From owning a team to calling a function

1. The Wrong Conversation

When people talk about AI, they are usually having the wrong conversation. They talk about it as an optimization, a tool to make existing processes faster. Writing marketing copy, analyzing data, answering support tickets. They see AI as a better, stronger horse.

This is a profound misunderstanding of what’s happening.

The real change is not at the surface level of tools. It’s a shift in the foundations. It’s a change in the means of production.

The last time we saw a shift this significant was when factories stopped building their own inefficient, expensive generators and started plugging into a centralized power grid. The change wasn’t about better generators; it was about treating power as a utility. You no longer had to own the machine that made the power; you just had to buy the power.

AI is the new power grid for business operations.

2. From Owning a Team to Calling a Function

To get a result in the pre-AI world—say, entering a new market overseas—you had to own the machinery that produced that result. That machinery was a team of people.

You had to hire them, manage them, and bear the full cost of their internal friction. The communication overhead in a team is immense. The final output is often throttled by the least efficient member. In software terms, it’s a tightly-coupled system with low cohesion. It’s messy.

AI allows you to switch from owning the machinery to simply calling a function.

You no longer need to assemble and manage a team to perform a function. You can now call that function from a specialized, vastly more efficient system. The system is a collection of AI agents, each one highly cohesive and focused on a single task:

• One agent analyzes the market.
• Another discovers potential customers.
• A third engineers the content required for outreach.
• A fourth handles the initial contact.

They communicate via APIs—a language with near-zero friction and no emotion. This is a system that is, by design, loosely-coupled and highly-cohesive.

You pay for the call, not for the entire power plant.

3. The Fuel for the New Machine

This new system runs on a different kind of fuel.

The old machinery—the human team—ran on messy, unstructured information designed for human consumption: websites, brochures, long email chains.

The new machinery—the AI system—requires fuel that is pure, structured, and machine-readable. We call this an AI-native content model.

This isn’t just a new form of SEO. It’s a first-principles approach to information itself. It’s about rigorously modeling your company’s knowledge. We deconstruct a vague concept like “product” into its component atoms: its core value proposition, its feature set, its technical specifications, the customer pain points it solves. Then, we explicitly define the relationships between these atoms, creating a knowledge graph.

When an AI system is fed this clean, unambiguous fuel, it can actually understand your business. And when it understands, its outputs are no longer a statistical shotgun blast of “traffic” or “leads.” Its outputs are precise and effective engagements.

4. The Founder’s New Role

So where does this leave you, the founder?

It liberates you.

Your role is elevated from being the foreman of a loud, inefficient factory to being the architect of the entire system.

You are no longer mired in the day-to-day management of a complex, human-driven process. Your work is distilled to the three highest-leverage functions:

1. Set the strategy: Define the target market and the ideal customer.
2. Provide the core knowledge: Work with the system to initially model your company’s unique product and expertise.
3. Handle the most valuable exceptions: Engage in the final, complex negotiations and build the key human relationships that only you can.

The other 80% of the work—the repeatable, scalable, data-driven execution—is handled by the system you’ve architected.

This is the true promise of this new era. Not just better tools, but a better structure for getting things done. It’s a shift that frees up human ingenuity for the things that matter most: building great products and making the strategic decisions that shape the future.