{"id":290,"date":"2026-09-02T00:20:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T00:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/?p=290"},"modified":"2026-09-02T00:20:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T00:20:16","slug":"ai-doesnt-matter-beyond-the-j-curve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/ai-doesnt-matter-beyond-the-j-curve\/","title":{"rendered":"“AI Doesn’t Matter”: Beyond the J-Curve"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Newsletter \u2013 Edition 7<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Essential to competitiveness but inconsequential to strategic advantage: that’s why IT is best viewed (and managed) as a commodity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is a quote<\/a> from Nicholas Carr more than twenty years ago about IT in enterprises. And the quote still works today if you read IT as the pronoun “it” referring to AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2003, Carr published the provocatively titled “IT Doesn’t Matter<\/a>” in the Harvard Business Review and it instantly became one of the most argued-over articles. His argument was that infrastructure technologies followed a pattern. Railroads, electricity, and then IT, were capabilities that offered real competitive advantage when they were scarce and being built out. However, once they became cheap and commonplace, they turned into commodities. They were necessary but no longer enough to pull ahead since everyone else also had access to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is tempting to carry the argument over to AI. Frontier models are commoditizing fast. On a recent earnings call, Jamie Dimon said his bank gets no unique benefit from AI since everyone has it. Carr was right about commoditization and we are now seeing that with AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference with AI is that it’s not something you can plug in and forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electricity did not pay off for consumers right away when it arrived. Companies that wired up an old factory and changed nothing else would have realized little value. Gains came only after years of rebuilding around what electricity made possible: the floor plan, the processes, the nature of work itself. Economists later named this shape the “productivity J-curve.” Measured productivity dips while the slow, tedious work of reorganizing completes, and then climbs as that work pays off. Technology commoditized but realizing value from it required hard work. The story repeated with IT. AI now inherits the same trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where AI differs is that prior technologies did not create more of themselves. Agents do. Every deployment adds systems, handoffs and dependencies, now at machine speed in the agentic era, and the organizational work does not end. Deploying individual agents that work is easy. But keeping several of them working together, without quietly working against each other, is the hard part and it grows as the AI capability gets cheaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the work beyond the J-curve, and someone has to own it. More on who below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The week in ideas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two posts from the past week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building Coherence Is About Structure, Not Supervision.<\/strong><\/a> The big advisory firms are arguing with themselves. They tell you to scale agents fast, then publish the evidence that scaling is where the value dies. What none of them prices is coherence, whether the systems still serve the business once they run together. Their fixes, unified data and orchestration and semantic layers, are permitting offices that check each agent at the gate. The collisions happen after the gate, when two cleared agents pull the same account two ways and no one is watching the live picture. Supervision does not scale to machine speed. Structure does. Sense the coordination state, constrain what each system can do, contain the failures, price the coordination cost, and save human judgment for the exceptions. They are building better permitting offices. Coherence is the control tower. Weigh in on LinkedIn\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Seven-Figure Job Nobody Can Quite Define Yet.<\/strong><\/a> A role is forming with seven-figure pay, fierce poaching, and business schools racing to train for it, and it has no settled title, no agreed mandate, and insiders who expect it to disappear. That is not how a market treats a job it understands. The skeptics say it will fade like a chief electricity officer once AI becomes ambient. They are right about the title and wrong about the function. Electricity does not build more electricity when you use it. Agents do. The capability goes invisible while the incoherence accumulates, and someone has to own that. The book calls the work coherence architecture, and the person a coherence architect, offered as a description of the work while the market is still settling on what to call it. Weigh in on LinkedIn\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These two go together on purpose. The first is about what a company has to build, a structure that keeps its systems coherent as they multiply. The second is about who has to hold it once it is built. They meet at the same gap. Coherence goes unmeasured because no one owns it, and it stays unowned because the job of measuring it has no name yet. Name the work and you can build it. Build it and someone has to hold it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before you go<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The book is Coherence: The Competitive Advantage AI Can’t Buy<\/em><\/a>, out this Fall. Everyone on the list gets the one-page decision tool I use to sort what to automate, what to augment, and what to keep in human hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if you try to coherise something this week, tell me how it went. The best of what I learn comes from those stories, where the ideas meet reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newsletter \u2013 Edition 7 Essential to competitiveness but inconsequential to strategic advantage: that’s why IT is best viewed (and managed) as a commodity. This is a quote from Nicholas Carr more than twenty years ago about IT in enterprises. And the quote still works today if you read IT as the pronoun “it” referring to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":108,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":291,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}