The next employee your company hires may not arrive alone. Alongside them will come a personal agent that knows their history, remembers what they forget and is authorized to act in their name. The company will see an external system seeking access. The employee may see part of themselves. That encounter will be the first operational test of distributed intelligence.

Sometimes, as I explain how AI is reshaping the world, I watch as the audience moves through a compressed cycle of grief. Denial appears in crossed arms and sceptical looks. Anger flickers when an example becomes too compelling to dismiss. Then comes bargaining, usually during the questions at the end. Which jobs are safe? When should humans have the final say? What should my children study? Will I get to retire before i have to deal with this?

On Sunday night, after the World Cup final had ended, mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a message on X that sounded almost casual: the Jacobian conjecture was false. Beneath it sat a small block of algebra, compact enough to fit in a single post. To most readers, it looked like an indecipherable tangle of symbols. To mathematicians, it was explosive.

For most of the modern age, companies have been designed around business processes. Managers mapped how work moved from one team to another, from request to approval, from customer problem to service resolution, from opportunity to invoice. The process was the operating logic of the firm: a way of coordinating people, systems, controls and time. But the arrival of AI agents is beginning to change that picture. Jensen Huang recently put the shift starkly, arguing that companies now built around business processes may, in the future, be built on “frameworks” — proprietary systems that represent a company’s workflows and make their components more autonomous, proactive and efficient.

Last weekend I found myself sitting in a hotel restaurant facing a surprisingly difficult decision. The breakfast buffet cost $34. Coffee was additional. Juice was extra. Alternatively, I could order à la carte. Eggs were $27. Add coffee, perhaps some fruit, maybe juice, and suddenly the economics became unclear. Was the buffet better value? How much breakfast was I actually planning to consume? At what point did the all inclusive offer become the rational choice? And perhaps most importantly, how much mental effort was I willing to spend answering these questions before I had even had my first coffee? The irony was hard to miss. In an age of AI, I was performing an optimization exercise that felt better suited to an algorithm than a human brain.