The A/E AI-Agent Challenge

Happy Friday!

For the first time in human history, intelligence itself has been digitized, transformed from a scarce, biological resource (tied to human brains, time, training, and fatigue) into a cheap, scalable, replicable digital commodity. AI agents hit the scene last month, demonstrating that AI can autonomously pursue objectives by orchestrating workflows. And again, today's AI is the worst it will ever be.

Digital Intelligence From First Principles:

Intelligence is fundamentally computation - pattern recognition, reasoning, simulation, optimization, prediction, and decision-making under constraints. All processes that can be expressed in algorithms and data, which AI agents now operationalize.

Digitization removes physical and biological limits - Unlike human engineers, digital intelligence has near-zero marginal cost to replicate or scale. Once trained, an AI agent can run thousands or millions of parallel instances 24/7 without rest, salary, or the multitude of employment risks, while adapting to real-time changes.

Cost collapse compels exponential adoption - Human intelligence is expensive (years of education, salaries, benefits, limited supply, and limited throughput). Digital intelligence's cost per unit of reasoning or simulation continues to drop rapidly with hardware improvements, better algorithms, and larger datasets, creating a rather vast economic asymmetry that agents now amplify.

Competition selects for efficiency - In a resource-constrained domain like infrastructure, where projects face tight budgets and public accountability, the lowest-cost, highest-throughput path to acceptable (or superior) outcomes wins. It's human intelligence-by-the-hour vs. digital intelligence.

The flywheel reinforces itself - Digitized intelligence produces arguably better data (more simulations, more monitored outcomes), which trains even stronger models, further reducing costs and raising quality. Human roles shift upward (oversight, creativity, ethics, approvals, accountability). Anything done with a computer, keyboard, and mouse moves to digital systems, i.e., computation, studies, predesign, design, report writing, etc.

The laws of physics are meeting the laws of economics. When a capability as powerful as intelligence becomes cheap, fast, tireless, and infinitely scalable, and is embodied as proactive agents that pursue objectives, it will diffuse everywhere it adds value. It's the law.

Punchline: Believe it or not, both consultants and the consulting industry must now redefine their fundamental value proposition. It's almost like starting a new business. How can you, as an individual, and your firm as a collective, continue to provide sufficient value to support both lifestyle and company valuations? Those capable of shifting into full-on entrepreneur/founder mode have an advantage.

Should be a piece o' cake. 😄

Have a greeeaaaaaat weekend,

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

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