Over the past six months, futurist and author Mike Walsh has been embedded in conversations with the global leadership of some of the world’s most influential organizations while writing his forthcoming book, Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, to be published by Harvard Business Review Press. What emerges from this research is not another story about tools, automation, or productivity hacks, but a far more consequential shift: the rise of digital labor as a new factor of production.
Mike’s findings show that AI is no longer just augmenting work. It is becoming the essential ingredient in how organizations create new value. Across industries, organizations are deploying AI agents that can reason, act, and adapt at scale. This marks a fundamental change in how decisions are made, and how accountability must be designed. The leaders Mike interviewed are not experimenting at the margins. They are re-architecting their enterprises around AI factories, systems that industrialize cognition, and agentic operating models that coordinate networks of humans and machines in real time.
His fieldwork draws on direct conversations with senior executives from global organizations including BMW, Palantir, Deloitte, NVIDIA, Tata Motors, Moderna, Southern California Edison, Petrobras, and Sanofi. Together, these perspectives reveal an emerging organizational paradigm in which competitive advantage no longer comes from having smarter people or better technology alone, but from how intelligence itself is configured, governed, and deployed.
The implication for leadership is profound. The next era will not be defined by managing people in roles, but by designing intelligence. Decision rights, risk, speed, scale, and strategy are all being reshaped by the presence of digital workers that never sleep and continuously learn. Leaders who treat AI as just another tool will fall behind those who learn to design, direct, and discipline hybrid human-machine organizations.
While the book itself will be published later this year, Mike is available to share his key findings now with select audiences, leadership teams, and boardrooms. This keynote offers a rare window into how the world’s most advanced organizations are preparing for a future of abundant intelligence, and what it will take to build an enterprise that can thrive when cognition itself becomes scalable, programmable, and strategic.