Meet the sentient enterprise

A good example of the difference between an old‑fashioned company and a Sentient Enterprise might involve a transportation business running busses or trains. Obviously, ticketing is central to such a company’s daily business.

In a traditional organization, many different departments are involved in this core ticketing process. The finance department crunches the numbers to determine how much tickets should cost. Schedulers keep tabs on passenger habits so they can plan the optimal times for busses or trains to depart and arrive. Operations determines the proper staffing levels for ticket booths and call centers. And IT implements and maintains a self‑service ticketing app.

Schedulers could put additional busses on the road, and finance could raise prices to balance new demand with the available supply.

The Sentient Enterprise has the intelligence it needs to take this real‑time business data, and—acting as a cohesive, integrated unit—make all of the necessary operational adjustments to keep the ticketing process running smoothly.

The Sentient Enterprise might come off as a Zen‑like being with total awareness of the world around it. In a manner of speaking it is. But there’s nothing mystical about making a company sentient. All that’s required are a few concrete steps. First, you need to reinvent your core. Next, you need to innovate for the future.

Just as you can’t build a Lamborghini on a Yugo chassis, you can’t build a Sentient Enterprise using the structure of a traditional company. Instead of organizing your company by departments, organize around the functions that your company needs to perform, like ticketing in our transit company example.

Then design workflows that enable these functions. Once you’ve automated the information‑gathering processes, you end up with an environment where people use data dynamically to get things done.

With this foundation in place, you can proceed to the most important step: Innovation. Because you’ll have a real‑time, 360‑degree view of your company, you’ll be able make changes to your products, or even your entire business model, as soon as the data indicate they’re necessary.

In today’s fluid business environment, speed of innovation can be the difference between life and death. Consider the fashion industry. A generation ago, the “season” was the main unit of time in fashion. Designers worked months in advance planning their next lines, and would wait many long weeks to learn if they had correctly guessed what people would want to wear.

Now consider the “fast fashion” that rules fashion today. The product cycle has been reduced from seasons to hours. An Instagram post by a celebrity influencer can instantly send vast throngs of shoppers to their favorite stores or websites. That means designers need up‑to‑the‑second information about what’s hot. They also need supply chains that can turn on a dime to satisfy these sudden spikes in demand.

Both require a Sentient Enterprise. A traditional company can’t keep up in this environment, which helps explain why we’re currently reading so many obituaries about once‑dominant retail chains. Tracking demand in real time allows you to change consumption and business models. You can quickly evolve how you create and deliver products, and deliver new services via new channels.

Those new channels might resemble nothing that exists today. Imagine what getting dressed might be like 10 or 15 years from now. You go to your closet, where an imager performs a 3D body scan to get your up‑to‑the minute size, including that extra helping of dessert you had last night. The data is uploaded to the cloud, where your favorite designer takes your measurements and pairs it with the very latest style, adjusted to suit your unique personal tastes. A pattern gets sent back to your bedroom, where a 3D printer “sews” the garment for you while you’re in the shower. What could be more up‑to‑the‑minute?

The development of biological sentience gave human beings an enormous evolutionary boost. It’s our core competitive advantage and the reason why we’re called Homo Sapiens, which is Latin for “wise man.” Future business historians will write about the Sentient Enterprise in much the same way. Companies that develop it will survive and prosper. It’s my belief that those that don’t will find themselves on a fast path to extinction.