Commoditized intelligence will lead to ephemeral coworkers

Azeem Azhar recently summarized the before/after of commoditized intelligence (Bloomberg):

For most of history, hiring a dozen PhDs meant a massive budget and months of lead time. Today, a few keystrokes in a chatbot summon that brainpower in seconds.

In light of this sudden appearance of free intelligence, Azhar continues, there's an important question:

The question facing individuals and organizations alike is: What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly ubiquitous and practically free?

The way I think about this is that the traditional company is being unbundled.

You can think of company personnel as agglomerations of intelligence, domain expertise, and productivity.

Historically, it was much more efficient for people to hire people full-time than to contract out every task big or small. Economist Ronald Coase won the Nobel prize in part for proving this.

However, that fundamental premise of company formation no longer holds.

As Azhar mentioned, PhD level expertise in virtually any domain is now available on-demand.

The high cumulative transaction costs of contracting people for any and every task are now dropping to zero.

This is why we believe inspired, resourceful individuals will increasingly outperform teams.

You can think of the "company" of the future as a solo operator working with a team of ephemeral "coworkers."

Each ephemeral coworker is spun up tailor-made for the task at hand, with the right expertise, the right context, and the right incentives.

With this structure, the solo operator should be able to outperform traditional companies, because their overhead is vastly lower and their performance may actually be better.