I’ve spent a good part of my career around digital transformation, and there is a question AI has forced me to reopen: what is a digital business now?
Some things haven’t changed. Transformation was never really about technology; it’s about customers, value and how work gets done, with technology as the enabler. That was true before AI and it’s true after. The humanistic core holds.
But three assumptions underneath the standard playbook are cracking.
First, pace. Traditional change management assumed technology arrived in discrete waves you could plan around: define future state, run the program, embed, stabilise. AI improves continuously and dramatically mid-program. The transformational shifts I grew up on took years; the capability now shifts materially in months. Change management built on stability between waves is managing a world that no longer exists.
Second, the SaaS bargain. For two decades, digital transformation largely meant adopting platforms with process and data rules embedded in them. It made us efficient, and it made us lazy: organisations followed the bouncing ball and quietly lost their own IP about how their business actually works. Agentic AI blows that bargain open, because agents demand exactly what SaaS let us forget, your processes, your rules, your definition of good. The organisations that retained that knowledge now hold the advantage.
Third, and most heretical: the build-versus-buy settlement. If development productivity keeps multiplying, and people use a fraction of the features they subscribe to, why default to subscription-heavy platforms? Why not sweat existing assets longer, and let agents wrap intuitive interfaces around systems we’d written off as too hard to use? I’m not declaring an answer. I’m saying a question we considered closed is open again, and investment strategies built on it deserve re-examination.
So my working definition: a digital business is no longer one that has adopted digital platforms. It’s one that understands its own work deeply enough to keep redesigning it as its tools keep changing.
Which of your settled assumptions deserve reopening? That’s the conversation your next strategy day should start with.