Decidr

In 2002, I launched one of the first online market research panels in the world, reimagining traditional phone or in person qualitative studies as a self service, internet-enabled marketplace connecting businesses with consumer insight. At the time, that type of data collection at speed and scale would have been like replacing a horse with a Mercedes.

AI is that next structural shift.

With Decidr, we're making a new category of product that replaces the haphazard and vertically focused human organisational design, productising best practice as a set of holistically designed and integrated applications, along with the hundreds of regular questions that would be asked by the very best of employees. We’re making all of this part of the operating system carried out by AI.

Our operating system produces metrics — month by month projections into the future — that form the reasoning for all resource allocation, creating an aspirational picture that an organisation is working towards. Think of it as autopilot with turn-by-turn directions for every process within the business.

Decidr helps you imagine the future

I’ve always been deeply immersed in product category definition. At the simplest level, a product category is a type of decision where different choices can be compared with the same attributes.

This is where the name Decidr comes from.

Observing the thousands of research surveys that took my interest, I worked out that just like a product category could be compared with attributes, every decision at every level could use the same decision support methodology.

Not only does the Decidr operating system completely align with pursued goals, it uses the power of decision support methodologies for the thousands of decisions at every level of an organisation that are made every month (mostly in people’s heads or via quick conversations).

So what exactly is an AI organisation?

And how can you compare the soon-to-be competitors in this new category?

Firstly, exclude all AI services that call themselves copilots. I’d make that another category that helps improve team member performance in an organisation but still works within the traditional organisational model. If you think about it, this product is far more driven by a team member being able to use some type of narrow AI tool to do less work.

Here are some of the attributes that I think form the new AI organisation product category:

1. How much of the organisation can run independently of people? Think of that like levels one to five of self driving.
2. Has it created its own projections?
3. How has it used humans in the loop (HITL) to achieve best practice and ensure it’s connected to taste and common sense (arguably pretty uncommon in lots of organisations…)?

In time there will be many more attributes, but one I can say would be most important for me is agility. How quickly can it adapt holistically, changing all metrics and associated targets into the future, realigning every activity in the process?

Why I’ve got such high conviction that AI orgs will play a significant role in improving the world

I’ve had the privilege of helping to ask and digitise literally millions of questions, answered by millions of real people, that constantly demonstrate a few key things: Organisations have always been built like factories. While they’ve played an important role in improving quality of life for humans, they’ve also become dehumanising, hierarchical, creatively limited and generally unfun.

It may sound like AI orgs are going to replace everybody and everything, but let's put that into perspective. The industrial revolution moved 90 percent of people who worked on farms into a thriving global marketplace. Similarly, AI orgs will give rise to incredible amounts of human-centric, world-improving and unimagined lifestyle enhancements. These improvements will be centred around each of the eight wellness dimensions, transforming those throwaway vision and mission statements that most old-world corporations have stuck on the wall. AI-powered organisations will help the most meaningful and lofty visions become realities.

Why we’re burning the boats

Category creation isn't about making something that's just different or slightly better than what existed before. It's about creating something completely new, something that leads people to that "aha" moment. There’s no established model for what we’re doing, but we believed in it even when very few others did. Once you commit to a new category, there's no turning back — you've got to burn the boats.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing at Decidr.

It would be easy for us to create a series of glorified chatbots to support marketing or sales functions, and integrate these into the Decidr platform. We could even use AI to analyse data and spit out limited context recommendations.

But I’ve realised that the best of human wisdom for each decision can mostly be applied as a holistic set of conditional logic. Which means the best organisations, like Apple or Hermes, have fought hard to define the logic behind every decision and have earned the right to be uncompromising about their brand.

Brands with operating systems like these are the closest thing we can compare to when it comes to organisations where every decision must apply the same strategic choices that align values, beliefs, attitudes and style to every decision at every level, even if the results are seen or unseen. It always takes more effort.

The incredible rise of internet delivered software (SaaS) has dramatically enabled productised processes and philosophies to be bought off the shelf like a product for each vertical in traditional organisations.

But no one has done this holistically because it is incredibly difficult when the primary user is a person and human focus and outputs (the inputs into the system) is the primary limitation.

We're dedicated to productising a holistic AI organisation that truly takes advantage of the primary user being AI, so that you can buy and configure it like you would a Tesla — with autopilot and an exciting vision programmed in, out of the box.

I firmly believe that AI orgs will become a new product category. What excites me most is the potential for thousands of new ideas that can align to improve real human wellness and quality of life, and the hundreds — if not thousands — of new product categories that will come into existence or be remade through the power of this new category.

So, we’re not just in the business of building AI tools — we’re creating a new way of thinking about organisations. And that’s why we’re burning the boats. We’re committed to this vision, and there’s no turning back.