A Guided Exploration of A.I for the Business Architect
In our times, predictions abound on the tipping point or inflection point of Artificial Intelligence and its ability to change the narrative of the enterprise irreversibly. So much so that one fears being left behind should he not grip it with fervour.
The modern enterprise is seen to be moving past the project model - slowly loosing the faithfulness to its name. Conventionally, an enterprise is a project - of an enterprising and risky sort, which brought with it benefits that could be divided between the promoters of the enterprise. It had in our times transformed into continuous processes - industrial or service providing. it is still true that there are fixed metrics like quarterly results, but there is so much volatility and elasticity to the financial base that the profits have to be interpreted not as standalone numbers, but complex state distributions. This is often delegated to the stock narket to come up with floor prices as the reckoning figure. Thus, an enterprise is no longer punctuated and re-committed to a new mission every year at book closure - but it is more and more understood as a continously stable system, where the margins of stability often non deterministic, deeply entangled with the fate of higher order systems and can be potentially chaotic.
If this is a justified state of affairs is something that needs to be examined. The enterprise is a social institution with limited liability and its risk is collectively subscribed by the society - the benefits too though immediately are private, diffuse for the common good. A useful institution in a complex system such as a society is something that is evidently expected to embed itself in an interruptible manner in the society. Hence, the enterprise cannot be totalizing and entangle itself with the general social life and state of affairs. It has to isolate and bound itself to the specific social contract to which it was commissioned as an institution. It is the board and the leaders that have the responsibility to keep it within these moral guardrails.
Meanwhile, disruptive technologies are often drawn without a clear statement of equations. It would yet be unclear at the time of its deployment and industrial manufacture, that the technology does not produce side effects or skews the natural equilibrium. When forced to adapt or defend, this results in enterprise getting into tensions with other social institutions.
So far, such disruptive technologies had mostly remained to be of a physical nature of a physical sort. They accelerated assembly lines, improved productivity in ways that are known to the operators and technicians and produced results in financial statements which alone needed management attention. One might say that the possibility to insulate from the shop floor and concerning themselves with metrics and panels only is something not affordable for a technology of a managerial and control engeineering nature as in A.I.
Hence, technological contemplation becomes imperative for all managerial leaders of today and that is what we would deliver, emphasize and engage in this place.
PS: To understand these concepts better, we would use the method of manifold geometry. We would for instance interpret the enterprise as a project and a panel in a 4-manifold. We would introduce manifolds here as the basic analytical tool.