Noun or Adjective

Two years ago, the week of the Fourth, I was trying to get a few years of focus onto a single page. Somewhere in that mess I wrote a line to my team that I have not been able to shake.

Digital is not an organization. It is not a channel, or a function. It is an adjective.

I meant it as a warning. Every company I had ever worked with wanted to solve digital by standing something up. A digital team. A digital officer. A digital budget. The org chart grew a box, everyone pointed at the box, and the work went on exactly as it always had.

Same question now, different word.

Is AI a noun in your company, or an adjective? A noun is a team, a function, a line item, a place you send a request and wait. An adjective describes how the work already gets done.

And then I went and centralized the AI function. A very small team, operating at the tip of the spear. On paper, the exact box I had spent a career warning people about.

We said it out loud on day one. The goal of this organization is to dissolve itself, through distribution and democratization.

Because nobody learns to work in a way an adjective describes unless somebody shows them first. Somebody has to build the first one. Somebody has to prove it holds under real weight. Then you give it away, on purpose, faster than is comfortable.

That’s what you get when you blow past 1,000 citizen developers and never think to look back. That is why the first cohort teaches the next one. That is why AI here is not a handoff, with one team building and another team simply receiving. The center holds the capital and the standards. The work lives where the work has always lived. That is why AI is not an IT project.

So ask whoever runs AI at your company what the end state looks like. If their organization is still standing in the middle of it, you built a noun.

Build the noun.

Then dissolve it.