Peter Diamandis calls it the age of supersonic abundance. The idea that AI is about to compress decades of progress into years, that scarcity, in many of its most familiar forms, is about to become optional.
He’s probably right. And I find the optimism genuinely compelling, even as I notice that the vision tends to be drawn from a particular geography. The infrastructure of abundance, the compute, the capital, the regulatory latitude, is not evenly distributed. What supersonic progress looks like in San Francisco looks different in Barnsley, or Nairobi, or São Paulo. That’s a conversation worth having separately.
But the core argument holds. AI is not a technology trend. It is a civilisational shift. And for the businesses navigating it right now, that creates a question most boards are not asking. Not “what’s our AI strategy?” That question is at least on the agenda, even if the answers are still forming.
The question nobody’s asking is: what does our approach to AI say about who we are?
Every AI decision is a brand decision
Diamandis identifies several Metatrends that AI is accelerating – the democratisation of expertise, the compression of development cycles, the shift from zero-sum competition to abundance creation. Each of them has a brand dimension that boards are almost entirely ignoring.
Take democratisation. When AI gives every business access to the same capabilities, the same customer service tools, the same content generation, the same data analysis, the differentiator stops being what you can do and starts being who you are. The businesses that win in an abundant world won’t be the ones with the best AI tools. They’ll be the ones whose customers trust them enough to choose them anyway.
That trust is brand. And it is built or destroyed by the decisions businesses make about AI long before any campaign is written.
Which tasks do you automate, and which do you keep human, because the human element is part of what you’re selling? Are you transparent with customers about when they’re interacting with a machine? How do you treat the people whose roles AI changes, and does the way you treat them match the values you claim in public? What data are you using, and would your customers be comfortable if they knew? None of these are technology questions. They are values questions. And values, consistently expressed over time, are what brand is made of.
The speed trap
The pressure boards are feeling right now is real. Competitors are moving. Investors are asking questions. The technology is developing faster than governance frameworks can keep up with. That pressure creates a particular kind of risk – the risk of making AI decisions at operational speed when they deserve strategic deliberation. Of deploying tools because they’re available rather than because they’re consistent with what the business stands for. Of chasing the capability without asking what it costs in trust.
Diamandis’s abundance argument is ultimately an argument about trust at scale. The technologies that create abundance, from the printing press to the internet to AI, do so by making things accessible to people who didn’t previously have access. That only works if people trust the systems enough to use them.
The businesses that build that trust now, through how they make AI decisions and how transparently they make them, will have a structural advantage that no late mover can easily replicate. The businesses that treat AI as a pure efficiency play, deploying it wherever it reduces cost, with minimal consideration of what it signals to the people on the other side of it, are making a bet that their customers won’t notice, or won’t care.
History suggests that bet usually loses.
The Board’s question
I’ve been in boardrooms recently where AI is on the agenda. The conversations are improving, more Boards are taking it seriously, asking harder questions, bringing in expertise they didn’t previously think they needed. But I haven’t yet been in a boardroom where someone has asked: does our approach to AI reflect our values? Does it strengthen or erode the trust our customers and employees have in us? Is the brand we’re building through our AI decisions the brand we intend?
Those are governance questions. They belong on the Board agenda. And they will define which businesses look back on this moment with pride and which ones spend the next decade rebuilding trust they didn’t realise they were spending.
The age of abundance is coming. The question is whether your Brand will be ready for it.