If You Were Founding Your Business Today, Would You Build It the Same Way?

AI is changing the economics of building companies. It should also change the questions leaders ask about strategy, investment and reinvention.

If you were founding your business today, would you build it the same way?

When it comes to change and reinvention, this is the question I keep coming back to when speaking with founders and leaders working through transformation.

Most established companies were built and evolved under very different economics. Software was expensive and slow to build. Testing new ideas required considerable time and capital. Increasing output usually meant adding more people.

AI is changing the economics of building companies and products.

Its impact varies by task but it can substantially reduce the time and cost involved in turning an idea into working software. Existing teams can now build, test and iterate at scale that previously required larger budgets, more specialist resources and much longer development cycles.

And this isn’t limited to software. Across marketing, analysis, support and other areas, AI is giving teams more capacity to experiment, solve harder problems and improve the customer experience. The question is what orgs choose to do with that new capacity.

But the greater opportunity may not be to do the same work with fewer people. It may be to achieve much more with the talent and capital already available.

That’s what makes the founding question particularly relevant now.

Would you offer the same products?

Would you organise work into the same functions, layers and processes?

Where could the capacity created by AI be redirected towards innovation, growth or a better customer experience?

Which products, processes and systems still create customer value, differentiation or trust? And which reflect constraints that AI is beginning to change?

If you wouldn’t build a particular product, process or system today, why are you still investing in it? Where could that investment and capacity create more value?

There may be good reasons to retain it. Existing customer commitments, domain knowledge, valuable expertise and trust don’t disappear simply because technology improves. But leaders still need to challenge those choices honestly, including when doing so iis uncomfortable.

This scenario also changes what leadership requires. Being a good operator or dealmaker is no longer sufficient.

Leaders also need the imagination to see a different company and the tech fluency to recognise what AI makes possible. They also need the drive to turn those possibilities into real innovation and the courage to rethink how the company creates value.

The strategic opportunity is not simply to operate the existing company more efficiently. It is to decide what the company can now become.

The gap between that possibility and how the company currently operates is where your transformation agenda begins.