Sangeet Choudary: Who Learns Wins

Sangeet Choudary is the best-selling co-author of Platform Revolution and the author of the new book Reshuffle. He has advised CEOs at more than 40 Fortune 500 companies and is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

• The SaaS crash isn’t cyclical — it’s structural. AI is eroding seat-based pricing, collapsing product boundaries, and destroying the old logic of defensible SaaS moats.
• AI doesn’t just change tasks — it rewrites value. Focusing on “automation vs augmentation” misses the point; AI reshapes whole systems of work, competition, and advantage.
• Translation is the real superpower of AI. By collapsing the cost of translating across silos, AI enables coordination without standards, APIs, or shared workflows.
• Moats built on customer understanding are dissolving. When users can no-code, extend, or bypass tools — and adjacent platforms can invade workflows — retention logic breaks.
• The decisive divide is above vs below the algorithm. Those who design and own learning systems capture capital-like returns; those whose knowledge is absorbed become commoditised labour.
• Platforms don’t just intermediate — they absorb learning. Campaign managers, drivers, and operators trained the systems that ultimately priced them out.
• Firms must be re-designed, not AI-enabled. Automating existing workflows locks in obsolete constraints; the real prize is questioning why the workflow exists at all.
• The future firm is modular — but selectively integrated. AI makes context exportable, pushing work outside the firm, while pulling learning-critical activities tightly inside.
• In physical AI, learning beats scale. The advantage isn’t owning assets — it’s owning the feedback loops that reveal how complex systems actually behave (the Tesla lesson).
• Nations compete on where learning compounds. The US bets on intelligence concentration, China on model commoditisation plus execution, India on open standards — while Europe risks playing defence in a power game.

He leaves us with a lingering question: are you above or below the algorithm?  

 

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