Lesson 5: The Great AI Unbundling, Disruption, and New Economic Models
The “Infinite Interns” paradox; the future of “agentic commerce”; redefining the customer relationship in the age of AI.
The new technology shift has given us new tools to rethink value creation and capture, in other words, how we solve problems and how we get paid for solving them. We analyze the strategies of bundling and unbundling that businesses have historically used and that AI companies use today to invent new business models.
Find all the lessons in the Economics of AI here and the previous lesson below.
Lesson 4: Enterprise's Slow Path from Automation to Disruption
Enterprises are slow to adapt to change and new technologies. They are risk-averse, inefficient, and overcrowded with bureaucracy. In this lesson, we break down the three-part process enterprises take to adopt and deploy new technology,
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Strategic Horizon: Unbundling, Disruption, and New Economic Models
What existing product and service bundles will large language models (LLMs) unbundle?
And what new forms of aggregation and value creation will they enable?
The primary strategic challenge for businesses today is to think beyond simple automation and envision how generative AI will fundamentally innovate and disrupt existing markets.
This requires asking more profound questions: What existing product and service bundles will large language models (LLMs) unbundle? And what new forms of aggregation and value creation will they enable?
The “Infinite Interns” Paradox
Generative AI is often described as providing businesses with “infinite interns”—a virtually limitless source of cognitive labor. This concept stems from the famous Jevons Paradox, which holds that when something becomes more efficient, its usage increases. This presents a critical strategic choice: Do you do the same work with fewer people? Or more work with the same people? The answer has disruptive implications. For industries where employing large numbers of people was a competitive moat, that advantage may soon evaporate.
This shift mirrors the impact of the steam engine in 19th-century Britain, which gave the nation the labor equivalent of “250 million extra working pairs of hands” and powered the Industrial Revolution. Generative AI promises a similar multiplier for knowledge work, forcing a complete rethinking of business scale and defensibility.
The Future of Aggregation and “Agentic Commerce”
In this future, a user might simply ask an AI what to buy, bypassing traditional search and discovery platforms like Google and Amazon entirely, creating a radically different, more direct path to purchase.
