Introduction

Hello everyone, good afternoon. I'm the non-practical guy in this show. I'll try to share some ideas I've been developing lately.

Ideas for change, we do very different things.

From Scarcity to Abundance

One of them is trying to design new business models that leverage on the future. And what I want to talk about is where your business model is ready for abundance because all the education we've received is based on scarcity.

Economics 101 is about the management of scarcity and that's how we've been dealing with everything so far. But you could say that the history of humanity is a fight to gain energy, first with our workplace, then with animals, then with fire and coal and so on, against energy.

But we just realized

Energy at Near-Zero Marginal Cost

that we can get energy with solar, wind, and batteries for most of the day at a marginal cost zero. So we're seeing abundance of energy, we're seeing marginal cost zero on energy and we're seeing that we're capable of passing day into night through batteries. We see abundance of energy.

So suddenly, everything that had moved us, and that's obtaining energy, and any change in nature can be seen as energy. Like when an animal eats a plant, that's an energy transfusion. that as well.

When a plant creates the sun and converts it into organic,

So we're seeing Abundance of energy.

We'll always need coal, we'll always need oil, but on top of that, no?

Abundance Across Sectors: Mobility, Proteins, and Health

We're seeing abundance of mobility. Autonomous cars are already in the streets and if they're shared autonomous cars, we can reduce the number of cars and reduce the cost. of riding from 1 euro kilometer to 0.10 euro kilometer.

It's the same with proteins. We can produce protein the same way we produce beer or yogurt through precision fermentation. We're starting to build and it's already been accepted as a substitute for the yolk in mayonnaise. Solane can be

And it's the same with health. It's the same with science. It's the same with whatever.

So on top of our material world, we can produce abundance of very many things.

When Better Is Much Better: Rapid Adoption Dynamics

And what we know is that when something is not a little bit better, but much better than what we had before, be it cat tires coming from radial to non-radial, be it insulin coming from animals or from chemicals such as protein from precision fermentation, changes happen very fast. When something is not a little bit better, but much better, changes happen very far. And these changes are already opening a new space of possibilities.

If we look back at energy, the steam engine opened a new paradigm of what could be done.

AI, Robotics, and the New Factors of Production

Then the generator, now with artificial intelligence, which is a catalyzer, is an accelerator of this abundance will. Things will change more.

We've got it with robots and it's getting to work. A robot costs now two years salary for the worst paid jobs in Spain. You can get a robot for 6,000 euros, even if it works only one hour on their batteries.

But yet, we're seeing that the price is going down. Adoption is going very high. So we have abundance of labor. We have abundance

The Intelligence Explosion and Its Adoption Curve

of intelligence and we're getting to artificial intelligence and the rate of adoption, this X curve of artificial intelligence is wild. The rate of adoption is incredible. And that's already changing our society.

This is only in the health sector in China and only with short term objectives such as optimizing cost performance or automating slide analysis or 3,000 images. So very real, practical, quick wins.

And if this changes very fast, we can, I believe we will see movements, economical, business-wise, but as well social, that are going to be very strong.

Shifts in Work, Startups, and Organization Design

For example, junior level employment in big consultant, big platforms is coming down. In the entrepreneurship arena, we see people hire normal juniors and the other day in a conference, I saw this person saying, we invest, it was an investment fund, which said new startups are one person, one person, one company, and multiple agents. And if you look at how solo founders have increased from 2015 being 17% to 35, they doubled from 2015 to 2025. So we're seeing that something more profound than tasks is changing.

No, because the new mantra, is value of shifting.

Blue in the Middle Age was very scarce. You had to get it from the Himalayas. No production in Europe was 30 kilos a year. And you had to risk your life for it.

So in the Medieval Age, Filippo di Lippi, for example, they only used blue for the virgin's coat. no it was ritualized when something scars no it becomes ritualized and it was only done for that in the 60s if claim created a new color blue clean which is acrylic and we could see blue everywhere so value shifting and is shifting

Learning from Barcodes: Designing AI-First Processes

We could think that when something like artificial intelligence happens, you can act as most retailers act when the barcode appeared in the 60s. What they did is this thing in the barcode is great, so we can express cash, the cash register at the end of the service in the supermarket.

did something different. It said, this is very useful for checkout for sure, but I can build, and that's what it did, I can rethink my whole organization on top of the barcode.

And that meant not only checkout, but that meant All their logistics were based on the barcode. All their suppliers were obliged from day one to adopt the barcode. All their stock in places were dealt with barcodes.

And that allowed them to manage hundreds of Walmarts as a single entity. Hundreds of suppliers with the same codes. And that's what gave them the advantage.

And the advantage they want to take today again. 1They were thinking every process, not only tasks, but every process, trying to put AI first.

From Chess to Go: Rethinking Strategy

So my sense is that we're playing chess, but the game has changed to gold. We're playing chess, we're playing still with the rules of domination. Chess comes from India and Persia, it's about war. It starts with a full board with pieces and at the end there are no pieces anymore so you have to kick people off the board.

What you need to play chess is memory, you need logic, you need calculation. It's very positional advantage.

But when we see Go, Go is a different game. It was born in China. It's not about domination. It's not about war.

It's about control, subtle control. It's about fluidity. It starts empty.

and you start adding bugs to the thing. So you're trying to look at the emerging properties of the things.

It's not about power, positional power. It's about linking things together. And seeing potential energy, not actual energy, but potential energy.

So I'm afraid that we're moving chest movements. when the game has changed to go.

First-Order vs Second-Order Moves

The other day, speaking with Manos Parnard, he told me about a group of translators that had seen that their clients were already translating with AI, so they reformed and they didn't call any more translators, but they kept one and they said, well, I give a service that I translate with an AI and I check, no?

I check that the human has gone through the document. And that's a chess movement. You move the queen to the place, so you occupy that space.

But then you think, what's the second consequence? What's the consequence of that?

Is that you have moved yourself not into the business of translation, which is not a business anymore, but in the business of certification. And what are your strengths in the business of certification if ever Cambridge or Oxford, which are the ones who certified the exams, the official exams, get into the business?

Value as Flow, Not Position

You see, the way artificial intelligence is changing our systems is not by conquering squares. It's about creating a mesh that changes everything and accelerates everything at the same time.

We worked with this, this year, with the 30 candidates to Catalonia Exponential Leaders, ACSIO, the official organism in Catalan promotion of economy, selects every year 10 Catalonia Exponential Leaders, and we went through a bootcamp with them, and at the end, what we saw is that you can explain businesses' flows.

rather than as position, rather than statics. You can think that value is made, value is generated and captured in five critical functions of a system.

Five Ways to Create and Capture Value in Flows

You can capture value when you capture, if you capture CO2, if you capture waste, you're creating a flow, you're at the beginning of a flow and you're capturing value then.

You can augment the flow if you're able that add more information to a clinical existing image, for example. If you're able to add more information to a video in 2D, you're building value on top of the flow.

You can add value when you compute, and we see all these innovations We see all this innovation in data centers, in refrigeration, in photochips, in forensics, but as well computing biogenetics, computing myoma, computing things that are not straight data.

You can generate captive value by coordinating, and by coordinating I mean making together work a factory or an agrarian exploitation where the actuators are dependent on you. You have all the strings to move the things.

But the most important, you can create value by orchestrating. And that means coordinating things that are autonomous agents, like a fleet of shared motorcycles, like panel energies which are at homes, like batteries which are moving on the territory.

Finding Your Endgame Position

And I believe that if you look at this and you look at What's the end game in the industry you're trying to see? And where value will be? Where value will be in this continuum that might look interesting?

Reconciling Abundance with Material Scarcity

So, oh. Okay, so I'm talking about abundance, but let's not forget there's material scarcity, and that might help as well to go about material scarcity.

So economic law, no, we cannot change it all, but we can see there's... Two sides of it. There's always scarcity of material things.

But there might be abundance of energy, mobility, knowledge for sure. And in this context...

And I'll finish.

Acting on the Endgame

What I invite you to do is try to look at the end game, not at the first move, but what this competitive scenario will look like when all these technologies deploy more or less simultaneously, because it's all going to happen in 10 years' time. In this new system, is there any function that I can deliver, any critical function that I can anticipate is not yet covered and I can slowly cover, like maybe contributing to open software or maybe creating a conference on that or maybe changing my roadmap to occupy that position?

No.

Watching Cost and Adoption Curves

Adoption and curve curves favor that. If you look at the curve curves of batteries, it's the one that has allowed to save energy at day and put it at night.

Which are the relevant and the adoption curves that play for you. And how do you have a way of seeing the business and where you are attentive to cost curves and to adoption curves so you can move value with the flow.

Conclusion

Thank you so much.