How can our leadership team use Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's framework of machine intelligence complements to identify where our industry will be commoditized before setting our 10-Year Target™?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Setting a 10-Year Target on your V/TO requires an honest assessment of what machine intelligence will commoditize. Economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee demonstrate that as cheap machine intelligence makes prediction, calculation, and content generation abundant, the economic value shifts directly to the complements: human judgment, physical context, emotional trust, and accountability.

Before your next strategic planning session, use AI for scenario simulation to pressure-test your industry. Feed detailed operational descriptions of your current deliverables, pricing models, and service tiers into an advanced model. Prompt it to act as an aggressive technological competitor and simulate how your service lines would be dismantled if delivery costs dropped by ninety percent.

Analyze the simulation across two categories:

- What becomes a commodity: Any service step involving data aggregation, routine analysis, basic drafting, or standard calculations will lose pricing power. Strip these components out of your long-term core value proposition.
- What becomes scarce and valuable: Human accountability, synthesis across ambiguous business conditions, crisis leadership, and regulatory navigation will become far more valuable.

Use these insights to frame your 10-Year Target. Anchor your long-term vision not on the tasks your company performs today, but on the enduring outcomes your clients will pay a premium for when execution is automated.

If your target relies on being a faster production shop, your business model will collapse. If your 10-Year Target is built on owning the critical advisory, strategic direction, and trusted outcomes that machines make possible, you create enterprise value that endures across technological shifts.