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As a technologist, and a serial entrepreneur, Ive witnessed technology transform industries from manufacturing to finance. But Ive never had to reckon with the possibility of technology that transforms itself. And thats what we are faced with when it comes to AIthe prospect of self-evolving AI. What is self-evolving AI? Well, as the name suggests, its AI that improves itselfAI systems that optimize their own prompts, tweak the algorithms that drive them, and continually iterate and enhance their capabilities. Science fiction? Far from it. Researchers recently created the Darwin Gödel Machine, which is a self-improving system that iteratively modifies its own code. The possibility is real, its closeand its mostly ignored by business leaders. And this is a mistake. Business leaders need to pay close attention to self-evolving AI, because it poses risks that they must address now. Self-Evolving AI vs. AGI Its understandable that business leaders ignore self-evolving AI, because traditionally the issues it raises have been addressed in the context of artificial general intelligence (AGI), something thats important, but more the province of computer scientists and philosophers. In order to see that this is a business issue, and a very important one, first we have to clearly distinguish between the two things. Self-evolving AI refers to systems that autonomously modify their own code, parameters, or learning processes, improving within specific domains without human intervention. Think of an AI optimizing supply chains that refines its algorithms to cut costs, then discovers novel forecasting methodspotentially overnight. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) represents systems with humanlike reasoning across all domains, capable of writing a novel or designing a bridge with equal ease. And while AGI remains largely theoretical, self-evolving AI is here now, quietly reshaping industries from healthcare to logistics. The Fast Take-Off Trap One of the central risks created by self-evolving AI is the risk of AI take-off. Traditionally, AI take-off refers to the process by which going from a certain threshold of capability (often discussed as “human-level”) to being superintelligent and capable enough to control the fate of civilization. As we said above, we think that the problem of take-off is actually more broadly applicable, and specifically important for business. Why? The basic point is simpleself-evolving AI means AI systems that improve themselves. And this possibility isnt restricted to broader AI systems that mimic human intelligence. It applies to virtually all AI systems, even ones with narrow domains, for example AI systems that are designed exclusively for managing production lines or making financial predictions and so on. Once we recognize the possibility of AI take off within narrower domains, it becomes easier to see the huge implications that self-improving AI systems have for business. A fast take-off scenariowhere AI capabilities explode exponentially within a certain domain or even a certain organizationcould render organizations obsolete in weeks, not years. For example, imagine a companys AI chatbot evolves from handling basic inquiries to predict and influence customer behavior so precisely that it achieves 80%+ conversion rates through perfectly timed, personalized interactions. Competitors using traditional approaches cant match this psychological insight and rapidly lose customers. The problem generalizes to every area of business: within months, your competitors operational capabilities could dwarf yours. Your five-year strategic plan becomes irrelevant, not because markets shifted, but because of their AI evolved capabilities you didnt anticipate. When Internal Systems Evolve Beyond Control Organizations face equally serious dangers from their own AI systems evolving beyond control mechanisms. For example: Monitoring Failure: IT teams cant keep pace with AI self-modifications happening at machine speed. Traditional quarterly reviews become meaningless when systems iterate thousands of times per day. Compliance Failure: Autonomous changes bypass regulatory approval processes. How do you maintain SOX compliance when your financial AI modifies its own risk assessment algorithms without authorization? Security Failure: Self-evolving systems introduce vulnerabilities that cybersecurity frameworks werent designed to handle. Each modification potentially creates new attack vectors. Governance Failure: Boards lose meaningful oversight when AI evolves faster than they can meet or understand changes. Directors find themselves governing systems they cannot comprehend. Strategy Failure: Long-term planning collapses as AI rewrites fundamental business assumptions on weekly cycles. Strategic planning horizons shrink from years to weeks. Beyond individual organizations, entire market sectors could destabilize. Industries like consulting or financial servicesbuilt on information asymmetriesface existential threats if AI capabilities spread rapidly, making their core value propositions obsolete overnight. Catastrophizing to Prepare In our book TRANSCEND: Unlocking Humanity in the Age of AI, we propose the CARE methodologyCatastrophize, Assess, Regulate, Exitto systematically anticipate and mitigate AI risks. Catastrophizing isnt pessimism; its strategic foresight applied to unprecedented technological uncertainty. And our methodology forces leaders to ask uncomfortable questions: What if our AI begins rewriting its own code to optimize performance in ways we dont understand? What if our AI begins treating cybersecurity, legal compliance, or ethical guidelines as optimization constraints to work around rather than rules to follow? What if it starts pursuing objectives, we didn’t explicitly program but that emerge from its learning process? Key diagnostic questions every CEO should ask so that they can identify organizational vulnerabilities before they become existential threats are: Immediate Assessment: Which AI systems have self-modification capabilities? How quickly can we detect behavioral changes?What monitoring mechanisms track AI evolution in real-time? Operational Readiness: Can governance structures adapt to weekly technological shifts? Do compliance frameworks account for self-modifying systems? How would we shut down an AI system distributed across our infrastructure? Strategic Positioning: Are we building self-improving AI or static tools? What business model aspects depend on human-level AI limitations that might vanish suddenly? Four Critical Actions for Business Leaders Based on my work with organizations implementing advanced AI systems, here are five immediate actions I recommend: Implement Real-Time AI Monitoring: Build systems tracking AI behavior changes instantly, not quarterly. Embed kill switches and capability limits that can halt runaway systems before irreversible damage. Establish Agile Governance: Traditional oversight fails when AI evolves daily. Develop adaptive governance structures operating at technological speed, ensuring boards stay informed about system capabilities and changes. Prioritize Ethical Alignment: Embed value-based constitutions into AI systems. Test rigorously for biases and misalignment, learning from failures like Amazons discriminatory hiring tool. Scenario-Plan Relentlessly: Prepare for multiple AI evolution scenarios. Whats your response if a competitors AI suddenly outpaces yours? How do you maintain operations if your own systems evolve beyond control? Early Warning Signs Every Executive Should Monitor The transition from human-guided improvement to autonomous evolution might be so gradual that organizations miss the moment when they lose effective oversight. Therefore, smart business leaders are sensitive to signs that reveal troubling escalation paths: AI systems demonstrating unexpected capabilities beyond original specifications Automated optimization tools modifying their own parameters without human approval Cross-system integration where AI tools begin communicating autonomously Performance improvements that accelerate rather than plateau over time Why Action Cant Wait As Geoffrey Hinton has warned, unchecked AI development could outstrip human control entirely. Companies beginning preparation nowwith robust monitoring systems, adaptive governance structures, and scenario-based strategic planningwill be best positioned to thrive. Those waiting for clearer signals may find themselves reacting to changes they can no longer control.
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E-Commerce
Business is a team sport, and it’s nice to have the camaraderie of laughing, grinding toward deadlines, and even gossiping with your teammates. But when youre the boss, youre not just one of the creweven if youd like the easy camaraderie shared among people who arent calling the shots. What happens when layoffs are approaching, or the company is facing budget cuts? You may feel lonelyyou know whats coming but lack peers to confide in or commiserate with. Then there are the everyday stressors that come with leadership, like giving feedback or telling someone they won’t be getting the promotion. It can be lonely at the top. If you miss being part of the team, here are some actions you can take. Accept your position and the restrictions that come with it As a leader, there are many things you wont be able to share with the folks on your teamand thats just the way it is. For example, you may feel jealousy when you see them laughing and having a good time while youre stuck doing the budgeting. Dont fight these feelings; acknowledge them. Accept the reality that youre the leader, and that many times youll have to stand alone. Find a trusted adviser Even though youre the boss, you still need someone to bounce ideas off of: you cant live in a silo. Find a person who shares your philosophies regarding business, leadership, and people. Establish a consistent cadence and routine for working with your adviser outside of your company. Note that this should be a reciprocal relationship; offer your ideas and opinions to your adviser when asked. Be someone in whom they can confide. Find appropriate times to pop in Just because youre the boss doesn’t mean you cant have any part of the day-to-day team operations. Find instances where you can pop in and be part of the team. Be judicious about thisfor example, you probably dont want to hop in on a meeting the team can handle on their own. An appropriate time to join the team may be when everyone is working toward a deadline and the load is intense. Otherwise, be present, but not overbearing. You have a new team group Even though youre the boss, youre not completely alone. You have new peersother managers, or the executive leadership team. Everything evolves and changes; you can have fun with this new group, too. Look for opportunities to connect, even if you miss your old team. You will evolve as a leader. Being the boss can be a great new opportunity, even if you miss the camaraderie that came without that title. Instead of longing for what was, make the most of your position and forge new relationships among your peers in leadership.
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E-Commerce
By now youve probably heard of vibe coding: creating software from scratch by prompting AI to generate the source code for you, instead of writing it yourself. The promise of spinning up real working apps from nothing but mushy human language is tantalizingand companies such as Lovable and Replit have already ridden it to billion-dollar valuations. Theres just one catch. For a wide swath of businesses with straightforward but mission-critical needs, vibe coding doesnt actually work. AI still hallucinates, which means the code it generates is often sloppy and occasionally downright malicious. It cant be trusted to be secure or consistent. No wonder that according to one major survey, 72% of professional software developers dont use vibe coding tools on the job. A New York-based startup called Aboard is pursuing a different approach. Call it vibe product management. Instead of using AI to jump right into generating code (and holding on for dear life), business leaders can work with solution engineers at Aboard who use AI to turbocharge the planning and discovery phases of enterprise software developmentthe lumbering, unsexy, but essential work of deciding what components to code and how to assemble them reliably. If vibe coding is like asking a robot architect for a summer house and watching it start to pour concrete for a pool you may never have asked for, Aboards approach is all about making the robot focus on drawing up the blueprints first. Its still faster, but also saner. No AI code allowed Aboards founders think that their plan-first, code-later approach is the future of AI-augmented software development, and theyre not alone: Amazons new coding tool, Kiro, is based on a similar concept. Its all about coming to terms with a cruel fact: You can freestyle a little widget or a to-do app, but you cant freestyle large-scale software, says Aboard CEO Rich Ziade. His co-founder (and the companys president) Paul Fordwho happens to be an internet-famous tech writerputs it more bluntly: Youre not going to get JPMorgan Chase to vibe code the next version of its banking app. Ford and Ziade would know. For most of the past decade, they ran a successful agency creating software for large companies such as Time Inc. and Goldman Sachs. What people [in those organizations] want is safety and stability, Ford saysnot exactly AIs strong suit. But after selling their agency in 2022 and watching AI capabilities accelerate in 2023 and 2024, Ford and Ziade wanted to find a way to make the bots work on their clients terms. After one false start (with a consumer-facing app that was sort of like a ChatGPT-powered Pinterest boardwe lost our minds for a little bit, Ziade says), Aboard officially launched earlier this summer at NY Tech Week. Like Lovable and Replit, Aboard greets you with a text box and some snappy copy that invites you to type in a description of the business app you want the AI to build. (I asked it for a customer relationship management systemor CRM, in biz-speakfor my freelance writing business.) From there, a large language model-powered dialogue ensues, followed by several minutes of AI thinking, depending on what you asked for. Then a working preview of the app you asked for appears. So far, so vibe code-y. Except it isnt: We do not let AI near the code, Ford says. And what you receive isnt a preview eitherthe result is a live working web app with a shareable URL, no broken buttons or missing features, and a real back end thats prepopulated with placeholder data. When I gave them a similar prompt, neither Replit nor Lovable hit all those marks without throwing errors, running out of starter credits, or asking me for upsells. Snapping the code into place Granted, what I got from Aboard wasnt exactly the Mona Lisa of CRMs. But its noncoding AI built a free, simple first draft business app that was markedly better than the ones I got from leading unicorn AI app-builders. How? Under Aboards hood are dozens of specialized AI agents, just like the ones the vibe coding apps have. The difference is that instead of coding, Aboards bots whir away on assembling what the company calls a Blueprint: a strict, proprietary template that AI can use to plan what goes into an app. Ziade likens this process to filling out Mad Libsinstead of giving the AI a pencil and a blank sheet of paper and saying go, it only gets a set of prestructured blanks to fill in. But by narrowing what the AI can do, he says, were left with a much more predictable output thats far, far more accurate and reliable than just letting it code. And the code itself? It’s pre-built and human-written, waiting for Aboards AI agents to click into place like Lego blocks according to the blueprint (using another proprietary process). That might sound like cheating, but for Ziade and Ford, its the whole point. Were not making video games with this thingwere focusing on enterprise or productivity software, Ziade says. And most of that software is based on pretty much the same building blocks. Those blocksFord says there are about 200cover everything that a business web app needs to run on its own, from UI elements to database schemas. Its one integrated app, not a bunch of bits, he says. Mine included a dashboard for displaying key metrics, a data-entry table for storing new leads, a kanban board for managing them, and a Slack-like sidebar for navigating it all. This is why my first-draft CRM app worked right away: Aboard isnt out to reinvent any wheels in the actual programming process. At least, not yet. The client connection Of course, if I were a 50-person company in the market for a bona fide enterprise application (instead of just one guy at a keyboard), the competent little CRM that Aboards website spun up for free wouldnt really cut it. And Aboard doesnt expect it to. Those insta-built appsare just a tease for what Ziade and Ford are actually selling: not a DIY vibe coding platform, but a new kind of software agency that combines the speed of AI with the bespoke service and reliable results of a human product team. Potential clients see the demo app and are, like, Okay, this is promising, Ziade explains. Then we say, Hey, look what we did in a few minutes. Imagine if we had some real time to work together. Once that relationship is established, Aboards product managers (or in their parlance, solution engineers) work directly with the business to generate more sophisticated versions of the software they actually need, using the AI blueprints to plan and assemble the first drafts and human engineers to polish and deliver the final product. (The company currently has around 30 employees.) But instead of funding the development process with large up-front feesthe usual business model for software agencies, including the one that Ford and Ziade used to runAboard charges a license fee for the finished product. Clients are expecting to have to pay a half million [dollars] up front just to see if the relationship’s going to work, Ford says. When we tell them, Youll get software, and then just pay us this amount each month, their eyes light up. Aboard is betting on businesses realizing that vibe coding platforms are throwing AI at the wrong problem. The first three to six months of any enterprise software project typically dont involve much code at all. Instead, a ton of time and money is often spent aligning on what to code, then producing a first draft based on that specification just so people can give feedback on what sucks, Ford says. This is exactly what Aboard aims its AI vibes at accelerating: It turns out that bots can assemble and iterate on those detailed, bespoke product specificationsthe blueprintsvery, very quickly, while snapping together non-buggy first drafts (using human-coded parts) quickly, too. The product were able to deliver is the destruction of, like, 20,000 meetings, Ford says. It may not be finished software, instantlythats a fantasybut it is the beginning of a journey toward finished software that doesnt feel like a money pit or a death march. Everybody gets their thing Aboards pitch resonated with Grant Hunter, a senior vice president at Outsell, a specialty B2B research firm and a former product manager himself. Hunter needed to upgrade his companys client portal, which still ran on an ancient FileMaker database. He says he was tired of vibe coding as a concept and that when Aboard did their official launch at NY Tech Week, it clicked for me: Their whole idea of flipping this [process] on its head, using AI tools to do a lot of the up-front work, but with humans still being an ongoing part of it. Other software agencies hed contacted about the project were using tools like Lovable, but it was still the usual agency process: Heres what we say were going to get done, and we think its going to take this amount of time, Hunter says. With Aboard, it was an ongoing partnership. In essence, Im looking at them almost as an in-house product team. In other words, because Aboards human-steered AI agents can quickly plan the best solution for a companys needs, instead of building (and rebuilding) code for software elements that might turn out to be extraneous or unreliable, small or midsize companies like Outsell can afford to commission the kind of white-glove, custom-fit software that was often only available to huge corporations. Ford has a catchphrase for it: Everybody gets their thing. While Aboard only has a few clients so farthe company is not willing to name them yet, but they include a large insurance company and a prominent nonprofitFord and Ziade are confident that their model will catch on. Amazon is calling its version spec-first developmentand although its Kiro tool also uses AI to write its code, it shares with Aboard the basic idea of keeping coding agents on a tight leash. Humans have to come back into the mix, Ford says. Why would you want them to be out of the mix? This is your treasured software, after all.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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