You know it when you see it.
I spend a lot of time talking to companies that say they want to become AI native.
Most of them are truly interested. There is real curiosity at the top. There are committees. There are experiments.
BUT.
They simply are not moving quickly or decisively enough.
How do I know this? Because every once in a while you sit down with a founder or an executive who is so frenetic, so obsessed, so determined that you know it’s a different ball of wax.
I spoke yesterday with a founder that is serving a mostly non-technical industry. About 150 people. He had decided it was time to take the jump, and that it was existentially important, and he wasn’t going to rest until he had reinvented his company.
Some of the signs were the role he was playing in the process:
He was running the AI committee himself.
He was accountable for releasing AI-first features in the product.
He had written a company manifesto.
He had co-written a manifesto for each department.
He had done the work to paint the vision of what he wanted the company to look like.
He had set aside a budget of about $750,000.
He was hiring a Head of AI.
He was bringing on external, best-in-class trainers to pull up the stragglers.
The forcing function was simple. The company was going to ship AI-forward product. The rest of the company had to be fluent enough to support it.
As he worked through the logistics of that premise, it turned into a full-on, company-wide sprint to reinvent the place as AI-first.
That is not what most of these conversations look like. Most look like interest. Committees. Experiments. But not EXISTENTIAL. Not losing sleep, hair on fire, if we miss the boat on this we are lost levels of urgency.
My sense is this is how the winners and losers get sorted. If your leaders are not excessively obsessed with reinventing the company, it is going to be a long road.
You know it when you see it.