Act II · The firm boundary moves
A job, a product and a company are historical bundles—not physical laws.
When capability and coordination become easier to assemble, the boundaries around work and production can be drawn again.
Employment bundles more than tasks.
Specialized knowledge, tools and training.
Planning, communication, standards and supervision.
Capital, customers, risk, identity and distribution.
AI can unbundle some components while leaving trust, permission, assets and risk allocation intact. The result need not be the end of employment; it can be a different reason for the firm to exist.
Some knowledge work exists because systems disagree about reality.
Integration, reconciliation, data entry and auditing are valuable responses to fragmented representations. Capturing trustworthy state at the event can eliminate work that document automation would merely perform faster.
Physical concentration can coexist with distributed organization.
Fabs, furnaces, energy systems, logistics and specialized machinery can remain large.
Design, procurement, scheduling, verification and software can become cheaper.
Smaller organizations can gain access to standardized physical capacity.
The alternative to buying software can become making the function.
The enduring product may migrate toward state, security, identity, payments, compliance and trusted operation rather than the regenerable interface.
Extreme founder leverage changes both sides of competition.
The first small producer demonstrates leverage. The second reveals whether that leverage is scarce.