Can AI Re-found an Incumbent Instead of Replacing It?

Michael Lee says an incumbent can be re-founded for AI from the inside, and neither a software purchase nor a consulting contract does that work. A Fortune 500 chief executive who tries to re-found the company is stuck with three options, and each one stalls.

Doing it alone fails on talent. Recruiting and keeping the people who can re-found a company is close to impossible when the celebrated persona is the investor, as at Blackstone, rather than the engineer, as at Palantir. Alex Karp would dislike that description of Palantir. Palantir gathered world-class engineers and sells that capacity to organizations that cannot hire it. A services firm such as Accenture or McKinsey celebrates the engineer and the technology, then optimizes for getting into the client's wallet, staying there, and growing that share. The services path stays incremental, and a vendor cannot change how people are organized or how they are paid. Buying software fails for a different reason. A product everyone can buy is available to every competitor, and a software company has to sell a workflow that already exists. It cannot sell a new way of organizing work that does not exist yet.

Ownership is what lines the buyer up with management. Sequence is built to celebrate the engineer, bring frontier engineering in, and keep a long horizon so the company can be rebuilt around the technology available now.