Our Viking moment: why the winning strategy changed on 30 November 2022
I've just put my keynote to The Recruitment Network online. Two hundred recruitment leaders, an hour and a bit, and a good chunk of it hands on. If you were in the room, this is the argument in one sitting. If you weren't, this is what you missed, and the video is at the bottom.
A sail on the horizon
On 8 June 793 AD a monk on Lindisfarne looked out to sea and saw a single sail. Nobody had seen one like it before. The Vikings landed, killed the monks, and burnt the abbey, and that one sail marked the end of an age. For centuries the winning strategy had been to trade, to learn, and to marry your children into the neighbouring kingdom. From that morning on, the winning strategy was defence and might. The people who kept the old strategy died. Luckily for us, we're descended from the ones who changed.
On 30 November 2022, 1,229 years later, we saw our sail. ChatGPT launched, and 5.8 billion people got access to the most powerful technology in human history on the same day, for free. Ages change abruptly. When they do, the strategy that made you successful for the last twenty years becomes worthless overnight, and it's no consolation that it used to work.
That's the whole talk, really. Everything else is what to do about it.
Disrupt or be disrupted
I opened with Sam Altman's line: if you think you understand the impact of AI, you don't. The people building this won't predict six months ahead. So I'm not going to give you a five-year plan either. What I can tell you is that the choice in front of every government, institution, business, and individual is binary. You're going to be one of the disruptors or one of the disrupted.
What do the disrupted look like? They get undercut by a competitor with a lower cost base. They lose their most talented people, because those people are frustrated. And they keep running a strategy that worked beautifully for ten or twenty years, right up until the morning it didn't. I told the room about an employee who spent twenty minutes on a video call with his finance director and then wired twenty million pounds. The finance director was a clone. That's not a prediction. That's already happened.
The new strategy fits in one sentence
Maximise the rate of innovation per unit time.
That's it. Bring the latest capability into the organisation faster than the people around you, and keep doing it as the technology changes underneath you. Notice what isn't in that sentence. It isn't "buy the right platform" and it isn't "wait for the strategy to be clear". The only mechanism anyone has ever found for increasing the rate of innovation is people. If I'm recruiting an HR director or an operations manager now, I want an AI-literate one, because they'll build a team of humans and AI agents, and the one who isn't literate will build the team we've always had.
Strategic drift, and why recruiters already understand it
I teach this on the MBA. Draw a blue line for how fast the environment is changing, which is really a line for what's now possible. Draw a red line underneath for how fast the organisation is changing. The red line puddles along, because that's what organisations do. The gap between them is strategic drift, and the bigger the gap, the bigger the opportunity for somebody else to disrupt the sector.
Recruiters get this instinctively. You already make a living spotting a niche the big players are ignoring and getting there first. The same thing is now true of your own firms. The blue line has just gone vertical. Whoever keeps their red line closest to it wins.
Me, my team, my business model. In that order.
Most firms try to do this backwards. They start with the business model, hold a strategy day about AI, and appoint a committee that can't tell you the difference between generative and retrieval AI. Then they hand the whole thing to IT, who produce a set of tools nobody uses, because IT don't understand the business. Or they start with policy and ethics and never get past them.
Start with you. Two barriers stand between anyone and AI literacy: downloading the app, and doing one thing with it. Clear both and you're halfway to being an expert. Then your team: audit who's literate, train the rest, and ask literacy-level questions rather than strategy-level ones. Not "we'll use AI for CV screening" but "what prompt did we use to assess those CVs, and have we tried GPT-4 instead of 3.5?" Only then the business model, because by then you'll know what you're talking about.
The bicycle
Imagine everybody in your industry has been walking, and one morning somebody hands everybody a bike. You could ask IT to tell you where you're allowed to ride. Or you could get on, fall off, look like a muppet for a fortnight, and then discover you can do two hundred miles a day instead of twenty. A whole firm riding together is a peloton.
The catch is the marathon runner's dilemma. Your best people are your best runners. They won't want to give up twenty-five miles of running for a day of wobbling on a bike, and they're the ones who most need to. So the question I left the room with is the one I'll leave you with. How many people are you prepared to let overtake you on bikes?
Where the money is
Three places, in order of how soon you'll see it. First, upskilled people with the right tools. That alone is worth about thirty per cent, and you get it straight away. Second, automation across the boundary between unstructured and structured data: the phone call that becomes a CRM record without anyone typing. Third, and furthest off for most of us, training models on your own proprietary data.
We're probably still in the first five per cent of this. It isn't too late to be the disruptor. But the recruitment industry in two or three years is going to be shaped by the most AI-literate people in it, and I'd like that to be you.
Watch the keynote
The full talk is below, including the live demos we built from the room's own data, the digital clone exercise, and Gordon, who was an excellent sport.
If you'd like to talk about where your own red line sits, get in touch. Time-box a little of each week, pick one use case, and focus on the only thing you can control, which is your own skill set.
Rob Dixon speaks and writes on AI, strategy, change, and innovation, and works with leadership teams on building AI capability.
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