Here’s what’s becoming crystal clear this year: we can now build our own capability equity.
For the first time, AI is good enough to be the software package. Which turns a question most leaders never had to ask into the central one. Which capabilities should we own, and which should we lease?
There is a path to get there, and it runs in four steps.
1. AI as the glue. Use it to connect the SaaS systems you already have and give your people a chat interface into all of them. They stop logging into those systems. They build the workflows they need, in skills, and that becomes the new here’s-how-we-work.
2. Micro apps. Windows into that same work. Small web apps carrying the 20% of functionality people use 80% of the time, with the rare stuff staying in the skills. How often do you really merge records?
3. Build the system you now know you need. After phases one and two you have a living spec. You have defined exactly how you work and built the muscle for it across the organization. The spec has proven itself instead of being a guess about what you think you want.
4. Agentic workers. Digital staff on the team, in the system you built, actively doing work.
Notice that agents are step four.
Firing agentic tools into the organization on day one is not the starting point. The starting point is understanding which processes need to become codified skills that people can actually run.
That four-step sequence is the business tech of the future.