Are you rewiring your company to work when the lights are out?
I spent this week in Madrid preparing to challenge the CEOs and executives of the world's leading Telcos on how to compete and stay relevant in the Age of AI.
The lights-out company
While reflecting, this vision of the next "Lights-Out Companies" kept coming to me. A world of companies that operate endlessly, where AI agents are relentless 24/7 optimizers, don't sleep, don't eat, don't need a break, and work when the lights are out. And, at the same time, of consumers who suddenly realize the number of things they can accomplish is endless.
A world where every device, every laptop, every server will be an intelligence endpoint to their owners. As Eric Jang puts it brilliantly in his article "As Rocks May Think":
From selling bits to providing intelligence
For massive industries like Telco, which rely on widespread physical infrastructure, the pivot from selling bits to becoming providers of intelligence will become an inflection point. When every device on the network becomes an intelligence endpoint, the value shifts from the connection itself to the insight that connection enables, and reaching customers through their own ambient AI agents becomes the new competitive territory.