Why the biggest cost of AI is not the technology, but the waiting. In this piece I explain why organisations must act now to ensure they retain a claim to the distribution of the surplus.
When we moved from hunting and gathering to farming, time was freed up. Less searching for food, more surplus, room for something new. The promise was liberation.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari calls that transition in his book Sapiens “the greatest fraud in history”. His thesis: hunter-gatherers had more free time and a more varied existence, while the first farmers worked harder, ate worse and saw their freedom constrained by hierarchy and debt. The surplus arrived, but it was not redistributed. It was seized by whoever could take it.
Whether this picture of the hunter-gatherer holds in every respect is debated among anthropologists. But one lesson stands: freeing up time has never automatically meant distributing that time well.
Steam power played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. It brought us productivity gains, but the first generations of workers were worse off: 12 to 16-hour days, child labour, lives without security. It took a century for the fruits to spread widely. And that did not happen by itself.
It came through organised struggle, unions, legislation, education, taxation. The eight-hour workday is not a technological product. It is a distribution decision.
There are two lessons for today. First: freed-up time only becomes value once someone organises the redistribution. Second: institutions do that reactively, and too late.
Farming and industry replaced muscles. Humans remained “the thinkers”. But one thing is fundamentally different about today’s development: AI touches precisely that domain: cognition, judgement, oversight.
What is really freed up
Automation and AI do what every leap in technology did before: they free up time, bring productivity gains. Work that people do now is taken over or lightened. This is already happening in administrative and analytical roles; research predicts those categories could automate up to 70 to 80 percent of their current work hours by 2035.
And then the robot comes. The “humanoid” that can handle the physical, unstructured world. It is the slower of the two, but the direction is clear.
The question everyone asks is: will this take jobs? Work becomes different, not emptier. But that answer is also an avoidance, because it hides the real question: who distributes the time that is freed up?
Ability is not the problem
Technically, the possibilities are unprecedented. The problem is not can. It is want.
The first form of wanting is organisational. Tooling, budget, pace, governance. Hard, but solvable.
The second form is existential. Who are you when the activities you do now fall away? That is not an adoption problem, it is closer to a question of meaning.
Harari’s sharpest observation may not be that machines get smarter, but that our capacity grows faster than our understanding. Today’s picture fits that exactly: studies show that a lion’s share of organisations experiment with AI, while only a very small percentage achieve real results.
The price of waiting
This is where it gets uncomfortable. You can decide not to take an active part. But the “can” does not disappear because you ignore it. Competition converts want into must.
It works the same way now. Every month an organisation fails to act changes not whether change arrives, but who steers it. The surplus of time and capacity will come regardless. The only question is whether you, your company, retain influence over how it is distributed, or whether someone else does that for you.
An organisation that does not choose what to do with the new space is redefined by the parties that do.
Why it is now up to businesses
History shows we should not wait for institutions. Government reacts to what is already visible; legislation follows reality. By the time regulation arrives, the distribution of freed-up time has long been settled by whoever was fastest.
The window in which businesses determine their position is now. Those who act within it will still have something to discuss. Those who wait will only have something to accept.
What this asks of organisations
The real luxury is not being able to do more. It is daring to let go of what you have, to make room for what does not yet exist.
Honestly establishing where you stand. Having the conversation about who your people are becoming, not just what they produce. And consciously turning the surplus into new value — giving the freed-up capacity a story, instead of letting it leak away or be seized.
What straops can mean in this
Making the goal leading and focusing on what distinguishes your organisation from the competition. You know your business, your right to exist, your distinguishing strength. We help prepare your organisation to shape this transition and to give direction to your position for the future. Not just one-off advice. But guidance in operational execution.
Where does your organisation stand? The first step is honestly mapping where you are — per team, per service, per business unit — and what is possible now. That is exactly what our method does. See the method →
Focus. Action. Result.
Sources
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
- McKinsey Global Institute (2017), A Future That Works — automation of work hours up to 2035 (70–80%)
- McKinsey & BCG — research on AI pilots: a large share of organisations experiment, a small share achieves results