While AI’s evolution is debated amongst intellectuals, technologists, and investors, when it comes to the tech’s presence in business most organisations remain firmly in the AI starting blocks, focusing on simple automation. However the tech’s trajectory will mean it will soon be capable of high-level, strategic decision making, making its role in the future of business quite different.

Klarna’s CEO had a point when he recently stated that AI will reshape his and other businesses. But, how do we get to that moment and will this be the turning point for mass adoption for AI in business?

AI to redefine how business run and grow

The velocity with which we are seeing AI’s sophistication grow is astonishing. It is heading towards replicating complex reasoning faster than the speed of the human brain. Such advances will take the future of business in a whole new direction, navigating the landscape of complex decision making with minimal human supervision. It marks a shift from automation to autonomy and is transformative to the modern workplace and corporate ventures.

Having highly capable AI means businesses will exist in an ‘always-on’ mode – constantly forecasting, strategising, and operating with no distraction – allowing the organisation to adapt to changing conditions in real time. With such continual attention, AI-led businesses surpass the capabilities of any human-led firm.

However, we are not quite at this point yet as today’s AI is confined to function-specific siloes of a task or an organisation, and the human mind drives strategic decision making. It’s a necessary bottleneck in decision making as that implicit knowledge about business logic is still very much not captured anywhere. The advent of a new layer in the AI stack, that acts as a connective tissue across different AIs, will embed business logic across the entire organisation and open the gates to a compounding of intelligence. It will unleash AI beyond siloed functions so that it is able to act in the right place, at the right time, anywhere in the company.

By ‘compounding of intelligence’ we mean that you’ll achieve increasingly intelligent AI in an organisation faster by unleashing AI, by allowing them to cross the boundaries of their siloes and interact directly with other AI systems across the organisation. By melding different AIs, the value you achieve is greater than the sum of all the parts, and what emerges is spontaneous interactions when and where is needed that make decisions quicker than any human mind, to drive optimal business growth.

This new layer establishes a powerful nervous system of steering business decisions and navigating entire organisations. It puts strategic thinking at the edge of the enterprise, unleashing a transformational future.

AI in the driving seat and business leaders as the gatekeepers

Klarna’s Sebastian Kiemisotski statements of “AI is capable of doing all our jobs, my own included…” reflects what many entrepreneurs and corporate leaders are thinking – who and how will a business run in the face of the AI’s charge?

AI-driven businesses will alter the scope of the CEOs and CxOs role, but it will not lessen their importance.

Agents are already taking hold of customer service and sales functions, eating up SaaS’s ground, and will soon be capable of more advanced applications, shouldering the majority of the decisions-making within the business.

As agents handle more daily operations, senior management will shift to oversight, making leaders and shareholders corporate gatekeepers. The traditional shareholders-board-executive model will evolve into a shareholders-supervision-autonomous agents structure This new structure equips the business with a superior level of agility. With autonomous agents taking care of the lion's share of the work, with minimal (high-stakes) decisions raised to human level, it eliminates the bottle-neck of human decision making we see today. This is the next evolutionary step of businesses – a faster, more adaptive, and coherently run organisation.

This ‘super-speed, agile business’ fuelled by AI comes with a renewed importance for shareholders. They will be held more accountable for keeping the company on the right-track – ensuring AI’s strategic decisions are aligned with the organisation’s core mission, values, and direction. Today’s leaders need to equip themselves with the knowledge and skills of how to work with these incredibly fast-moving organisations and how to best leverage the emergent human-AI symbiosis.

AI-natives to set the blueprint for the future

Businesses have a tendency to look at the surface changes that advanced technologies, like AI, will bring to an organisation. However, AI’s growing sophistication means that the impact goes much deeper to fundamentally change how to build and run a business from the top down.

Startups and new businesses emerging today will be the first to be built on AI from the ground up and they wield a huge competitive advantage over established businesses who are having to retrofit AI into their existing systems.

As AI-native businesses combine human governance with autonomous leadership, they will naturally leapfrog traditional organisations to become hugely profitable and market leaders. This is because their governance allows them to capitalise in the most efficient way to manage AI – human synergy. It is highly likely that we can reach a point where AI-native businesses generating millions of dollars in revenue will make up a greater share of economies – transforming entire economic centres into AI-first economies.

CEOs, their board, and top level management for existing businesses and future corporate founders need to wake up to the changes coming their way. The unprecedented scope of AI’s decision-making powers demands executives to hold a deeper understanding of its capabilities in order to harness this technological superpower and apply it in the next iteration of their organisations.

As this article has (hopefully) outlined, the future of business in the wake of growing AI sophistication is set to look and feel very different from anything we know today. The winners will be those that build organisations with a structure that can easily adapt to working with digital decision makers and automated agents.

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe