Sangeet Choudary: Who Learns Wins

Sangeet Choudary is the best-selling co-author of Platform Revolution and the author of the new book Reshuffle. He has advised CEOs at more than 40 Fortune 500 companies and is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. The SaaS crash isn’t cyclical — it’s structural. AI is eroding seat-based pricing, collapsing product boundaries, and destroying the old logic of defensible SaaS moats. AI doesn’t just change tasks — it rewrites value. Focusing on “automation vs augmentation” misses the point; AI reshapes whole systems of work, competition, and advantage. Translation is the real superpower of AI. By collapsing the cost of translating across silos, AI enables coordination without standards, APIs, or shared workflows. Moats built on customer understanding are dissolving. When users can no-code, extend, or bypass tools — and adjacent platforms can invade workflows — retention logic breaks. The decisive divide is above vs below the algorithm. Those who design and own learning systems capture capital-like returns; those whose knowledge is absorbed become commoditised labour. Platforms don’t just intermediate — they absorb learning. Campaign managers, drivers, and operators trained the systems that ultimately priced them out. Firms must be re-designed, not AI-enabled. Automating existing workflows locks in obsolete constraints; the real prize is questioning why the workflow exists at all. The future firm is modular — but selectively integrated. AI makes context exportable, pushing work outside the firm, while pulling learning-critical activities tightly inside. In physical AI, learning beats scale. The advantage isn’t owning assets — it’s owning the feedback loops that reveal how complex systems actually behave (the Tesla lesson). Nations compete on where learning compounds. The US bets on intelligence concentration, China on model commoditisation plus execution, India on open standards — while Europe risks playing defence in a power game. He leaves us with a lingering question: are you above or below the algorithm?    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.