Every once in a while, you come across a concept that blows your mind. And then, there comes along a chain of thought that manages to scare and excite you at the same time. The book I am reading now manages to do this, and more.
Everyone is talking about AI these days – like they were about blockchain, and ICOs, and NFTs, and a lot of other new age topics that have caught our attention in the past few years. The fundamental difference is that AI is not a concept, or just another technology – unlike anything else humanity has ever seen actually. Or thought of, for that matter. So when I see “AI expert” loosely peddled around in people’s bios on LinkedIn, I tend to get a bit irritated. The guy was a blockchain expert a couple of years ago, wasn’t he?
Anyway, I am fortunate to be somewhere ringside on these exciting new developments and paradigms, given my line of work. I get to meet with and have detailed discussions on various aspects of AI, the opportunities and challenges, and what it means to the future of work. And it gets me even more intrigued.
So back to this book, the author of which I have known for a while now and every discussion that I have with him brings across a whole range of thoughts and ideas, one better than the next. His book however, brings to the fore a concept that promises not just to change the way one works, but also the way the whole world functions – the concept of AI born companies.
Actually, the work has two parts – AI Born – The Machine Core, and AI Born – The Bridge. Book 1 introduces the concept, after presenting very good insights on how the nature of work changed from the Pre-Industrial Revolution to post, and then in the internet age.
Pre-industrial labor followed the logic of the task, not the logic of the clock. The blacksmith worked until the horseshoe was finished, until the plough was repaired, until the harvest was in. The weaver wove until the cloth was complete. Time was something you passed—with neighbors, in relationship, embedded in the season’s rhythm. It was not a commodity to be parceled out and sold. It was the medium in which life occurred.
He then speaks on the concept of “precise or measured time”, which actually came into being as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution.
Thompson’s contrast with what came after is stark, and his phrasing precisely captures the difference: time shifted from something you “passed” with neighbors to something you “spent” alone, sold by the hour. That single shift—from passed to spent—contains almost everything.
Moving from vocation to industry fundamentally changed the meaning of work itself. What was earlier a craft, now became an assembly line, with a master craftsman being replaced by a line of workers who took bits of work, produced an output, but never got to experience the making from start to finish. In essence, mastery was replaced by fungible units of labour.
The modern job was born from this dissolution—work as alienated time, sold by the hour, abstracted from identity, disconnected from product or purpose. You weren’t a maker of pins or cloth or iron. You were a seller of hours. The job title became the primary marker of identity precisely because everything else had been stripped away or enclosed.
The author argues that the guild system that preceded the industrial era, was in time replaced by the corporation, which provided a lot of advantages (job security, financial certainty etc.) but also disconnected the human from the hyper local society that he used to live in. Strangers came together to live and work, and the corporation became the social institution.
These three thinkers—Follett, Drucker, McGregor—form the intellectual spine of what we might call managerial humanism: the recognition that the corporation wasn’t merely an economic machine but a social institution, and that its success depended on taking seriously the full dimensionality of the humans within it. They saw what the corporation had quietly become before the institution itself was prepared to admit it.
There are many amazing insights in the book, too vivid and detailed to be included in such a summary, but let it suffice to say that the author deftly brings us to where we are, post the internet revolution, and on the cusp of the AI age, which, he says, is also quite misunderstood. ChatGPT wrappers are not what would drive this forward – the fundamentals are changing, and not in a good way for those who remain unprepared or ill-informed.
Deploy AI. Announce transformation. Plateau at marginal gains because the agent systems were bolted onto hierarchies designed for a world where humans were the execution layer. Multiple studies published in 2024–2025 found that the substantial majority of enterprise AI pilots—estimates cluster around 90% or higher—delivered no measurable P&L impact, an order-of-magnitude indicator rather than a precisely audited rate, but consistent enough across sources to name the pattern: electric motors on steam-era pulleys, translated into software deployments and unchanged workflows.
The very nature of work is changing, the very nature of the organization is morphing into an organism that few currently recognize. Here lies the urgency – preparing for what’s coming can be exciting, life changing with far-reaching consequences, but only if you are receptive. The rest, will be history:)
AI-Born – by Mehran Granfar.