Business futurist. Innovative strategist. Leadership advisor. Bestselling author. Inspiring speaker.
“Reshuffle” … How AI is rewiring the world’s economic systems … from steam to internet, every tech revolution has reorganised how people, resources, and decisions align
September 5, 2025
The story of AI is often told as one of automation — machines replacing human effort, algorithms outperforming human judgement. But this is the narrow view. The deeper truth is that AI isn’t just a new tool of production; it’s a new infrastructure of coordination.
Every great technological revolution — from steam to electricity to the internet — has reorganised how economies coordinate people, resources, and decisions. AI is no different, except that its impact is arriving faster, wider, and deeper than anything before it.
Sangeet Paul Choudary’s fabulous new book Reshuffle captures this shift perfectly.
He argues that every major technology wave has reshaped the “coordination fabric” of the economy — how we match supply and demand, distribute information, and align incentives. Steam power centralised production.
Electricity decentralised it. The internet created digital platforms that connected producers and consumers directly. Now, AI is creating an entirely new layer — one where intelligence itself becomes a coordination medium.
AI beyond automation … from output to orchestration
Last week I worked with one of the world’s largest luxury groups, Richemont, the parent company of brands like Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre. We explored the opportunities of AI, digital technologies and how they would shape the future business. The leaders I spoke to were adamant that this would never change their business – how products are made, how brands are built, how consumers buy – instead it would be a story of efficiency.
My response was frustration at how blinkered they were about this new superpower in their hands. As they invest millions in new AI platforms, data factories, and its intelligence, they could only see its value in reducing costs, and maybe increasing speed. Of the old business model. Nothing else would likely change, they reassured their colleagues.
The real story of AI isn’t about robots replacing humans on the factory floor or chatbots answering customer emails. It’s about how AI reorganises the flow of economic activity. It’s about how markets, industries, and entire ecosystems are being rewired around new patterns of coordination — where data replaces hierarchy, prediction replaces planning, and digital ecosystems replace traditional firms.
Think about logistics. A decade ago, companies like FedEx and Maersk relied on rigid, human-driven systems for scheduling, routing, and maintenance. Today, AI coordinates thousands of moving parts in real time — predicting demand, rerouting shipments, and allocating containers dynamically. Amazon’s logistics network is perhaps the clearest expression of this: a continuously learning organism optimising itself with every click, order, and delivery. It’s not automation; it’s synchronisation at scale.
Or take healthcare. Babylon Health in the UK, Ping An Good Doctor in China, and India’s HealthifyMe are all reorganising healthcare systems around AI coordination. They don’t just automate diagnosis — they coordinate patient journeys, link data across providers, and dynamically allocate scarce medical resources. These systems learn, anticipate, and reconfigure healthcare around need rather than procedure.
The coordination revolution
In Reshuffle, Choudary reminds us that each industrial revolution has expanded the boundaries of coordination:
The first (steam) created centralised factories that replaced craft-based systems.
The second (electricity) allowed decentralised production and global trade.
The third (digital) replaced physical intermediaries with platform ecosystems — Uber, Airbnb, Alibaba — which matched participants through data.
The fourth (powered by AI), takes coordination beyond human cognition. It doesn’t just connect people — it connects intentions, probabilities, and predictions.
In essence, AI turns decision-making into a network effect. The more data it ingests, the better it becomes at aligning incentives and resources across the system.
Consider Ant Group in China. What began as a payment app is now a financial coordination engine. AI-driven credit scoring connects small businesses to microloans, investors to opportunities, and consumers to personalised products — all without traditional bank structures. It’s not about automation of banking tasks; it’s about reorganising finance itself around intelligent coordination.
Or look at Tesla. Every car on the road feeds into a global learning network. Tesla’s AI doesn’t just automate driving — it coordinates learning across millions of vehicles, improving safety, efficiency, and performance in a self-reinforcing loop. The company’s real innovation isn’t in manufacturing cars but in orchestrating an ecosystem of data and intelligence that continually evolves.
The platform-to-protocol shift
If the 2010s were defined by platforms — centralised systems that mediated value (Google, Amazon, Facebook) — the 2020s may be defined by protocols — decentralised systems coordinated by AI.
Choudary argues that as AI integrates with blockchain, IoT, and other distributed technologies, the economy will shift from platforms that control interactions to protocols that govern them. Think of it as moving from orchestras to jazz ensembles — structured, but adaptive.
In energy, companies like NextEra Energy and Octopus Energy are already coordinating distributed generation through AI. Their grids are dynamic, balancing millions of data points — from wind turbines to household batteries — to optimise energy flow in real time. These are not utilities as we knew them; they are digital marketplaces of power, learning and adapting every second.
In agriculture, platforms like CropX in Israel or Agrosmart in Brazil use AI to coordinate water, soil, and weather data — connecting farmers, suppliers, and markets. The result isn’t automation of farming; it’s orchestration of the entire food system.
Reinventing the organisation
Every coordination revolution also rewrites the logic of the firm. The industrial corporation — hierarchically structured and vertically integrated — emerged to reduce transaction costs when coordination was expensive. The internet and platform era reduced those costs, giving rise to ecosystems and networks. AI takes this further: it collapses internal and external boundaries by enabling real-time, data-driven decision-making across distributed actors.
Firms like GitLab, Haier, and Shopify already operate as modular ecosystems. GitLab coordinates thousands of developers globally through AI-enhanced workflows. Haier’s “Rendanheyi” model turns employees into micro-entrepreneurs coordinated by digital data flows. Shopify enables millions of merchants to access AI-driven logistics, payments, and marketing tools — effectively functioning as a decentralised retail coordination system.
The lesson? The future firm is not a fortress but a network. Not a producer but a conductor. Its competitive advantage lies in how effectively it coordinates intelligence across boundaries — human, machine, and ecosystem.
Reimagining policy and society
If AI transforms how firms coordinate, it also transforms how societies do. Governments are beginning to use AI as a coordination infrastructure — reallocating resources, anticipating needs, and designing dynamic public systems.
In Estonia, digital government services are already coordinated through interoperable AI protocols, allowing citizens to access healthcare, tax, and education seamlessly. In Singapore, the Smart Nation initiative uses predictive models to manage traffic, healthcare, and energy flows. And in Kenya, M-Pesa and related AI-enabled fintech systems have turned mobile data into a backbone for financial inclusion.
AI’s coordination power can unlock new forms of economic participation — but only if governance keeps pace. Left unchecked, it could also centralise control in the hands of a few algorithmic gatekeepers. The challenge for policymakers is to design open coordination systems — transparent, fair, and adaptive — that amplify collective intelligence rather than extract individual value.
The global reshuffle
Across industries and geographies, AI is catalysing a great reshuffle of economic systems:
In finance, AI connects capital with opportunity in milliseconds.
In mobility, it synchronises real-time transportation flows.
In retail, it matches products, preferences, and logistics with uncanny precision.
In energy, it balances distributed generation and demand dynamically.
In education, it personalises learning journeys at scale, turning classrooms into living systems of feedback and growth.
In India, Reliance Jio and Airtel are using AI to coordinate digital commerce ecosystems for millions of small businesses. In Europe, Schneider Electric is building AI-powered platforms that coordinate energy efficiency across entire cities. In Latin America, Rappi and Nubank are using AI to connect consumers, merchants, and financial services into new hybrid economies.
Each of these is not just a story of automation — but of reorganisation. AI isn’t the end of work, it’s the end of linearity. It dissolves traditional boundaries — between industries, roles, and even human and machine.
The next frontier … intelligence as infrastructure
The next phase of the AI economy won’t be defined by apps or devices but by infrastructures of intelligence. These will operate like invisible nervous systems — constantly sensing, learning, and adjusting economic flows.
Choudary calls this the “intelligence fabric” — the layer where coordination becomes ambient, embedded into every transaction and interaction. When that happens, industries won’t just compete on products or efficiency, but on how intelligently they can reorganise themselves around real-time feedback loops.
Imagine a city where traffic lights, vehicles, and pedestrians coordinate dynamically. A supply chain that anticipates disruptions and reorganises instantly. A job market that matches skills and opportunities fluidly. This isn’t science fiction — it’s Shenzhen, Rotterdam, and Dubai today.
The real AI revolution
The automation story is ending. The coordination revolution is beginning.
AI’s true power lies not in replacing human labour but in amplifying human coordination — helping societies work smarter, faster, and fairer. The winners of this new era won’t be those who merely deploy AI tools, but those who rebuild their systems, structures, and strategies around its coordinating intelligence.
As Choudary writes in Reshuffle, “The institutions that define the economy — firms, markets, and governments — are being re-architected by AI.”
We are no longer living through an automation age, but a reorganisation age. A world where intelligence itself becomes the connective tissue of progress — binding together the atoms of an economy into a smarter, more synchronised whole.
Reshuffle … turning ideas into action
Here are my 7 takeaways from Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary:
Inconvenient Truths
Pithy slogans like “AI won’t take your job — but someone using AI will” sound empowering, but they miss the point. They keep our focus on personal competition when the real shift is structural. The rise of AI isn’t a battle between individuals — it’s a reconfiguration of entire systems.
Rewiring Architectures
AI isn’t merely automating tasks or assisting workers. It’s rewiring the architecture of work itself — how decisions are made, how roles interact, and how industries are organised. What used to be a chain of activities is now an intelligent network.
A New Logic of Work
The comforting assumptions of the 20th century — stable jobs, neutral tools, predictable wages, enduring firms — are all unravelling. Once AI enters the system, the logic of work changes. What was once fixed becomes fluid; what was once secure becomes open to reconfiguration.
Redefining the Value Equation
Productivity gains don’t automatically translate into prosperity. The benefits of AI tend to flow towards those who control coordination — the data pipelines, digital platforms, and algorithmic architectures that define who participates and how. Value creation and value capture are no longer the same thing.
Jobs are being Reinterpreted
Just as data analytics reimagined how basketball is played, or how shipping containers reinvented global trade, AI is dissolving traditional roles. Jobs aren’t disappearing — they’re being rebuilt around new constraints, new flows of information, and new sources of advantage.
Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking
This isn’t about being replaced by a machine or outperformed by a colleague using one. The real question is whether your capabilities remain relevant in a system where the basis of value — coordination, prediction, adaptation — has fundamentally shifted.
The Real Challenge
Preparing for the future of work isn’t about individual optimisation — learning a few new skills or mastering the latest tools. It’s about redesigning the systems themselves: how workflows connect, how organisations evolve, and how economies distribute value. The future won’t reward the best worker in yesterday’s model, but the architects of tomorrow’s.
