Company 2.0: Building the AI-First Organizations of the Future

As we stand on the brink of an AI-driven era, a new class of organizations is emerging: AI-first companies, or Company 2.0.

AI is taken the world by storm. As we stand on the brink of an AI-driven era, a new class of organizations is emerging: AI-first companies, or Company 2.0. 

These organizations are redefining business formation, operation, and innovation by placing AI at the heart of their strategies, products, and operations. Company 2.0 organizations are lean, agile, and highly automated, enabling the creation of products and technologies with small teams.

What’s Happening?

The AI landscape has experienced remarkable growth in the past 18 months, with new developments and breakthroughs occurring at an unprecedented pace. The most considerable change has been the rise of Generative AI, specifically the utilization of transformers, which are a type of neural network. They are now used for a wide range of purposes, from generating texts and images to protein folding and computational chemistry.

It is becoming increasingly clear that AI will revolutionize (knowledge) work across various industries. A recent OpenAI study forecasts that “approximately 19% of jobs have at least 50% of their tasks exposed to GPTs when considering both current model capabilities and anticipated GPT-powered software.” Three pivotal drivers of this transformation are:

1. Generative Models: Generative AI produces text, code, images or film, making knowledge work much more efficient. For example, the MIT found that engineers spend about 55% less time when using GitHub CoPilot. Tools like Jasper or Harvey already produce marketing copy or legal documents, reducing the time it takes humans to do these tasks.

2. AI Plug-Ins: Tools like ChatGPT Plug-Ins will streamline workflows and boost efficiency. For instance, HubSpot's plug-in ChatSpot allows users to update customer data across products with a single prompt, while plug-ins with travel companies will enable users to book multi-leg business trips with one command.

3. AutoGPTs: Recent innovations around AutoGPTs allow users to chain prompts and create agents that generate and complete multistep plans. It is only a matter of time before machines replace human labor in many work domains on a large scale.

A New Generation of Companies

This technological change will create a new breed of organizations, the Company 2.0. 

Company 2.0 organizations excel at integrating AI across their operations and leverage human-AI collaboration to achieve better outcomes. Many processes and operations will soon be fully automated while in other areas, human augmentation will create massive leverage. 

Historically, companies were an aggregation of human and financial capital with the goal of producing economic outputs. On the contrary, a Company 2.0 organization is primarily an aggregation of agents, scripts, and APIs that collaboratively build and deliver products and services.

Here are a few ideas how potential Company 2.0 organizations could look like:

• AI-first Healthcare: Use AI to analyze blood samples with computer vision, generate diagnoses, and create treatment plans, augmenting doctors and providing more accurate, targeted, and cheaper health care.

• AI-first EdTech: Use AI to create personalized learning experiences. By analyzing individual learning styles, strengths, and weaknesses, the AI generates bespoke content, exercises, and assessments to each student's needs. This product does not only improve learning outcomes but also uses fully automated content creation.

• AI-first E-Commerce Shop: Use AI to offer personalized shopping experiences and automate ordering and warehouse processes. By analyzing user data and global fashion trends, the AI decides what to stock and triggers purchase orders with fashion brands. The AI then generates dynamic web pages for every new product and offers a fully automated end-to-end shopping experience.

• AI-first Airline: Use AI to transform operations, customer experience, and overall efficiency (not even talking about AI flying airplanes). The AI optimizes flight and crew scheduling, predicts potential mechanical issues and schedules maintenance more effectively. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants would be available to address customer queries and provide support throughout the booking, check-in, and boarding processes, enhancing overall customer satisfaction. And the airline would collaborate with airports to implement AI-driven technologies, such as facial recognition for seamless check-in and boarding, smart luggage tracking systems, and autonomous ground vehicles for efficient baggage handling and aircraft servicing. 

The Implications

Companies will likely be smaller as productivity soars through AI agents and automation leverage. In the future, a team of 100 could produce the same output as a team of thousands today. This will lead to more profitable companies and increased innovation. Even non-software companies which historically relied on human labor will need way less employees to create the same or even more output.

The obvious benefit is that these new levels of efficiency will create much more profitable companies. Companies will probably need less capital and this will have huge knock-on effects on venture capital.

It will also lead to more innovation. Small teams are typically more agile and make faster decisions; combined with AI superpowers, they can capitalize on this advantage to create enormous outputs. 

Furthermore, most software products must be API-first. (Business) Customers will demand APIs to connect products with their automated workflows, as many SaaS interfaces will move to the background and simply manage specific tasks or processes.

As work becomes increasingly invisible, it is crucial to develop transparent, comprehensible, and user-friendly AI systems. New tools will be needed to build, maintain, and orchestrate AI while being able to stop agents or automations that might go haywire.

AI has turned many assumptions about work on their head. Company 2.0 organizations embrace AI-driven strategies and fostering human-AI collaboration. By doing this, these organizations are poised to unlock new levels of innovation, efficiency, and growth. 

At Interface, we are excited about Company 2.0. If you are building a Company 2.0 or developing the necessary tools to support it, let’s talk.