Summary

Stancil argues that while AI companies talk grandly about revolutionizing the world, the real transformation will be carried out by internal teams at ordinary companies—the IT departments and 'agent engineering' teams who figure out how to actually deploy AI in practice. He draws a parallel to how Microsoft built Windows but it was millions of IT teams who actually redesigned how corporations work, suggesting the same pattern will repeat with AI.

Key Insight

The AI revolution won't be defined by the companies building frontier models, but by the unglamorous internal teams at ordinary companies who figure out how to actually use them—just as the PC revolution was ultimately shaped more by IT departments than by Microsoft.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  Information technology, pfft. You are building a cathedral that will change the world, and all the government can see is the bricks.

• 7

  One way to read all of this is that AI is reinventing Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare. But the other, more literal way to see it is that Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are reinventing Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare.

• 5

  AI companies cannot do that work. They can help with it—they can spend billions building consultancies and deployment companies—but it too will ultimately be carried out on the ground, across a million 'internal agent engineering' teams, testing new ideas against their specific problems.

• 5

  OpenAI and Anthropic may build the model and some of its generic products; everyone else will figure out how to use them. And it will be their discoveries that become tomorrow's standards.

• 7

  If models converge but computers endure, eventually, what will be more valuable—selling models or selling computers?

Tone

satirical, analytical