Two rival CEOs. One warning. At Davos 2026, Anthropic's Amodei and DeepMind's Hassabis agreed: AI will overwhelm our ability to adapt within years. The question is whether we shape the transition, or suffer it by default.
We stand at a phase transition where intelligence becomes commodity and scarcity shifts to authenticity. The threat isn't machines taking jobs—it's humans losing internal models that constitute agency. The next decade determines whether we remain architects or become clients.
The SaaS era monetized state. The agentic era will monetize judgment. Systems of Record captured what happened, and Context Graphs capture why it was allowed to happen. Incumbents are optimized for the wrong layer. And judgment compounds faster than data.
BMW achieved 5.2% Q3 margins versus Mercedes' 4.8%, a 40-basis-point gap that either proves strategic transformation remains possible with better execution or merely demonstrates BMW hasn't yet hit the constraints that killed its rival's strategy. Four paths forward, one answer by 2028.
Mercedes spent €15B on transformation, executed it perfectly for 3 years, then reversed it. The strategy might have been right—but they ran out of time to prove it. When validation takes 7 years, but stakeholders tolerate only 3, transformation becomes impossible.
