AI's real ROI

The Real ROI of AI is the Advancement of Civilization.

"What's the ROI on our AI pilot?"
"What skills will still be relevant in five years?"

These are the wrong questions. They're tactical anxieties in the face of a civilizational shift.

The right frame comes from Alfred North Whitehead: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

AI is the most powerful tool we've ever built for this purpose. When given an environment to execute, AI gets agency. Agentic agency dramatically lowers the cognitive load required to perform complex operations. This accelerates the basic human instinct to re-define the next generation complexity.

This is how civilization advances. This is how the world's GDP grows.

Stop trying to draw a straight line from your AI pilot to your quarterly earnings. The real ROI is building the capacity for your organization and yourself to perform at the next generation of complexity.