley and you’ve enjoyed reading the abstract above, here are two things you could do next:
First, pre-order the book now. It’s available at 70% off till launch (July 20, 2025) and is half the price of a Starbucks Flat White.
And… join the Reshuffle community
Second, if you’ve enjoyed reading the abstract above, sign up for the Reshuffle mailing list where you will receive one abstract per week from the book, every week from now all the way up to the launch in June.
Will it be available for pre-order in Europe? On Amazon.de or so? In Europe Amazon says "This title is not currently available for purchase", but on Amazon.com its available for $2.99.
I am reading this book right now - actually devouring it - and it has shifted how I think about AI. I have been talking about "unassembly, assembly, and reassembly" now for years as a view into us humans as living mosaics, not linear chronological resume bullet points. And your "bundling and unbundling" speaks to that itch.
Also, having spent some time at AOL in the heyday - I remember Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape at the time, saying there are only two business models: Bundling and Unbundling.