Times of Turbulence: Why this isn't the Age of AI

Apr 17, 2025

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.— Peter Drucker

We are at the dawn of a turbulent age—not defined by a single disruption, but by a compounding set of forces reshaping how business and society operates at every level. Economic pressure. Technological upheaval. Labor transformation. Societal shifts. Political volatility.

But the real threat? It’s not the turbulence itself. It’s clinging to the logic, management science and operating models of a bygone era. It’s acting with yesterday’s playbook in the face of today’s circumstances and tomorrow’s potential.

This is why Big Bets™ matter.

The New Era Demands Bold Leadership

We’ve got it wrong. We’re not in the AI era. What we’re entering is something far bigger and integrated than AI, or even broadly defined by disruptive technologies.

Yes, AI is a catalyst—but this isn’t just another technology wave.

And no, it’s certainly not a continuation of the digital era we’ve been navigating for the past two decades either.

This is a structural shift. A reinvention. A redefinition of how businesses operate. How work gets done. How productivity is measured. How companies will design and build lasting competitive advantage.

This isn’t hype—it’s a forecast. A high-resolution view of what’s ahead.

I believe the greatest alpha—the outsized returns and deepest strategic advantages—emerge not during times of stability, but during times of turbulence.

You may long for a simpler time. A time when operational excellence, customer obsession, and incremental innovation were enough to run an amazing business. Bless your heart — how quaint.

But if you play the long game. If you think in terms of second-order effects. If you play chess not checkers. If you’re wired for curiosity and experimentation, then you’re built for this moment.

You’re built for the Hyper-Digital Era.

Three Mega-Forces Shaping the Hyper—Digital Era

There are three mega forces shaping America’s need and opportunity to drive productivity and innovation.

Invite John to inspire, challenge and guide your leadership team or audience

Mega Force #1: Disruptive Technology Acceleration

The first mega-force is the rapid advancement and promise of disruptive technologies. These are accelerating—all at once.

Generative AI
Agentic AI
Computer Vision
The Internet of Things and sensor-based edge computing
Crypto and blockchain architectures
Augmented and virtual reality
Quantum computing
The potential for fusion energy.

These technologies are powered by cloud computing, 5G capabilities and Moore’s law. They are in the early phases of abstraction and the evolution pattern which all technologies go through —

Going from difficult, complex and expensive…

To easier, faster and cheaper.

The transformative opportunity lies in the combination of these technologies. This is where it starts to get interesting, enabling innovative use cases that today seem far fetched.

That we haven’t even dreamed of yet.

These go well beyond the point solutions of AI today such as precision agriculture dosing, preventive maintenance or the white-collar productivity boosts of generative AI.

These disruptive use cases are made up of coordinated activity, realtime, loosely coupled adjustments across people, machines, computers, robots and vehicles. These are activities and decisions across an enterprise, across a supply chain, across an ecosystem.

Seeking out optimizations, adjustments, quality improvements.

After Mega Force #3, let’s outline a couple of killer use cases to demonstrate the promise of coordinated agile flows leveraging many of these disruptive technologies.

Mega Force #2: The Labor Paradox

The second mega force is the aging of America’s workforce.

In 1995, approximately 88 percent of the US population was under the age of 65. Today, it is 82 percent.

In 1995, the US birthrate was approximately 15 per 1,000 people. Today, it is approximately 11.

In 1995, approximately 3 percent of the US labor force was over 65. Currently, it is approximately 6 percent. By 2050, it is projected to more than double to over 13 percent.

Our available workforce is aging, and that is a challenge confronting most of the world’s major economies.

This mega force will drive substantial but hard-to-predict disruptions to companies’ organizational structures, operating models, and cost structures.

This isn’t a skills gap. It’s a math problem.

Mega Force #3: The Economic Pressure

The third mega force is the growth of spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare as well as the cost of serving the US debt. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts US government spending on entitlement programs plus net interest on US debt to grow from 56% of total federal spending in 2023 to 74% by 2050.

Growth in spending on entitlement programs and debt payments will create upward pressure on taxes and downward pressure on spending on infrastructure, education, defense, and other discretionary spending programs.

The only way out?

Growth.

And productivity.

Through combining disruptive technologies with our will to invest in business models which take advantage of these mega-forces.

Apex Use Cases

An apex predator is a species at the top of the food chain with no natural predators of its own, such as wolves, sharks, or orcas. These predators play a critical role in maintaining the health and balance of an ecosystem by regulating the populations of other species, which in turn affects vegetation, disease spread, and the overall structure of the food web.

The presence of a thriving apex predator typically signals a well-functioning, biodiverse ecosystem—one where energy flows efficiently and species interactions are in balance.

There are also apex use cases. To enable this use case, one can assume lots of other capabilities and use cases come with it. Here are two examples of what I would consider futuristic (but not too futuristic) apex uses cases showing the potential of coordinated realtime multi-actor optimizations.

Apex Use Case 1: The Agentic Supply Chain: Precision Medicine at the Speed of AI

What if your pharmaceutical supply chain didn’t just react to the world—but anticipated it for every individual patient? That’s the Big Bet: an AI-orchestrated, real-time, precision medicine ecosystem that learns, adapts, and acts—seamlessly—from lab bench to the biometrics streaming from your smartwatch.

This isn’t incremental improvement. It’s a reinvention of a fragmented, compliance-heavy industry into an agile, personalized, patient-centric value network.

The Future Capability: Agentic AI isn’t just making smart decisions—it’s personalizing judgment. Across manufacturing, logistics, and patient care, these systems sense, decide, and act. They adjust batch production in response to patient-level demand signals. They reroute temperature-sensitive shipments to avoid geopolitical disruption. They adapt care plans in real time based on biometric data.

No lags. No delays. No bureaucratic drag.

The Coordinated Moves: Closed Loop Personalized Pharma

On the factory floor, robotic lines reconfigure on-the-fly using predictive quality models and individual-level consumption forecasts.
In logistics, smart containers equipped with embedded sensors self-route based on geopolitical risk and thermal thresholds.
At the point of care, wearables stream real-time health data to AI systems that adapt dosage and delivery—triggered via blockchain-backed smart contracts ensuring traceability and compliance.

The Juice That’s Worth the Squeeze: This is velocity at scale: safer treatments, faster delivery, radically less waste. This is clarity: the right drug, for the right person, at the right time. This is prioritized value: hitting the highest-risk, highest-impact elements first—from human biology to global logistics.

This Big Bet doesn’t just change how pharma works. It changes who it works for.

Apex Use Case 2: Precision Agriculture – A Fully Coordinated, AI-Orchestrated Ecosystem

This isn’t precision agriculture—it’s precision coordination. Think of a cooperative of farms operating like a decentralized network, not a hierarchy. Autonomous tractors, drones, processors, and retailers all exchanging real-time data to continuously align supply with demand. That’s the Big Bet.

The Future Capability:

The power of this transformation isn’t in any one machine. It’s in the system-level orchestration. Distributed AI agents don’t just act locally—they negotiate regionally, optimize cooperatively, and execute dynamically.

The Coordinated Moves:

- At the farm level, drones and tractors run localized AI playbooks to optimize every drop of water and grain of fertilizer.

- Smart contracts on the blockchain coordinate supply chain precision—harvests hit processors at peak freshness.

- Retailers feed inventory signals back to the field, allowing the network to balance yield and demand in real time.

- Sustainability metrics are autonomously tracked, aligned with evolving weather patterns and regulatory needs.

The Payoff:

Yields go up. Labor costs go down. Resources are hyper-targeted. This isn’t just technology—it’s system advantage. And it’s how you lead with velocity, not just scale.

These aren’t just use cases—they’re Big Bets™. They demonstrate a killer feature, build clarity from the edge in, and create high-value coordination without relying on traditional top-down control. If you're thinking of transformation as siloed innovation, you're thinking too small. These are playbooks for how to lead in the hyper-digital era.

Forecast

In 1995, when Netscape went public, and the digital era was born.

Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen magic:

Innovation, disruption, and reinvention.

Winners were bold.

Losers hesitated.

In 30 years from today, we will look back at when ChatGPT was released in November, 2022 and we will reflect that this was the start of another era.

The hyper-digital era.

Where new winners and losers were created.

The winners will include categories and companies unknown to us today. The losers will include organizations and brands that today appear to be under no threat, perhaps even the big winners of the first digital era.

Those companies and leaders who lack daring, clarity and velocity will typically find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Kevin McCaffrey and I wrote Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era for those rare leaders that are ready to act to compete for the future, but are looking for playbook to guide their efforts.