They will be the ones that changed shape around it, deliberately and in the right order. Our working paper, The Principal Firm, sets out where this goes. This page is the argument in ten minutes, and what it means for your P&L along the way.
Strip away the noise and three facts remain. Each one is measurable inside your own company today.
Drafting, coding, analysing, answering, processing: the execution layer of the firm is becoming machine work, and its price is falling toward the price of computation. Every competitor you have gets the same discount. The discount itself is not an advantage.
Saying precisely what you want, and standing behind what comes out. Specification and answerability. Machines do not supply either one, and every hour of cheap execution makes them more valuable, because more work now depends on fewer decisions.
Firms were designed to organise scarce execution: layers of people doing, and a thin layer deciding. When execution is abundant, the pyramid inverts. The scarce roles become the people who decide what good looks like and answer for the result. Most companies feel this as chaos. It is actually a direction.
Most AI programmes add tools to a company shaped for the old economics: a licence per employee, a pilot per department, a bot in the corner of the architecture diagram. Eighteen months later the spend is real and the P&L has not moved. The pattern of failure is always one of three.
Nobody chose the work on purpose, so the tools automate whatever was easiest to reach. Individual tasks speed up. The processes that carry the business do not.
Agents inherit whatever is underneath them. Contested figures, unowned systems and processes that live in two people's heads produce confident automation of the wrong thing.
The first serious question from a board, a customer or a regulator goes unanswered, and trust in the whole programme dies with it. This is where most pilots quietly stop.
The paper's claim is simple: when machines perform the work, the firm that remains is organised around the people who answer for it. We call that a principal firm, and it has a definite shape.
A smaller core with more reach. They specify the work, keep the decisions that carry consequence, and are named against outcomes.
Working from specifications rather than vibes, stopping at gates, at whatever scale the work demands. Capacity stops being a hiring problem.
A role most companies do not have yet: the people who own the specifications, the data paths and the agent roster. They are how one principal safely directs a hundred agents.
What was asked, what was produced, who approved it. It answers auditors, survives staff turnover, and becomes the one asset a competitor cannot copy: the account of how your work goes wrong and what you did about it.
You do not get there by proclamation, and you do not get there by buying tools. You get there in an order, and the order is the strategy. Skip a step and the next one breaks.
Which work is worth putting agents on, what it is worth, and whether the data and the process can carry it. Weeks, fixed fee, a document your board can act on. This is the Agent Case and the groundwork around it.
One consequence-heavy workflow live, with the gates where a person still decides and a figure agreed before the build. The number funds the next step and ends the internal argument. This is first agent live.
Specification discipline, permissioned data paths, gates and the record become how the company works rather than how one project worked. Applications are added one at a time, each cheaper than the last, on one layer that also takes the agents you bought elsewhere.
Each step pays for itself on a figure you already report, and each step is also a piece of the destination. That is the difference between a transformation and a string of projects: nothing gets thrown away, and stopping at any step still leaves you better than you started.
Gates where consequence lives are what let agents run everywhere else at full speed. A record you hold is what makes European and Asian regulation a formality instead of a programme, including the transparency duties that already apply and the high-risk regime arriving in 2027. And a named plan for the people whose work the agents absorb is what makes the change survivable inside your own organisation. Repurposing comes before redundancy, and we do not start without that plan.
These are commitments you can check, and they are written down. Five of them, on the About page.
The paper is not marketing. It states the conditions under which the argument fails, so you can test it against your own market rather than take our word for it. If the argument holds for your company, the sequence above is how you act on it. If it does not, better to know now, for the price of an evening's reading.
Thirty minutes with the founder. Bring your situation, and we will tell you where the sequence would start in your company, and what it would cost to find out.