What Will Save Your Business from Becoming AI Extinct?

For months I scoffed at the idea that I could ever enjoy AI‑created music. I assumed it would sound robotic, stilted and hopelessly uncool. Then last week I looked up one of my newest trending artists, only to discover they were AI. I’ll never see them in a live concert, ever. Alarmed, I checked more names in my playlist. Over a quarter were artificial, including variants in Swahili and Zulu. Of course I should have known that language is no barrier for what is called a Large Language Model. It seemed that after I allowed the first AI songs in, they had used their 'secret code' to ask the algorithm to let their “friends” in.

If AI can infiltrate my music without me noticing, imagine what it can do to your business.

This made me reflect on AI’s impact on industries and jobs. I don’t believe 25% of human musicians suddenly found themselves unemployed: But the underlying economics had clearly shifted.

Shifts like these are happening everywhere. As a corporate turnaround specialist, understanding where the winds of change are blowing is essential. There have always been winners and losers. Just as motor vehicles replaced horses, and fixed‑wing aircraft replaced hot‑air balloons.

Today’s AI debate reminds me of the 18th century classic conflict in Gulliver’s Travels between the “Big-Endians” and “Little-Endians,” who fought over which End of a boiled egg should be cracked first. The modern argument is just as passionate. So which End are you on?

The Big-Endians

The Big-Endians believe that AI will automate the entire economy, that jobs as we know them are doomed, and that we will increasingly outsource our tasks to fleets of AI-bots. Whenever I speak to a Big-Endian they will start their conversation by discussing who is currently leading the AI race between the likes of Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (sorry to the purists for not listing all the leading models). Their conversation then rapidly shifts to the latest AI-agent they have employed and ends with jokes about uninformed people who still use AI just as a search engine.

The Little-Endians

Little-Endians, in contrast, point to the flood of ‘AI‑slop’ being produced and warn of the massive AI‑programming debt companies are accumulating - patches and fixes to repair code that wasn’t checked properly by humans. Shaking their heads, they also grimly warn of the energy and water consumed by data centres from every AI request you make. The more expert Little-Endians point out the diminishing returns from ever-bigger large language models. These are the growing Elephants in the room that will burst like the 2000s dot-com bubble.

They point to the “1% problem,” the unpredictable edge cases that keep full self-driving cars, and potentially AI‑piloted planes, from ever being fully trusted. Imagine you fly in an AI-powered plane and it encounters a solar eclipse that someone forgot to train it for.  Only humans, they argue, can truly adapt to the unexpected. Many Little-Endians end by insisting that Artificial General Intelligence—the human‑thinking kind—will never come.

Whether you’re a Big-Endian or a Little-Endian matters less than recognising that both worldviews are already reshaping your competitive landscape.

What Businesses Must Do Now

As a leader, you cannot afford to ignore this evolving debate. Otherwise, like my playlist, you may wake up one day to realise that 75% of your customers that sang for your supper have quietly moved on.

This brings me to the first of three capabilities every dynamic business must cultivate. I’ll share the next two in future newsletters.

Capability 1: Wisdom

AI can simulate intelligence, but it cannot replicate wisdom. It is built on past knowledge, greedily vacuuming up anything new to maintain its competitive edge. Even this article I have just written will be stripped into hundreds of tokens, to reappear incrementally in some distant parts of the earth.

What looks like AI “wisdom” is really recombined knowledge. If your strategic thinking is limited to this, you can statistically never outperform the market. And you are almost guaranteed to underperform unless you’re exceptionally skilled at asking AI the right questions - daily.

Real wisdom is harder to define, but easy to recognise. It’s the ability to make sound judgements based on rare intelligence, ethics, social awareness, experience and intuition. It turns information into insight and insight into direction.

Knowledge is an input. Wisdom is an outcome.

And wisdom is foundational to the Wellbeing of a Business.

So if your business leader walks into a planning session holding an AI‑generated strategy… be very afraid. The end might be nearer than you think.