The Coming Illumination: When AI Reveals How Work Really Happens
We're approaching a pivotal moment when AI will expose the invisible infrastructure of human problem-solving that underlies every enterprise - and fundamentally change how organizations thrive
For decades, while we’ve focused on the best ways to optimize customer operations, we’ve been mapping the wrong thing.
We’ve charted customer journeys, documented processes, and optimized touchpoints—all while the real work of the enterprise happened in the shadows. This work happens in the pathways of Slack, chat, and email messages that prevented a crisis. It’s also hidden in the institutional knowledge that lives only in someone’s memory. Often, it’s hidden in the creative workaround that makes an impossible system function. This invisible work isn’t a bug in our organizational design. It’s a feature. It’s how complex systems adapt to meet reality when formal processes inevitably prove inadequate.
As the next level application of AI begins to take hold, we’re going to discover where the real value can be unlocked. There will be a lot of surprises, but immense opportunity as well.
The Universe We Couldn’t See
Physicists tell us that roughly 70% of the universe is dark energy—a force we can’t observe directly but that fundamentally shapes everything we can see. When you look at a galaxy, you’re seeing only a fraction of what’s actually there. Enterprises have the same property. The org chart, the process documentation, the system integrations—these are the visible matter. But the actual work, the adaptive problem-solving that happens moment by moment, the collective intelligence that makes things work despite the systems—that’s the dark energy.
Current AI has been aimed at optimizing the visible universe. It finds patterns in structured data, predicts outcomes based on known variables, automates clearly defined tasks. This is valuable but incremental. The next generation of AI—truly agentic systems capable of reasoning, learning, and operating across ambiguous domains—may do something unprecedented: they’ll make the dark energy visible. Not by imposing structure, but by learning to perceive, navigate, and eventually participate in the unstructured work that has always been there.
An Explosion of Complexity and Possibility
The Cambrian explosion in biology wasn’t about life appearing—life was already there. It was about a radical expansion of living organisms’ receptors, especially visual. As organisms developed eyes, and other sensors, the arms race of visibility began. Every creature suddenly had to adapt to a world where they could be observed.
We’re at another such moment, but this time the transformation goes deeper. We’re not just making customer behavior visible—we’re making organizational behavior visible. The informal networks, the tribal knowledge, the judgment calls, the adaptive workarounds that separate functional organizations from dysfunctional ones will soon be ‘seen’ by agentic AI.
This visibility will be uncomfortable. It will reveal that many of our most critical business functions depend on undocumented expertise. It will show that some expensive systems are routinely circumvented because they don’t match reality. It will demonstrate that certain “efficient” processes only work because humans are compensating for their inadequacies.
But it will also reveal extraordinary capability. The creative problem-solving that happens every day. The relationship networks that transcend org charts. The emergent intelligence that arises when talented people collaborate to serve customers.
The Transformation of Human Work
As AI learns to navigate and systematize unstructured work, the locus of human value will move. Today, much human effort goes into execution within broken or inadequate systems—being the glue that holds things together, the translator between disconnected platforms, the memory that spans system gaps. This work is valuable because it’s necessary, but it’s not where human capability shines brightest. As AI takes on more of this connective tissue work, humans will be freed to operate at a different level.
I’m betting this won’t be a story of AI replacing people. It’ll be a story of AI finally enabling humans to work at the level of abstraction where we’re most uniquely valuable.
What This Demands of Leaders
The leaders who will navigate this transition successfully won’t be those with the best AI strategy. They’ll be those who can embrace profound organizational honesty.
You must be willing to acknowledge the gap between how your company is supposed to work and how it actually works. To recognize that your documented processes are fiction and your undocumented processes are fact. You’ll need to resist the temptation to use AI visibility as a surveillance tool. The goal isn’t to catch people working around systems—it’s to understand why they work around systems and what that reveals about organizational reality.
You’ll need prepare for a redistribution of value and status. People who’ve been essential because they knew how to navigate broken systems will need new ways to contribute as those systems evolve. This is a change management challenge that will test your organization’s capacity for empathy and reinvention.
You’ll need to develop comfort with opacity during the learning phase. As AI systems observe and learn from unstructured work, there will be a period where neither fully automated processes nor fully manual processes dominate. This ambiguity is necessary—rushing through it will compromise both learning and customer experience.
The Opportunity Ahead
If we do this right—if we treat the illumination of organizational dark energy as an opportunity rather than a threat—we have the chance to build enterprises that finally align with human capability, and drive long lasting value.
I can imagine that we design organizations where:
- Systems adapt to human work patterns, not the reverse
- Institutional knowledge is captured and enhanced, not lost with every departure
- The gap between strategy and execution becomes visible and addressable in real-time
Ultimately, customer experiences that bring together trusted and full context from customers as the first party with the full intelligence of the organization, not just what we’ve been able to systematize on the organization side.
The end goal is not just better AI implementations, but fundamentally more honest, capable, and human organizations.
The dark energy has always been there, keeping your enterprise functioning when logic says it should collapse. We’re about to see it clearly. What we do with that visibility will define the next era of how humans and machines collaborate to create value.
The Cambrian explosion of CX is forcing us to acknowledge complexity across the entire customer lifecycle. This transformation will force us to acknowledge organizational complexity. And in that acknowledgment lies the possibility of building enterprises that finally work the way we’ve always claimed they do.