Everybody in business seems to be having the same conversation about AI, and I think it's the wrong one. The question being asked in boardrooms everywhere is "how many people can this replace?". That thinking is unbecoming and results in train wrecks.
Klarna is the poster-child for this. In early 2024 they announced, proudly, that their AI assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. Fifteen months later the CEO was on record admitting that optimising for cost had produced lower quality, promising customers would always be able to reach a human, and hiring people again. But before anyone in telecoms enjoys that too much or takes any kind of affirmation from it: at least Klarna bothered to try. At least they moved, learned something expensive, and corrected.
By contrast, our industry cannot even be bothered to make the mistake. I've heard it said that "AI is for our customers to build". They just don't get it - and here's the uncomfortable bit - even if they did get it, they couldn't act on it, because acting on it requires infrastructure and operations somewhere near this millennium. You cannot point intelligence at a business run on spreadsheets, fax-era processes and a billing system nobody dares touch. Well you can, but it is a much bigger ask, and a bigger roll of the dice by those who have proven effort- and risk-aversion.
My own conclusions came from having no choice. My recent health and long-standing family situation mean I don't have the luxury other CEOs take for granted any more, especially in respect of time and geo-mobility. The only way for me to compete is to be massively more productive in the hours I do have, and I'd argue I am, despite one hand tied behind my back. Automation and recently AI amplification is how: the mornings my inbox used to eat now belong to the work only I can do. I realised amplification works because I had to operate this way, and that lived experience is the whole philosophy in miniature - don't replace the human, amplify them, make them superhuman. If it does that for someone running with a handicap, imagine what it does for a whole team at full strength. Everything we've built recently reflects this.
What's been interesting, having arrived there out of necessity, is looking up and realising I'm not alone. Jensen Huang has been telling audiences "you're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to someone who uses AI" - true, though I'd go further, and will below. Erik Brynjolfsson gave the phenomenon a name years ago: the "Turing Trap" - build machines to imitate humans and the best you can ever achieve is a cheaper human; build machines to augment humans and you create things that were impossible before. Klarna walked straight into the trap. Much of the queue behind them is still shuffling forward.
And then there's the opposite camp, which is louder. Dario Amodei - whose company builds the very models we use, so hardly a luddite - warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. On the narrow point he's probably right: if AI can do the meaty-medium tasks you used to hire junior people for, you'll need fewer junior people. But the bloodbath framing misses what happens at the other end, which is where the real story is.
We've been here before, incidentally. In weaving, the power loom was going to decimate employment in the mill towns - places with no other industry - and people smashed machines over the fear of it. What actually happened is one of the most instructive statistics in economic history: over the 19th century, automation removed 98% of the labour needed to weave a yard of cloth. Now you could read that as it took 98% of jobs but in fact by 1902 a single weaver minding 18 power looms produced 50 times what their predecessor had a century earlier. Employment should have collapsed by any replacement logic. Instead, not only did a single weaver achieve 50x more, but the number of weavers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900, because cloth got so cheap that demand exploded. That is a 200x improvement in output with an expansion of employment.
Of note, the people who were ruined weren't weavers as a class - they were the handloom weavers who kept doing it the old way while the world industrialised around them. Read that again with today's headlines and particularly telecoms in mind. The job didn't go extinct - it grew exponentially - but the people and businesses that refused the technology did.
A senior manager used to leverage themselves through a team of ten humans, and spent most of their week diluted across managing them - the coordination, the checking, the chasing. Give that same manager ten AI agents instead and the dilution disappears. They're not managing anymore, they're amplified: the judgement that made them senior applied at ten times the surface area. I made exactly this point to Raj, our CRO, in our 1:1 last week. The conventional playbook says hire x more people to do back-office functions in support of account managers. The better answer is ten-plus agents doing the work agents can do, with the budget that would have gone on those hires spent instead on humans doing the things only humans can do - the relationships, the trust, the judgement. And here's the twist: as AI becomes ubiquitous, the human bits don't get less valuable, they get more valuable. Everyone will have the agents. Not everyone will have people freed up to be human. Replacement shrinks a business to save cost. Amplification multiplies what the same business can do, and redeploys the humans to where humans compound. These are not the same strategy, and they emphatically do not produce the same outcome.
This is running in both directions at Simwood - outwards in what we ship, and inwards in how we work.
Outwards, Conversation Intelligence is amplification made product. When a fraud signal fires mid-call and a whisper delivers guidance into the handler's ear, the AI hasn't taken the call off the human - it's made that human better at their job than they could ever be alone. The handler with an Operator watching their call is not a cheaper handler. They're a superhuman one.
Inwards is where it gets more interesting, because this is the part no customer will ever see. I wrote recently about kaizen that remembers - me and an agent doing a task together once, it documenting every decision as it's made, and it just happening from then on. These are the tasks where previous automation efforts couldn't quite reach. What started as email triage is now something closer to an operating system we're expanding across the business: standing rules, codified skills, memory that executes rather than a wiki that rots. I said to Charles only last week that there is little point newly humanising processes with internal portals and the like when we can liberate the human altogether to a level we couldn't imagine in our last round of automation - which itself led to the requirement for the button for the human to click. Our biggest wins are increasingly coming from the unglamorous internal plumbing - reconciliations, month-end, reporting, the thousand paper cuts of running a carrier - places nobody outside the business will ever see. Competitors won't see any of it, they'll just wonder, as they probably do now, how a company our size is this insanely productive, the same way they've spent a decade wondering how we run a network like ours with a team the size of ours.
But here's where it gets exponential, and where I think the extinction actually happens.
By my reckoning Simwood is 10 to 15 years ahead of our peers on infrastructure, and objectively 20 years ahead of those who prefer to invest in Ferraris to show (themselves) how successful they are. We've consistently been a generation or two ahead at every turn. Despite being significantly smaller than many of them, our margins are ahead of businesses 100 times our size because our operation is more efficient - our financial statements are public if you want the receipts. That lead was built the slow way, over decades, a few percent at a time. And now we're ahead on AI adoption too - the entire Conversation Intelligence platform was designed, documented, built and shipped by a small team amplified in exactly the way described above. We could not have built it at all, under any previous model, with the team size we have.
Think about two cars that accelerate at the same rate, where one simply starts sooner. The second car never catches up - the gap is permanent even with identical performance. The follower can spend a lot more on a faster car - I mean literally invest in the business not themselves - and might gain a few percent faster acceleration. They can spend telephone numbers buying our customers too but the common thread is spending a lot more, in the often vain hope of catching up. In the old paradigm that could work in theory, although I've yet to see it in practice in telecoms.
However, now amplify the first car's acceleration ten, a hundred, a thousand-fold, because that's what AI adoption does to a team that already knows how to move - and remember the compounding: every rule written down, every skill codified, makes the next amplification cheaper. By the time the second car pulls away from the line, the first isn't merely ahead - it's over the horizon. The word "race" doesn't even apply and no realistic amount of money makes catch-up feasible.
I've been generous here in assuming the laggards recognise the need to even leave the start line, which, given some of them still don't have a usable API in 2026, and survive servicing knuckle-draggers, is quite the assumption.
So yes, I think AI is an extinction-level event. But the thing going extinct isn't the human's job, it is the businesses that can't move. Those businesses are the ones that are already inefficient, already a decade behind, already hanging on by their fingernails - the ones who could just about survive against competitors marginally better than them, but cannot survive against competitors 10, 100 or 1,000 times more efficient. Remember what happened to cloth prices - the laggards simply could not compete. Huang had it nearly right: you won't lose your job to AI, and your business won't lose to AI either. It will lose to a business that uses AI. The asteroid isn't aimed at your staff. It's aimed at your slower competitors, or - if you wait, or if you think AI is something your customers should build - at you.
Which brings me to the part that really excites me. This revolution is one where size doesn't matter; Simwood is proof of that. What matters is agility and adoption, and every one of our customers has both available to them. Since we launched Conversation Intelligence I've watched new businesses being formed on top of it, and existing customers genuinely getting it - taking what we've given them and developing their own propositions at a pace that would have been impossible in conventional times. The best part: they're augmenting their own people with AI in order to build on the AI capabilities we've handed them. Amplification stacked on amplification. That's the exponent doing its work, and it's available to a two-person startup just as readily as to us.
I genuinely think we're only years away from a trillion-dollar company, run by a single person. The asteroid has already hit. The only question left is whether you made it outside the crater. Your move.