We once built organizations like machines. Then we wired them like networks. Now, as organizations weave artificial intelligence (AI) into their increasingly digital infrastructures, they are evolving to think, learn, and act autonomously like living organisms.
Just as aircraft engines have digital twins monitoring every vibration in flight, soon every organization will have a digital twin. This digital replica will continuously sense, learn, and adapt within the vast enterprise cyberspace that lives behind the terminal screen used by carbon-based life forms in physical “meatspace.” Its networked digital leadership counterpart will be a Purposeful Agentic Leadership System (PALS).
DIGITAL DOPPELGÄNGERS
Like nature’s mycorrhizal web—the hidden fungal network that keeps a forest ecosystem alive—PALS must be designed to maximize enterprise flourishing. In the forest, each mycorrhizal network node senses where nutrients are needed and redistributes resources to sustain the whole forest. In a flourishing digital enterprise, the same principle applies: Generative AI is “sense-able,” meaning it can perceive, interpret, and predict what will happen within the enterprise digital twin. Agentic AI is “response-able” in that it acts, coordinates, and adapts in real time to ensure enterprise survival in the era of digital Darwinism.
Every carbon-based manager soon will have a silicon-based digital doppelgänger operating as a node in a virtual, networked leadership system within the organization’s cyberspace domain.
Together, they will function as symbiotic “phygital” leadership partners moving back and forth between the digital and physical realms in real time, from top-down physical command and control in the physical realm to middle-out connecting and choreographing in the digital realm, ensuring that human wisdom and machine intelligence harmonize in service of individual, organizational, institutional, societal, and planetary flourishing.
In biological systems, flourishing is the core organizing purpose. The same must become true for digital enterprise ecosystems. By encoding flourishing into the digital DNA of our Purposeful Agentic Leadership System algorithm, we ensure that AI doesn’t just make organizations faster and smarter but also wiser.
The next leadership evolution will integrate hierarchies of command with “wirearchies” of care. Its foundation will be a sentient leadership system where carbon-based humans and silicon-based machines become “pals” that sustain the vitality of people, organizations, society, and the planet.