By Shruti Menon Seeboo
The Mauritius Telecom AllMyT Summit at the SVICC in Pailles opened to one of the most arresting statements an audience of business leaders could hear. “We’re not in an era of change, but a change of era,” declared John Sanei, global futurist, bestselling author, and one of the world’s most sought-after keynote speakers. The distinction, deceptively simple in its phrasing, carried the full weight of everything that followed — a masterclass in strategic foresight, organisational evolution, and the profound, uncomfortable reckoning that every business leader now faces in the age of artificial intelligence.
Returning to Mauritius for the second consecutive year, Sanei brought with him an entirely new talk — one that shifted focus from individual human evolution, the subject of his previous address, to the urgent imperative of organisational evolution. “If the rules of the game are changing, we have to evolve ourselves to play in the new game, and we need to change the way our organisations have been set up,” he told delegates. “Everything that comes with a skill set of the old world needs to be left in the old world.” He pointed to the 10,000-hour rule, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, to illustrate the danger of expertise in a shifting landscape. “That is valid if the rules of the game don’t change,” he said. “And if the rules of the game were changing, our 10,000 hours become almost irrelevant. And that’s where we are today.”
The Priority Framework: Four Ways to Think About AI
Central to Sanei’s talk was a framework he has developed to help organisations understand how they are — and critically, how they are not — deploying artificial intelligence. He called it the Priority Framework. “When we think about AI, we often think that it’s this massive, complex technology,” he said. “But the truth is, you can only use AI in four ways.” Those four ways are organised along two axes: internal versus external, and today versus tomorrow. The first and most common application is using AI internally to bring efficiencies to existing systems — today innovation, internal. The second is using AI externally to delight and surprise customers — today innovation, external. “Everybody in the world is bringing efficiencies to their existing system and delighting and surprising customers in brand new ways,” he said. “And that’s kind of where everybody stops. And that’s why today’s talk is so important — because the real trick and the real stroke of genius will be thinking about tomorrow AI and re-architecting our businesses from the inside out. And we often think we are doing this, but most organisations aren’t.”
The German car industry provided his most arresting case study. “What happened to the German car market compared to the Chinese car market?” he asked delegates. “The German car market did was they were excellent at today innovation. They were absolutely useless at tomorrow innovation.” The result is playing out in real time. In Dubai, where Sanei lives, 80 percent of the cars on the road are now Chinese. “All that money, all that wealth are ignoring the German cars and moving towards Chinese cars,” he said.
The Adaptable Intelligence Framework: Rewiring the Brain for a New Era
To navigate this new landscape, Sanei introduced what he calls the Adaptable Intelligence Framework — a three-part process for developing the kind of thinking the new era demands. Its first pillar is simplifying the future. “Complexity is the enemy of execution,” he said. “When something is too complex, what we do is we delete it, distort it, generalise it, and ignore it, and carry on doing what we did. This is exactly what the German car market did when they heard about batteries 10, 15 years ago. They’re like, ‘Ah, that won’t affect us,’ and they carried on doing what they’re doing.”
The second pillar is developing a new type of intelligence — awareness. “It’s not actually IQ, but a level of awareness,” he explained. “Awareness is the space between stimulus and response. When your brain is constantly getting stimulus and you don’t have any space between stimulus and response, you’re not doing your deepest thinking. You’re not doing your deepest creativity.” He drew on neuroscience to press the point home. “By the time we’re 35 years old, we’re having somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day, of which 90% are the same thoughts as yesterday,” he said. “Our brains are familiarity machines, especially when you get past 35 years old.” The consequence is profound. “What we’re doing is applying old thoughts towards AI. We’re not thinking AI native enough, and we have to start thinking AI native,” he said. “In AI, what’s happening to us is we are thinking old-school principles and then adding AI to it — not thinking AI first and then bringing it into principles. So all of our brains have to start evolving to become AI-native thinkers.”
He also identified what he calls the expert problem. “The more educated a person is, the less likely that person is to see a solution when it is not within the framework that she or he has been taught to think,” he said. “This is called the expert problem. This is what the German car market has been suffering from. Experts in combustion engines, useless in battery production.”
The Six D’s, Zero Marginal Cost, and Jevons Paradox
To explain the mechanics of technological transformation, Sanei introduced three interlocking principles. The first is the Six D’s of technological lifecycle: digitisation, dematerialisation, the deceptive phase, democratisation, demonetisation, and disruption. He brought it to life with the story of the digital camera. “In 1976, the world’s first digital camera arrived,” he said. “Kodak looked at it and said, ‘Ah, that’s never going to work. Get it out of here.’ What happened to the technology? It went deceptive. And as it went deceptive, from 1976 to 1999, that technology got better, cheaper, faster, better, cheaper, faster, better, cheaper, faster. And all of a sudden, in 1999, 2000, it popped up and it totally democratised and disrupted the whole photography industry.”
The second principle is the Zero Marginal Cost Society. “When you create something digitally, the first time it costs money, and every other time that you share it, it costs nothing,” he said. Music, photography, communication, and entertainment have all moved to near-zero cost. But Sanei warned that the next wave is already under way. “The next four things that are going to start moving towards free are transportation, generating power, computer transistors, and intelligence,” he said. On that last point, he was particularly striking. “Intelligence is moving towards zero as well. And we know this because Accenture’s share price in the last six months has halved. And we know also because Singapore has made it absolutely mandatory for everybody in Singapore to study AI. Why? Because the Prime Minister of Singapore said our whole economy is based on intelligence and services. When AI arrives and makes intelligence and services zero-costed, the whole country’s economy could fall flat.”
The third principle is Jevons Paradox. “When something drops in price, the consumption of that product becomes exponential,” he explained. “Before our phones had cameras, we used to take very few photos. Today, we take billions of photos. What happened? Costs dropped, our usage changed.” He pointed to the automotive industry to illustrate how this reshapes entire societies. In 1910, Henry Ford brought the production time of a Model T down from 12 hours to 93 minutes, cutting the cost of the car from $850 to $225. “Model T didn’t just sell more cars, it reshaped a whole society,” Sanei said. “Over that period of only 10 years, we went from 200,000 cars to 15 million cars. Cities started to become suburbs. Road trips became obvious for us to take. The middle class exploded in its freedom and its ability to move around.” Today, China’s BYD produces a new car every 60 seconds and Xiaomi every 76 seconds. “That competition is totally breaking down the German car model market,” he said.
He took the transportation analogy further, pointing to the world’s first autonomous vehicle — not a self-driving car, but the elevator. “Before the elevator arrived, the top floor was the sixth floor, and the poorest people used to live on the top floor,” he said. “The richest people used to live on the bottom floor, because you had to be a peasant to walk upstairs. The minute the elevator arrived, 50 floors, the most expensive property is on top, the cheapest property is on the bottom. All of a sudden, cities changed.” And the next shift is already beginning. By 2027, he told delegates, Tesla plans to launch a cyber taxi that will bring the cost of transportation from $10 per kilometre to 18 cents per kilometre. “Think about that,” he said. “That’s 100-fold cheaper. And as that starts to happen, we have to start to think that if transportation moves down to almost zero cost, what’s going to happen to our suburbs?” He described seeing, at a technology show in Dubai, an autonomous vehicle designed to look exactly like a living room — with a TV, couches, and blankets — that drives itself in and out of the home on demand. “This is already happening,” he said. “Guess where? China.”
Amdahl’s Law and the New Point of Constraint
The third strategic principle Sanei introduced — Amdahl’s Law — may be the most practically useful for business leaders. “Every time innovation and technology arrives, the point of coordination changes,” he said. “And as we start to understand where the next point of coordination will be, we should start planning our strategies for that next point of coordination.” Manufacturing is no longer the bottleneck. Information is no longer the bottleneck. Attention is. “What did Spotify do so well? It created an algorithm to make amazing suggestions to us so that when we get into Spotify, we never want to leave. Why? They own the new constraints and coordination points.”
He was direct in his challenge to leaders in the room. “The organisations that will win are the ones that understand the next bottleneck. The ones that don’t will become the bottleneck,” he said. “Even companies like BMW, VW, and Audi that never thought they would never be in this situation have become the bottleneck towards the next layer.” The warning was not about the past. It was about the present moment, and the decisions being made — or avoided — right now.
He also drew a critical distinction between two types of worlds: the complicated world and the complex world. “In the complicated world, there are patterns that repeat themselves,” he said. “You can use maths, accounting, and Excel spreadsheets to figure out the future. Everything inside the complicated world becomes automated eventually. And the business principle that we have been following in the world of complications is called economies of scale and efficiency. We have been practising economies of scale and efficiency for 200 years.” But the world is no longer complicated. It is complex. “In the new complex world, you have some patterns, but they don’t repeat,” he said. “You cannot use mathematics, Excel spreadsheets, and accounting to figure out the future. It is impossible. The future’s not a straight line. It’s all over the place.” The shift required, he argued, is from economies of scale and efficiency to what he calls economies of learning and robustness. “The old way is a conveyor belt — highly automated, works in a straight line, super efficient,” he said. “The new world is the pilot up in the air, practising economies of learning. He has no idea what’s happening up there. So what will he do? He’ll bring four engines and one is enough. He’ll bring three pilots and one is enough. He’ll have eight operating systems and one is enough. Why? You have to be over-prepared because you have no idea what’s coming.”
The Beehive, Shein, and the Dual Team Strategy
Perhaps the most memorable section of Sanei’s talk drew on the behaviour of honeybees to make the case for a fundamentally different approach to organisational strategy. Research has shown that 80 percent of bees follow the waggle dance — the signal directing them to known nectar. But 20 percent ignore it entirely and fly off at random. Without those random bees, the hive would become trapped in a local maximum, over-dependent on one source of nectar, unable to adapt when it disappeared. “Think about that,” Sanei said. “Bees have spent 80% of their people collecting pollen and 20% of people were out there looking for new pollen. But what we do in our organisations is put 100% of our people collecting pollen, because we’re so addicted to small, short-term profitability, our brains are only solving today’s problems. What we have to start developing is teams that think about tomorrow.”
The parallel he drew to the business world was exemplified by the story of Shein and Zara. Zara, he reminded the audience, is a genuinely exceptional business — delivering to 1,850 stores twice a week, moving designs from concept to shelf in ten to fifteen days, adding 10,000 new styles per year. “This is not some Mickey Mouse business,” he said. “And you have to ask yourself, what happened to Zara? They focused on execution, and they didn’t focus on transformation. They focused on being agile in an old world. It doesn’t matter how agile you are in the old world, you’re just becoming more irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how good the combustion engine is from BMW, it can’t compete against the cyber taxi. It just can’t.” Shein, by contrast, is not a clothing business at all. “It has built an AI system that scrapes the internet 24 hours a day and looks for clothes that we have liked and shared the most,” he said. “AI creates 10 different variations in 20 different colours, puts it up onto its website every day — and it only starts to make anything when we place our orders. Their wastage is below 2%, where Zara’s wastage is 25%.”
His prescription was what he calls the Dual Team Strategy. “The team that focuses on today is managing with precision efficiencies and profitability in the existing system, because we still need cash flow to get the business going,” he said. “But please stop asking these people to think about tomorrow as well. You’re making them schizophrenic. You’re making them worried. What you need is a tomorrow team. And this tomorrow team starts to think about things three to five years ahead.” He was characteristically vivid in making the point. “Asking our existing people to be both efficient and totally disruptive for tomorrow is actually making you the fool asking that,” he said. “It’s like asking Serena Williams to become an F1 driver. She can’t even fit into the car. It’s asking Cristiano Ronaldo to become a ballerina.” If Volkswagen had built a tomorrow team, he argued, they would have led the electric vehicle revolution. “But they didn’t, because they were so caught up in small-term profitability and stuck to 90% of their thoughts, they couldn’t even evolve and elevate themselves into a new world.”
From Hierarchy to Intelligence
Sanei closed with a forward look at what he described as the next frontier — the future of organisational structure itself. The hierarchical model that has governed business for two centuries is, he argued, already beginning to give way to something entirely different. “We start to move away from the need for communication between a whole layer of organisations to a system where we all tap into internal intelligence of our organisation, build small teams of architects and people with thousands of agents,” he said. “This is where we’re going.” It is, he promised, the subject of his next visit to the AllMyT Summit.
The message that John Sanei left with delegates in Pailles was neither comfortable nor complicated. “Today innovation is doing what you’ve always done, modified and more efficient,” he said. “Tomorrow innovation is making your current business model obsolete to create a new business model. This is what Zara didn’t do. This is what BMW didn’t do. And this is really where all our power lies.” In a room full of leaders responsible for some of Mauritius’s most significant organisations, the challenge was clear: stop optimising the old game, and start building for the new one. Because the era has already changed — whether we are ready or not.
