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For the first time, organisations can measure and buy certain kinds of cognitive work at scale.
Once thinking becomes measurable through tokens, the economics underneath a business start to shift.
Work that once sat inside roles, teams, and service models can now be broken apart, reassessed, and redistributed across people and agents.
In this ADAPT Insider conversation, Mark Pesce, ADAPT Executive Advisor and Co-Founder at Wisely AI, argues that this is why the current moment is bigger than another wave of software.
Businesses are not simply adopting a new tool.
They are being pushed to rethink the cost of work, the design of processes, and the basis of competitive advantage.
Key takeaways:
- AI is becoming infrastructure, which means the real shift is organisational design, not tool selection.
- Cognition can now be priced more directly, forcing businesses to rethink where cost sits and where value is created.
- The biggest gains will go to organisations that redesign workflows around agents and feedback loops instead of optimising old processes.
AI is becoming part of the infrastructure
Mark’s view is that AI will disappear into the background in the same way electricity did.
It will stop being treated as a standalone capability and become embedded across products, workflows, and decisions.
That is why he uses electrification as the comparison.
Businesses that once bolted electricity onto old factory designs were eventually overtaken by those that rebuilt around distributed power.
He sees the same pattern emerging with AI.
The larger gains will go to organisations that redesign around agents rather than leaving AI in a central team or treating it as a side feature.
The real pressure is economic
Mark is less interested in AI as a novelty than in what it does to the economics of cognition.
Once organisations can buy certain kinds of thinking directly, they have to revisit where expensive human effort is still essential, where agents can take on part of that load, and how that changes their margins and operating model.
That is where he sees the real disruption.
Many businesses are still running on assumptions formed before this shift began.
The bigger risk is discovering too late that the business is still priced and organised for a world that no longer exists.
Redesign will matter more than optimisation
Mark is clear that the biggest gains will not come from adding AI to existing workflows and hoping for incremental improvement.
The larger opportunity comes from redesigning those workflows around agents and feedback loops.
He points to software engineering as an example, where agents are already being used to detect issues, fix code, test changes, and redeploy continuously.
In that kind of setup, the work does not disappear, but it changes.
Humans move up a level, from executing repetitive tasks into designing, guiding, and improving the loop itself.
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This is ADAPT Insider. Proudly A/NZ first. For more than 15 years, ADAPT has empowered Australia and New Zealand’s executive community with trusted data, insights, and connections so leaders can make better decisions with confidence. Because this region is different. Our markets are unique. And the challenges facing enterprise leaders from legacy technology to transformation are only getting bigger. Each year, through in-depth research, benchmarking and executive-only events, ADAPT engages with over 2,000 senior leaders across the region’s most influential enterprise and government organisations. ADAPT Insider brings you inside those conversations. Real perspectives from technology and business leaders. Independent research grounded in local data. And practical intelligence you can actually use. This is not theory. It is insight for leaders driving modernisation. Welcome to ADAPT Insider. Built for A/NZ leaders. Backed by data. Designed to help you move with confidence.