I rarely read business books. Extremely rarely. However, the decade-old “The Decline and Fall of Nokia” by (mainly) David J. Cord has something biographic to it. It’s like a detailed painting of a crowd: adds clarity and context to an external viewer.
Nevertheless, I consider, in my own view, that it contains a lot of parallels (or rather, counterexamples) about what is happening nowadays, with the advent of this generation of AI. There are many tech businesses that have to suffer, adding fuel to this fire seems to be this new tech.
What tech? you say ?
This one:
LLM Ability to complete an expert-level long task
What’s that you say? That is the ability of LLMs (so not all AI) to complete long tasks. To read: If you present a complicated problem to an expert, how much time does the expert spend in order to solve it. In summary, the latest commercially available LLM, is now solving 2 hours worth of expert-level in an instance. (95C.I is 1 hour and 10 minutes to 4 hours). In Health, for example, the number is much, much higher. This is, without a doubt an exponential beggining. It started with X’s grok4, and is thorowly confirmed by OpenAIs GPT5.
To put this in perspective: the jump from o1 to o3 is as big as the jump from o3 to gpt5. In the four months it passed from April…
The blindspot.
This is the reality that everybody has to swallow. In an analogy with what happened with Nokia, there is a counterintuitive (fr some) blindspot that is manifesting for businisess. This only comes to confirm my predictions (to be fair, not mine to start with, but predictions of smarter people) that: The boost in productivity will manifest itself only for the supperior level of expertise. The best people in a field will be able to milk these tooks better. Considering they assume the stool and start putting in the effort to rub the tities 🙂
This is also the big blindspot. Many organizations seem to think that because high expertise is easier to find, you can mix it with the low expertise of a random team and boost productivity, when reality is exactly the other way around. In all this turmoil we’ll find an increasing number of Nokias. Bigger or smaller, but still, blind.
Let’s hope more and more business leaders understand this aspect before the exponential growth of this capability, turns into a 1/T law for the business.
Bang!