AI cannot optimize a company it cannot understand

For many weeks now, I have been trying to describe in my Fast Company essays what I think is the future of corporate AI. Now imagine that someone, somewhere, comes up with a solution that fulfills the requirements I have been drafting here. Would your company be able to jump on its platform and access all the advantages we have been describing? To start optimizing a company with artificial intelligence, AI needs to understand what you want to optimize; AI cannot properly optimize what it cannot represent. The paradox is that companies are giving increasingly sophisticated and capable models access to the tools and workflows they use, but they have only a fragmentary representation of the map of the organization they are trying to optimize. Even if a large language model is extremely knowledgeable about management, marketing, or logistics (after all, LLMs have “read” pretty much every book about it), it usually knows nothing about your specific customers, your dependencies, your bureaucratic processes, any possible exceptions, your risk tolerance, or the cascading implications of changing a process. We need to separate plain memory from what constitutes a real data model; while mem…