“It always makes me feel a bit melancholy,” says Q, gazing at The Fighting Temeraire (Turner, 1839) in London’s National Gallery. “Grand old warship, being ignominiously hauled away to scrap… The inevitability of time, don’t you think?”

This quiet scene from Skyfall (2012) frames a shift mightier than art or espionage. Turner’s painting depicts the massive Royal Navy HMS Temeraire, once a hero in Britain’s defence against France during the Napoleonic Wars, tugged away by a diminutive steam boat. The Temeraire is not destroyed in battle, it’s outlasted. The age of sail gives way to the age of steam. At first glance, the tugboat hardly seems up to the task, but the hulking fighter glides after it all the same.

Artificial General Intelligence isn’t some distant threshold event. It won’t hit like a tsunami and instantly inundate everything. It will seep into every industry, function, and discipline at uneven rates, through applications that quietly but unmistakably outperform the best of human effort, then keep improving from there. If you wait for a consensus definition or a defining event, you’ll miss your window to act. The countdown has already begun, not to AGI’s arrival, but to your reckoning with it.

AGI Can Transform or Topple Organizations
Imagine an intelligence that doesn’t just follow instructions but writes and adapts its own playbook: reasoning, planning, adapting to solve novel problems across domains. It can jump from diagnosing supply chain bottlenecks to designing new products, from forecasting markets to rewiring organisational charts, without needing to be told how. It continually absorbs context, adapts on the fly, and fluidly distills knowledge. Once it enters your domain, it will quietly start outperforming your best teams, not by doing what they do faster but by doing things they haven’t yet imagined.

AGI won’t just make your tools sharper – it will change who’s holding them.
The complexity of tasks AI agents can handle autonomously has been doubling roughly every 7 months since 2019, and may have accelerated to doubling every 3 months with the Claude 2024 models (METR, 2025). This is an exponential capability curve and won’t flatten to accommodate our adaptation.
The urgent exercise is to consider what AGI will mean, to you, your organisation, and your strategic plans. AGI is inevitable rather than speculative and its impact will vary by industry, business model, and even by role. Each business will meet its own version of AGI, on its own timeline; and if prepared, on its own terms.

To ground the perspective, imagine everything that matters to your business scaled by a factor of 100: your customer base, your development speed, your product quality. 100x faster feedback loops. 100x more personalization. 100x more competitors with the same tools. How would you operate in that world? What would break? What would win? What assumptions would falter? What processes become bottlenecks, or even irrelevant?

For organisations willing to engage early, AGI is an open design space, a rare chance to rethink how value is created, how people are empowered, and how entirely new advantages can emerge. Early movers don’t just adapt faster, they can attract top talent, surface innovation and efficiency, and shape governance before the rules are written for them. Signs You’re Ahead of the Tide

AGI readiness isn’t a checklist, but a different posture altogether. If you’re doing this well, you’ll move with intention and clarity while others are still scanning the horizon.

1. You’ve stopped perfecting structure and started accelerating substance.
You know that in an AGI world, “Context is King” (Cowan, 2025; Levie, 2025; DataStax, 2024). Instead of polishing schemas and pipelines, you’re focused on getting exactly the right information into systems, fast. Data curation, not architecture, is the new source of leverage. ETL pipelines are legacy thinking. You’re feeding the intelligence over wiring the plumbing.

2. You’ve discerned alignment isn’t just a research problem, it’s a leadership one.
You’re not waiting for OpenAI or Google to “solve alignment.” Alignment is a fundamental principle in how you make decisions, how humans remain meaningfully in the loop, and how you surface and address unintended consequences.

3. You’re not aiming for scale but for speed of adaptation.
The 100x future doesn’t reward size, it rewards reflexes. You’re building organizational reflex loops, not just roadmaps. Your teams aren’t preparing for one disruption; they’re rehearsing and refining how to respond to any disruption, continuously.

4. You’re questioning roles, not just reskilling them.
You’re asking which roles become obsolete in a world where cognition is a commodity, and where is human value irreplaceable? You’re re-architecting from first principles, not just who does what but what even needs doing (see, for example, Lin (2025) and Palmer (2025)). It’s not about automating tasks, it’s about delegating entire scope, where humans and machines both operate with real agency. In this model, the UX is the values and shared understanding between humans and AI.

5. You’re investing in human leadership, the rare kind AI may never replicate
In a world where intelligence is cheap, judgment under pressure becomes priceless. AGI will soon match humans in analysis and decision-making—but it won’t shoulder consequence. Exceptional leaders take responsibility when logic loses steam. Organisations that want this kind of leadership must create space for it: clarity of mission, moral latitude, and real accountability.

6. You’ve abandoned the illusion of control and are building for co-evolution.
You understand AGI readiness isn’t about doubling down on what works today, but surviving what breaks tomorrow. You embrace a collaborative mindset where humans and AI grow and learn together. This reflects a shift from dominance and control to partnership, recognizing that the future will be shaped by dynamic interaction.

AGI will alter the currents, but won’t define who thrives. That comes down to leadership: less technical literacy, more clarity of purpose, speed of adaptation, and courage to evolve. The organizations that prepare now will help steer what comes next. Smooth seas never made a great navigator, and the waters ahead are anything but calm.

References:
● Cowan, C. (2025). Context is king – the race for integration. Retrieved from: https://charliecowan.ai/blog/context-is-king-the-race-for-integration
● DataStax (2024). With Generative AI, Context Is King. Medium. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/building-the-open-data-stack/with-generative-ai-context-is-king-7a1469942044
● Levie, A. (2025, April 22). “Context is king for AI Agents. It’s clear that the more relevant context the agent has to complete the task at hand, the more differentiated and successful the agent will be.” [Post] LinkedIn. Retrieved from: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boxaaron_context-is-king-for-ai-agents-its-clear-activity-7320105458659217409-IBJa/
● Lin (2025).IBM CEO Says AI Has Replaced Hundreds of Workers but Created New Programming, Sales Jobs. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-says-ai-has-replaced-hundreds-of-workers-but-created-new-programming-sales-jobs-54ea6b58
● Kwa, T., West, B., Becker, J., Deng, A., Garcia, K.. Hasin, M., Jawhar, S., Kinniment, M., Rush, N., Von Arx, S., Bloom, R., Broadley, T., Du, H., Goodrich, B., Jurkovic, N., Miles, L.H., Nix, S., Lin, T., Parikh, N., Rein, D., Sato, L.J.K., Wijk, H., Ziegler, D.M., Barnes, E., & Chan, L. (2025). Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.14499
● Palmer, A. (2025). AI Effect: Shopify CEO says staffers need to prove jobs can’t be done by AI before asking for more headcount. CNBC. Retrieved from: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/07/shopify-ceo-prove-ai-cant-do-jobs-before-asking-for-more-headcount.html
● Turner, J.M.W. (1839). The Fighting Temeraire. The National Gallery, London. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/catalogues/egerton-2000/the-fighting-temeraire
● Leo Lau & Digit, Wheel of Progress.