We’ve argued before that AI doesn’t just tweak digital workflows; rather, it rewires the value thesis across markets and organizations. The advantage shifts from “more headcount and scale” to modular capabilities with clear semantics, clear outcomes, and executable interfaces—operational clarity you (and your customers and ecosystem partners) can actually build on.

In parallel, a new kind of squeeze is hitting all industries – beyond digital. In the “Urgent Buyer Era” (check the articles in this week’s curation) even hard tech incumbents are being forced to reorganize faster than their governance can manage:

“The coming industrial realignment will reward companies, and investors, specifically built to thrive amid disruption, not those struggling to adapt legacy operations to new structural realities.”

On top of this, AI agents promise to become a powerful negotiation infrastructure, a coordination technology like our good friend Sangeet Choudary posits in his latest book Reshuffle.

In that perspective the costs of discovery, bargaining, and enforcement of agreements collapses: it’s what we call Coasean bargaining… at scale. When those costs fall, coordination migrates from policy and hierarchy to contracts—and then to contracts that machines (agents) can understand and leverage.

The practical implication in our organizations may not be to “decentralize everything,” but create the basis to harden what matters so people and agents can compose fast and safely.

That brings us to two key ideas from this week’s recordings (shortly coming up on the podcast): two new Boundaryless Conversations, one with PostShift’s Lee Bryant, and another with Hat’s Protocol’s Spencer Graham & Nicholas Naraghi.

During our conversation, Lee raised a key point in this context: “the platform is whatever you can automate.” Your platform is the surface area of reliable automation—a thin waist where contracts, roles, and semantics are clear enough so you can build your product portfolio on top.

Below it, Shared Service Platforms can provide repeatable capability (compliance, security, quality, procurement, finance, data). Above it, entrepreneurial cells (what we call micro-enterprises, with P&L) compose those capabilities into offers aligned to customers and, increasingly, to… urgent buyers (including agents).

The narrower and clearer that waist, the easier it is to move from intention to impact without losing control.

But then, in decentralizing and enabling, you also have another problem: that of executing on a reasonably coherent strategy and governance, known as the principal-agent problem.

As Nicholas put it during the conversation, there’s a trilemma you can’t escape in organizations when effectiveness (or efficiency at outcomes), cost, and hardness (i.e. predictability and programmability) have to coalesce:

• High effectiveness + high hardness ⇒ often means higher costs (more controls, more contract engineering).
• High effectiveness + low cost ⇒ hardness tends to decrease (you have to trust social processes, delegate – thus more risk of bureaucratic buildup, debt and opacity).
• High hardness + low cost ⇒ sometimes effectiveness decreases (because you need rigid rules and you’ll need to limit agents’ autonomy, and require humans-in-the-loop, etc.).

Nick provides a good example: putting an AI agent in a role reduces execution costs, but introduces capture risk (prompt injection anyone?) or diminished effectiveness on some tasks.

You optimize resource by resource, role by role—with explicit trade-offs about where to add finality, auditability, and enforcement, and where to remain agile for speed and learning.

Roles can become programmable bundles: treat a role as a unit that explicitly carries outcomes, permissions, eligibility, decision rules, and payout/penalty logic. Make that legible, and an AI agent can safely “sit in the hat” of that role.

Put differently, the shape of organizing to come is fewer walls and more contracts with milestone acceptance and telemetry; role registries that state, in machine-readable terms, who can do what with which assets; and risk-tiered controls that match the criticality of the process. Get that right, and you can invite autonomous agents in—because you’ve given them constraints worth adhering to.

Why move now? Because markets are already starting to select on these features, buyers are facing existential timelines in energy, compute, defense, and critical materials, and seek easily leverageable capacity. Organizations that remain ambiguous about interfaces and do not decentralize roles will be out-transacted by those with programmable clarity at the waist and entrepreneurial range at the edges.

The prize goes to firms that can say straight, “here is our contract standard, here is our service catalog—plug in”—and mean it.