Personal Chefs for Everyone, Courtesy of AI

“Superficially, we lack memory, inspiration, and a sense of proportion. More profoundly, we are probably approaching a new stage of human consciousness.”- Jean-Louis Servan-Schrieber, “The Return of Courage”

"We're already doing that…." - Customer

I've had the privilege of working with many companies and seeing what goes on behind the curtain. Most companies do not like to innovate, and I have some theories about why. On one hand, most mature companies are doing pretty well, so while they dabble with innovation, they really cook with legacy technology. After all, why change things if everything is pretty good?

The other side is best articulated in a paper entitled "The peculiar longevity of things not so bad." The authors, Daniel T. Gilbert et al., document what they call the "region beta paradox." Their research revealed a psychological phenomenon where people sometimes recover faster from more distressing experiences than from less distressing ones. This means a "worse" situation can push someone to take action and find a solution quicker than a mildly uncomfortable situation where they might remain stagnant due to the lack of urgency to change. This psychological phenomenon describes the persistence of legacy systems that we all love to hate—they're bad, but not bad enough.

In the absence of a "worse" situation, we remain anchored in a homeostatic world. What could create that worse situation for businesses that might force them to change, rather than persist with the same? My bet is AI.

Blind Alleys and Over-specialization

Paedomorphism, a well-known principle in evolutionary biology, occurs when an organism reverts to an earlier, more adaptable evolutionary stage. Sometimes, species become so specialized that they can't adapt to change—this is called an evolutionary "blind alley." Paedomorphism helps by preserving juvenile traits, giving species more flexibility to evolve. For example, certain marine organisms, like nudibranch mollusks, have retained simplified body structures while adapting to new ecological niches.

What is the paedomorphic equivalent for businesses? To retreat from blind alleys, overspecialization, and potential extinction, a reversion to a past form might be useful. The answer lies in first principles. This approach forces us to think about the fundamental elements of the business; in essence, it's a simulated reversion to a more juvenile and simplified state. Companies generally avoid this as they're locked into incrementalist thinking.

Whenever a new technology emerges, most incumbents respond with a bolt-on solution to an existing product or create a poorly funded proof-of-concept to check a box and tell investors they're innovating. But what if the technology is fundamental? The internet was one such technology, mobile was perhaps another, and generative AI represents at least as fundamental a shift, if not greater. These major shifts require recalibrating business first principles to fully capture value and understand the implications of the technological shift.

As I observe the bets that incumbents and startups have placed in the AI race, I notice patterns that give me pause—particularly the incrementalist startups and short-sighted incumbents. These cohorts fall into the age-old optimization trap, starting with the current state and asking, "How can we make this better or cheaper?" The typical answer is process automation. While this approach often works, it fails to question whether the process should exist at all. This failure to look beyond immediate problems leads to business logic sprawl, spaghetti code, and technical debt that bloats and encumbers businesses over time.

Your Own Personal Chef

I don't have a personal chef, but I can imagine the luxury of having someone make all your meals exactly to your specifications, based on your health goals, taste preferences, fitness ambitions, allergies, and scheduling needs. A personal chef epitomizes personalization, delivering service customized specifically to you.

For years, companies have focused on building self-service software and applications. The thinking goes that by building systems with unique data available to all stakeholders, each person can use the application as needed. While reasonable, this approach faces challenges: humans rarely fully utilize available features, and finding or building what you need (like dashboards or reports) can be incredibly time-consuming and often requires specialized training. Yet I still see people, including new AI entrepreneurs, stuck in this old world of self-service software systems.

Returning to our personal chef fantasy, Imagine an application that, like a chef, knows your goals, preferences, capabilities, and deadlines. Instead of telling it what you need, it would tell you what you need based on your desired outcomes. Is this possible?

Agents are stepping stones to what I call advisors, or teleological systems—systems that execute and provide instruction based on desired outcomes. Like your personal chef who knows you're preparing for a marathon or high-school reunion, a teleological machine learns your goals and directs the smartest actions across a series of advisors. Your role? You're the CEO in this brave new world of software "personal chefs."

When knowledge becomes readily available and increasingly cheaper, the problem set shifts to engineering maximal utility. By focusing on outcomes rather than optimizing workflows, we can use purpose-driven business models to re-engineer businesses and applications, altogether eliminating unnecessary processes & workflows. This will empower people through AI-driven hyper-personalized capabilities—just like a CEO with a team of expert advisors at your disposal. The question will then become - what makes a good CEO? A few things come to mind, 1/ the ability to consume and comprehend a large amount of information, 2/ the ability to ask relevant and insightful questions, 3/ the ability to allocate resources effectively, 4/ the ability to communicate, rally, inspire, and lead teams, 5/ a first-principles orientation.

Opinions My Own.