Early in my career, at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, I watched a team solve a hard problem in a way that has stuck with me ever since.
The task was automatic highlight reels for baseball games. Real effort had gone into the sophisticated version: systems that could read the play, follow the ball, understand the game. Then someone on the audio side noticed something. Every moment worth keeping had one thing in common. The crowd roared. So they tried the simplest possible approach. Replay the few seconds around each spike in crowd noise. It produced a near-perfect highlight reel, built from a signal anyone could have used.
The sophisticated system was not the advantage. Noticing what mattered was.
I think about that a lot right now, because the enterprise is making the same mistake at scale. We have decided the advantage in AI is capability. The smartest model. The most copilots. The biggest deployment. It is not. And capability is about to stop being scarce at all.
For most of the past decade, the winning move was speed. Adopt faster, automate more, ship before the competition. That worked because building things was hard, and whoever removed that friction first pulled ahead. Agentic AI is ending that era, because it is making execution cheap. When anyone can build, automate, and deploy in an afternoon, speed stops being an edge. Everyone has it.
So what becomes scarce? Coherence. Whether your growing crowd of autonomous systems, and the people accountable for them, still pull in the same direction. When everyone can go fast, coherence is what wins.
The debt that never shows up on a dashboard
Here is what happens when execution gets cheap and no one is watching for this. Everyone makes more. Sales stands up an agent for lead qualification. Finance automates forecasting. HR wires up hiring. Operations builds a copilot for logistics. Each one works. Each one passes its own tests. On paper, the company gets more automated every month.
And it gets quietly harder to run. Decisions start flowing through systems no single person fully understands. Two agents act on assumptions that contradict each other. Every team sharpens its own corner while the whole thing loses its shape. I call this complexity debt, and its defining feature is that you cannot see it directly. You feel it later, as the strange sense that nobody can quite explain why the organization behaves the way it does.
I learned how this happens the embarrassing way, long before agents existed. At United Technologies, I built a data visualization I was proud of. It was dense, information-rich, technically elegant, the kind of thing that impresses other engineers. But users hated it. They found it unreadable, and they were right. I had optimized for the wrong thing. My system was correct at the level I cared about and useless at the level that mattered.
That gap is the whole problem, and it is about to repeat across the enterprise, one agent at a time. A system can be flawless at its task and still make the organization worse. Task-level correctness and organizational coherence are different things. Improving one does nothing for the other, and most companies are measuring only the first.
What coherence is
So what am I asking you to protect? Coherence is not a vibe or a culture slogan. It is structural, and you lose it in specific, recognizable ways.
A coherent organization shares context. Its systems and its people reason from the same facts, so a decision in one place does not silently undercut a decision somewhere else. It keeps its wiring legible, so pulling out one system does not trigger a chain reaction nobody saw coming. And it keeps a human line of accountability for every autonomous system: someone who owns it, knows what it is really doing, and can correct it when it drifts.
None of that means slowing down, and none of it means centralizing. A decentralized company can be perfectly coherent. A centralized one can be a mess. Coherence is not the absence of autonomy. It is what makes autonomy safe to scale.
You cannot supervise your way out of this
The instinct, once a leader feels this, is to watch everything. That instinct fails on contact. You cannot supervise a hundred agents by paying attention harder.
The leaders who handle this well build coherence into the structure instead. They set constraints so whole classes of incoherence cannot arise in the first place. They contain systems so the failures that do occur stay local rather than spreading. They spend their scarce human judgment on the few decisions that truly need it, and let the rest run inside guardrails. It is engineering, not vigilance. The difference is between a company that stays coherent because someone is always watching and one that stays coherent because it was built to.
The advantage no vendor can sell you
This is why I keep coming back to that baseball reel. Intelligence is commoditizing. Everyone will have capable models, mostly the same ones, at mostly the same price. The capability will not be your advantage, any more than the sophisticated summarizer was.
What will not commoditize is the ability to deploy all that intelligence coherently: the judgment to decline the automation that buys a local win at the cost of the whole, the architecture that lets you move aggressively without piling up debt, the discipline to keep the organization legible to itself as it fills with autonomous systems. That is hard, it is specific to you, and there is no vendor who can sell it to you.
So here is the question I would sit with. You can almost certainly tell me, right now, how accurate your models are and maybe, how many agents you have in production. But can you tell me whether your organization is still coherent? Do you have anything that would show you coherence breaking before it breaks something?
Most leaders do not. It is the most expensive blind spot in enterprise AI, and almost no one is looking at it.
That question is what my book, Coherence, is about, and it is what I will be working through here in the open over the coming months. The one-page tool I use to start answering it is the first thing I send when you join the list at coherise.com.