First, all companies are now technology companies.   The first stirrings of this development, when AI began to remake one business process after another, were what moved us to write Human + Machine. Amid widespread fears of job displacement by AI, employee unease with smart machines, and the ethical and technical complexities of machine learning and its implementation, we laid out a road map organizations could use to responsibly bring humans and machines together to form new kinds of jobs and work experiences and achieve significant performance improvements.

In the intervening years, intelligent technologies have become the animating force throughout many leading organizations. These now-ubiquitous technologies are not only remaking processes, they are also opening up new sources of value, underpinning new business and operating models, addressing some of the most intractable business and social challenges, and moving leaders to see technology and strategy as inseparable. That exponential expansion—from processes to products, algorithms to architecture, systems to platforms, strategy to sustainability—is the new reality for all organizations, no matter the business they are in.

Second, companies have proved that they can wield technology to innovate and change with unprecedented speed.   Before the pandemic, many companies, faced with a widening gap in digital performance, had already begun to fast forward their transformation agendas. The Covid crisis greatly accelerated those plans. Leaders focused intensely on building a digital core to simultaneously transform multiple parts of their enterprises and rapidly reorient their talent to the demands of intelligent technologies. Major shifts that were predicted to materialize in years happened in months: industry convergence, localized supply chains, and mass virtualization—all against a backdrop of fast and continuously changing customer expectations. Enterprises everywhere pivoted quicker than they believed they could and demonstrated the adaptability, innovation, and agility that many mistakenly thought they’d already achieved. The pandemic also awakened some sleeping giants, as former laggards leapfrogged their peers, turning around mediocre performance virtually overnight.

That the pace of change is picking up is of course a cliché of business literature in every era. But this time there’s a big difference. It’s not just that potentially game-changing technology will keep appearing at what seems like a faster rate, but that a great many companies now know that they can change far faster than they, or anyone, believed possible. Until Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954, it was a speed widely believed to be unattainable.¹ But within forty-six days of Bannister’s breaking the barrier, another runner did it. A year later, three runners in a single race did it. Since then, more than a thousand runners have accomplished the feat, including eleven high schoolers. Something like that has occurred in business over the past two years. The many companies that accomplished lightning-like transformations have set a new standard for speed that more and more enterprises will now see that they, too, can attain. The old cliché carries new weight: the pace of change is picking up, doubly so.

Third, in the human-technology nexus, the human is in the ascendant.   The IDEAS framework offers new approaches to the building blocks of comprehensive digital transformation. The major differentiator of these approaches is not only do they push technical boundaries, but they do so while taking on a distinctly human character. Artificial intelligence that more closely resembles the way humans reason and feel promises greater explainability, transparency, and comfort in our interactions with machines. The new utility of small data, including the ability to create data where none exists, is democratizing AI, bringing it within reach of enterprises and researchers previously locked out of it by the cost and scale of computing power. The cloud is similarly leveling the playing field with big data. Putting the professional, social, and personal expertise of people in the driver’s seat through machine teaching will mean even more human-centered and accessible technology. Radically human technology is transforming differentiators like talent, trust, experiences, and sustainability, challenging companies to take them to a new level of distinctiveness.

Of these three truths, this third one is perhaps the least well understood, and the reason we wrote this book. Its full implications are still unfolding. As people’s skills, experiences, and, in some senses, humanity evolve in tune with new technologies, the technologies and their design will, of course, need to further adapt. And as they adapt, individual and collective capabilities and perspectives will further evolve. In reality, this has always been the nature of the human-tool symbiosis. What’s different now is that it’s happening much faster and with much broader reach.

Taken together, these three truths and recent history have brought us to a new inflection point. We’re facing a set of global circumstances we’ve never seen before. Radically human technology and the ability to transform at astonishing speed have given us the power to break through many of the traditional constraints of business and create almost anything we can dream up. On the other hand, the journey of reinvention has only just begun. Virtually every industry remains a blank slate waiting to be defined. It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to actively shape our future from the ground up. To finally, definitively operationalize values. To move fast and fix things. At this moment of truth for technology and for people, companies that fully embrace their newfound power to reimagine everything from their talent to data, architecture, and strategy will lead the way in business performance and to a future that works better for everyone.

The stakes couldn’t be higher; the opportunity couldn’t be greater. All of the phenomena we examine throughout this book—more natural artificial intelligence, manageable small data, machine teaching, living systems, trustworthy AI, the unleashing of talent—make technologies more recognizably human. As these new terms of our relationship with technology unfold, we will find ourselves moving deeper and deeper into reflections about what makes us truly human. In the final analysis, that may offer the most radically human hope for the future.