Every company needs its own Agentic AI

Our VUCA world yields a fracturing system demands superpower-level AI capabilities that are arriving just-in-time for the Technological Singularity

Everybody, get in line!

I feel like I am approaching my own singularity — seriously. Between my interactions with a cluster of Founders and my own analysis of the world, I can feel the solution-set forming right on the horizon — and it is stunning to behold.

I realize that most of us are pendulum-swinging right now between insane expectations (mostly tech driven) and loathsome dread (mostly driven by global structural changes that appear to yield that VUCA [volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous] world-reality, along with Trump 2.0), but I remain supremely optimistic that AI arrives just in time.

If you are — like so much of the high-tech world today — fascinated by Palantir co-founder Alex Karp and his new book’s argument that Silicon Valley should embrace an avowedly America-first imperative when it comes to how AI can transform national security, it may seem like the answer to all challenges is for Big Tech and the Tech Bros to go all-in on an AI arms race of sorts with China.

Admittedly, that is important ground to cover — namely, not being left behind on what I call the looming Military Singularity.

You don’t want to be out there fielding a personnel-heavy, platform-centric military when your opponent is fielding a real-world Transformer force fueled by AI capable of shrinking the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) Loop to milliseconds. You most definitely want to get there first, not just to reap that strategic advantage and make sure Mutually Assured Destruction still reigns supreme — even with the advent of AI, but likewise to pioneer how all such capabilities ultimately migrate from the national security realm to the domestic/homeland security realm — where its capacity for generating transformation of policing will be history bending (in both good and scary ways — thus our imperative to pioneer it).

America wants to be there first on all things, proving the superiority of our market-based democracy to deliver these advancements and likewise to set the rules for how they are successfully applied within a market-based democracy — thus proving the lie that authoritarian states can do it faster and better.

So, yeah, I’m all for Karp’s call. I’m just more interested in seeing how AI can empower our private sector to step up in this wider competition with China because that’s where I spot the win: not defeating China on some battlefield but outperforming and out-networking Chinese firms throughout the world.

China’s quantum grand strategy, as I call it, is about winning the world one captured/manipulated consumer at a time.

It won’t be the superiority of our national security apparatus that wins over the Global South in coming decades. Heck, any imagined superiority in that realm won’t even keep the West together — as recent events make clear.

America under Trump 2.0 has re-embraced its ruthless market-playing role of the 19th century. Necessary, I could say, but not sufficient.

America won’t be able to long withstand the global blowback as that rapidly scales in reply. Even the sheer audacity of the attempt of this Administration to demand a severe “haircut” for the entire world as precursor to the restoration of American greatness will fracture the world system so as to render it incredibly VUCA-infused for any company — much less for us as individuals — for the foreseeable future.

At this juncture in history, then, the notion of annually revisiting and revising one’s corporate strategy seems comically fantastic — as in, delusional or emanating from The Before Time. If your corporate OODA loop is that long, you’re a dinosaur in a world just crushed by a massive meteor.

No, nowadays, any company (and soon enough, every individual) will need the capacity to shrink that OODA Loop to near-nothingness through the use of AI, or, more specifically Agentic AI (think of Iron Man’s Jarvis).

Agentic AI is a form of artificial intelligence that enables autonomous decision-making, action-taking, and continuous learning from interactions. It operates through AI agents that interpret context, make informed decisions, and execute actions aligned with preset objectives, often with minimal human oversight. Agentic AI combines advanced technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and large language models to solve complex, multi-step problems in dynamic environments. It is characterized by its ability to adapt, learn, and optimize workflows independently, setting it apart from traditional AI systems that are typically task-specific and rule-based.

PERPLEXITY

That ability — on a daily or even hourly basis — to “boil the ocean” and then run through countless permutations (simulations/wargames) that can be presented to us business executives as options of varying offense/defense … THAT is what’s going to prove the supremacy of America in an era of globalization’s pervasive digitalization.

Karp’s call can be criticized as excessively top-down in its vectoring (build the unassailable Leviathan military on top of the world system), in part because it sells that vision as both necessary and sufficient to an American “win” or “greatness.”

I would argue yes for necessity but no for sufficiency. What Karp seeks would indeed keep America in top-cover mode for global security (the digital/AI Leviathan), but nothing more.

What needs to happen is a “re-greatening” of American business by similar means: Agentic AI shortening OODA Loops to the point of American firms out-anticipating Chinese firms in meeting the consumer demands of that majority global middle class, for therein lies the swing vote between democracy and autocracy in our world this century.

Recall my argument: when the middle class appeared in the West at the turn of the 20th, it generated ideological threats from the Left and Right.

America threaded that needle by making our political system middle-class-centric, thanks to the progressivism of the Roosevelts (Teddy, Franklin).

Where does America fall on this spectrum now?

That’s a very important question. Dems would say Trump 2.0 pushes America to the Right, while Republicans leveled similar left-ward charges against Biden’s short turn as a 21st-century FDR wannabe (or almosbe).

More broadly framed: now, we rerun that experiment on a global scale with that emergent global majority middle class (a mere 2B souls in 2000, then 4B in 2020, then 6B in 2050).

For America to be great is for America to remain a market-based democracy embedded within a world system that is majority defined in similar terms (more of us freedom-lovers than them freedom-loathers). We can’t be who we are in isolation from a wider system, because, the more that system yields to autocracy, the more we will mirror-image that development (as we already are today). Recall how close we came to that in the 1930s — the scenarios in which Joseph Kennedy, or Douglas MacArthur, or Charles Lindbergh win in 1936 (or even 1940) instead of FDR.

Maintaining some slim and ever-vulnerable lead over China in the Leviathan game will not be sufficient, even as it remains necessary. No, our businesses, sufficiently armed with Agentic AI, need to win out on all levels short of real war (i.e., keeping consumers satisfied, making citizens happy, optimizing networks).

So, yeah, I want the Tech Bros to win on some level within Trump 2.0 because I know we need dramatically improved models of governance for America to win. Again, necessary but insufficient, with American business creating that sufficiency — winning stomachs-and-wallets-segueing-to-hearts-and-minds both here at home (recentering our politics on the middle versus either extreme) and abroad (creating a world more full of us freedom-lovers than those freedom-loathers).

Why this exuberant rant?

I just spent a good stretch with my longtime colleague Steve DeAngelis, founder and CEO of Enterra Solutions (where I was an early employee during its beginning years and where the Agentic AI enlighten by deep reasoning Symbolic AI for businesses [and government] gets built) and Massive Dynamics (where the history-bending maths gets done). Both of Steve's companies are located in both Princeton, NJ and Cambridge, MA.

The stuff that Steve (by instinct) and I (by extension) dreamt of two decades ago when I first joined Enterra (2005), in terms of developing an AI-like capacity for autonomous decision making … is now reality in a stunning, truly jaw-dropping sort of way — not vaporware, but actually in at-scale use by global corporations, layered on top of enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities (like SAP).

For a brief explanatory video, go to https://enterrasolutions.com/soi

I mean, everything is there: the boil-the-ocean real-time Big Data analysis, the anticipatory wargaming, the countless scenarios tracks autonomously generated/parsed/ranked … it is truly amazing, confirming everything I ever thought possible with AI and elevating — by leaps and bounds — my personal sense of analytic empowerment thanks to AI.

Re-teaming with Steve is proving to be a re-energizing dynamic for me. I mean, I was feeling great with the analysis and have felt great with it for a couple of years now, thanks to my teaming up with Throughline to generate America’s New Map. Reconnecting with Steve — a true genius once profiled in an Esquire Best-and-Brightest edition (just like me!)— feels like we’re getting the band back together after a long period of side projects on our own. It’s also like my recent teaming with Karen Fleckner and Artesion on water+power management — a sense of real-world application for my entire future vision.

Where things stand for me right now reminds me of the marching orders I once received from VADM Art Cebrowski when he stood up Rumsfeld’s Office of Force Transformation (OFT) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense right after 9/11. Art, in borrowing me from the Naval War College and naming me his Assistant for Strategic Futures, told me he needed a vision of the world and future conflict to guard-rail his office’s ambition.

“Well, tell me what you’re looking for in a brief,” I asked him.

“Relax,” he said, “as you draw the slides, it will all become apparent to you.”

Stupefied by that answer, I followed up with: “Well, who am I supposed to brief with this slide deck?”

“Relax,” Art said, “they’ll call you.”

That was the sum of my operating instructions at OFT.

When plotting out America’s New Map, I got very similar orders from Throughline’s Founder and then-CEO Scott Williams.

In both instances, their advice worked, and now I’m fielding the right calls for what comes next, which, as I told Steve today, is supremely exciting.

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