If you want to see the future, don’t look at the mainstream. Look at the fringe. Look at the edges. Look for the weird.
With AI, most incumbent organizations and established enterprises are playing catch-up. They’re focused on productivity. There’s nothing wrong with productivity. But productivity is not the sole use of AI. Writing emails faster isn’t game-changing. Neither is drafting documents or summarizing reports.
And nobody wakes up inspired to go to work because they can 10x the number of emails they send.
AI can do much more than help us do the same things faster. The problem is that most organizations still treat AI as a tool. Open ChatGPT. Ask it something. Get an answer. Close it. That’s a solo-player model of AI. Employees use it individually, in isolation from the rest of the organization.
The more interesting future begins when AI moves from being a tool employees use to becoming part of the organization’s operating system.
Imagine AI that knows what your organization knows. It participates in meetings. It understands customer calls. It has access to relevant emails and messages. It’s connected to your CRM, project management system, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and the other systems where your organization operates.
It doesn’t simply wait for someone to prompt it. It has context. It has memory. It can reason. It can take action.
Now we’re no longer talking about helping someone write an email faster. We’re talking about increasing the capabilities of the organization itself. That’s a very different game. And if you want to understand what that future looks like, don’t look at what the average enterprise is doing.
Look for the weird people inside your organization who are already experimenting with this stuff. Find the person who has built their own agents. Find the non-developer who is suddenly building software. Find the employee who has completely redesigned how they work. Find the team that has eliminated steps everyone else assumes are necessary.
Instead of dismissing these people as outliers, study them. Ask them to show you what they’re doing. Some of today’s weird behavior will become tomorrow’s standard operating procedure.
Then look outside your organization. Study startups and AI-native companies that aren’t burdened by decades of processes, systems, organizational structures, and assumptions. They have an enormous advantage. They’re not protecting the past. They’re creating the future.
Companies like Every are experimenting with giving every employee an AI agent. Others like Kavak are embedding agents throughout their operations and designing entirely new ways for humans and AI to work together.
Don’t necessarily copy them. Study them. Ask what they believe about the future that you don’t. Ask what assumptions they’re challenging that you still take for granted. Ask what they’re doing today that would look crazy inside your organization. Because the mainstream is usually optimized for what already works. The fringe is where people are experimenting with what might work next.
By the time something becomes a best practice, the future has already moved somewhere else. So if you want to see what’s coming: Go to the edge. Find the outliers. Study the experiments. Look for weird.
Bottom line: The future usually looks weird before it looks obvious. Innovation starts on the edge, not in the mainstream.
