Say what you want, but after yesterday’s Commerce Symposium (well done, Nebulab) I walked away with a nagging feeling that we’re not stepping into the future of digital commerce — we’re stumbling into something far more transformative and unsettling.
The moment that stuck with me — and the one that prompted this post — was an exchange with Alessandro Desantis. While discussing the near future of AI-enabled commerce, the conversation drifted toward the technical, sociological, and human implications of value creation through co-intelligence: what happens when a human being is genuinely augmented by an AI system.
This isn’t about AI lending you a hand through a few well-built automations. It’s an entirely different scenario — one where humans and machines divide the work, and the line between who controls whom, and who produces what, starts to blur.
At that point I realised: if we no longer live in a purely human world, then we live in a mixed system — one where we shape the machines and the machines shape us. Continuously. Which means we need to start asking some uncomfortable questions:
- What happens to trust and accountability when we work alongside something that isn’t human?
- What kind of ‘culture’ (or should I say context?) do machines develop — and how does it spread?
- These co-working and co-authoring dynamics are already changing how we speak and decide. How much, and in what direction?
- When you delegate work to a machine, where does that delegation end? Where does your responsibility begin — and where does it stop?
- What kind of knowledge is produced when we think together with a model?
All of which is to say: in commerce — and in the future of work more broadly — it’s the way we work that is changing, and in part the way we think. Uncharted territory is opening up.
So I find myself wondering whether we’re actually ready to work alongside intelligences that don’t sleep, don’t tire, and learn faster than we do — and how we’ll ever draw a clear line between what belongs to us and what belongs to them.
Sure, we can keep telling ourselves it’s just a tool. But the moment it influences us and we influence it, something new emerges — a completely new form of meta-cognition. And honestly? I’m not entirely comfortable with that.