Time is the biggest leverage
State of Agritech - 29th January 2025
0/ Unintended Blessing
Trump's second innings will be the biggest unintended blessing for those of us passionately working on climate change. It must be hard to digest and I am aware that this might come across as being deliberately provocative. I am not.
Mustering every sincere fibre of my being, I mean this. His second innings will accelerate the system’s collapse sooner and drive us faster to change our course.
For far too long, we've known facts and data and still behaved in a certain wavelength of normalcy as if these facts were largely outliers. Even though we have been aware of this for decades, we played along as those violinists did when the Titanic sank.
We have taken the green transition for granted. Now, Trump will make sure that we will never take it for granted.
The question to ask is this - Would four years be too short enough to create the level of pain that strengthens resolve and reduces fear, motivating us to do the right thing?
1/ Chief AI Officer? Good Heavens No
“Chief AI Officer” is a terrible idea if you are serious about organizing your firm's efforts to let AI "transform" the way you do business. I'll tell you why.
It has to do with something I learned from the amazing David Graeber called "Grammar-Book Effect".
Ever wondered how grammar books are written? I bet you will meet a consultant on the road who will convince you that people invent languages by writing grammar books.
The first grammar book is written by an expert who observes the tacit, unconscious rules people apply when they speak a new language.
Now, here's the funny thing.
Once the grammar book is written, people no longer consider it a compilation of rules that describe how people talk. They see it as a Bible that dictates how people should talk.
When a new language is emerging and spoken only in certain pockets, it must be deeply unnerving for an outsider to follow what is actually going on. In such moments, when the environment is too illegible and arbitrary, it is deeply tempting to take refuge in the comforting authority who can spell out rules and impose a structure that alleviates the anxiety. What deeply appeals to us in those structures is that it looks aesthetically pleasing from the outside.
"Yes, We have hired a Chief AI Officer who is responsible for leading our digital organization in an AI-first world"
That sounds so reassuring, isn't it?
Yes, the AI-first world is already around us, unevenly distributed. To become relevant in this emerging, AI-first world at the outset requires grokking context (landscape), not structure. The structure follows context. Not the other way.
All this while, I didn't tell you the scariest thing about this idea. This is exactly how Bureaucracy lives on in the digital age.
2/ Time is the biggest leverage
In a domain like agriculture, where ‘the definition of 'fast' is counted in years, time is the biggest leverage. Although you could argue the case of survivorship bias, some of the leading profitable agritech players-Arya.Ag, KisanKonnect, and SLCM - make you wonder if smallholding agritech thesis works best where time and relationships have an edge.