The book left a rare-books dealer with a secret. On a screen, a reporter watched it move through the logistics bloodstream of America until the signal came to rest at VGT3, an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, then went dark. Inside, printed books arrive in bulk. Their bindings are cut away so the loose pages can be scanned faster. The physical volumes are destroyed. The team's logo shows a dinosaur clutching a book in its claws, teeth bared. There is no bonfire, smoke or jeering crowd, only a blade, a scanner and an efficient workflow. Are we watching the last human harvest, or the beginning of a fight over who controls the data that AI's hungry ghosts demand?

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.