SA国际传媒

Editor鈥檚 note: This column is the second in a three-part series. Read part one here and part three here.

By and

We鈥檙e not doomsday thinkers. The truth is, we can鈥檛 afford to be, because founders rarely have that luxury. Instead, we make decisions in real time with clients, teams and cash flow.

But the signals around us are loud, and getting stronger.

Startups like , and each operate with . Humanoid robots are being built explicitly to replace labor. and have cited automation or AI as contributing factors in recent reductions in force. Whether every case is perfectly causal isn鈥檛 the point 鈥� the direction is unmistakable.

So what about the companies in the middle? Not fully AI-native. Not legacy. Actively transforming in real time.

A reply to 鈥檚 captured the moment with dark humor: 鈥�.鈥�

It鈥檚 funny but clarifying. If a PE firm were leading our transformation, they鈥檇 restructure aggressively around speed, automation and product velocity. Many roles 鈥� potentially including ours, even as founders 鈥� would be redesigned or replaced.

Welcome to the modern dilemma faced by nearly every existing founder, CEO and management team on the planet.

Everyone is experimenting with AI partly out of curiosity but mostly out of fear 鈥� fear of being left behind, losing business, missing the next shift. No one, however, agrees on what 鈥淎I is coming鈥� actually means. CEO predicts abundance; CEO predicts chaos. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Meanwhile, leverage is becoming nonlinear, just as Ravikant warned. Highly leveraged individuals can create exponentially more output than peers. Society, however, isn鈥檛 built for exponential asymmetry, and most companies aren鈥檛 either.

Which is precisely why culture is so important. We鈥檙e definitively reorganizing work and what it means to be professional, yes, but we must also reorganize culture in order to succeed.

Nearly all AI commentary focuses on operations 鈥� efficiency, automation, productivity, tools, workflows. But what of culture 鈥� the real operating system of a company 鈥� within organizations?

We have now over-indexed on the operational, rational, intellectual, left-brain paradigm. Ironically, we鈥檙e doing so precisely as intelligence gets commoditized. We must now concern ourselves with its reciprocal.

• How do teams build trust when AI handles core work?
• What does 鈥渃ontribution鈥� mean when output is hybrid?
• How do you maintain belonging when leverage increases?
• What does creative authorship look like between humans and machines?
• How do you preserve dignity, identity and motivation?

These are cultural questions. And we don鈥檛 have established norms, language or frameworks for them yet. The cultural gap is the founder鈥檚 dilemma hiding in plain sight.

is the co-founder of the world鈥檚 newest creative AI marketing tool, RYA. He鈥檚 also the co-founder of , an advertising agency that leverages data to make hits for , , , and many other marquee brands. Over the past two decades he has led cross-functional teams and developed multidiscipline communications and creative strategies for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Himmelsbach is a MBA graduate from 鈥檚

is head of business development at WestComms. He strongly believes that high-quality communication will only continue to appreciate in value and supports clients working in AI, crypto and frontier technologies. Pinson still keeps a regular hand-written journal, loves wine and earned a degree in economics and philosophy at in California.

Illustration: