The Web Shrunk Space. AI Shrinks Time.

The web shrunk space. AI shrinks time.

Recently I have been re-reading that great page-turner, The Three Musketeers.* So, while my days have been full of conversations about AI, competitive pressure, and teams grappling with the increasing pace of change, my nights have been spent in the company of D'Artagnan and his friends. In a different world — a world filled with honour, valour. And waiting.

Several times through the fast-moving story, our heroes act — and are then brought to a standstill. They have to gather the resources, put their plan into action and wait to see how it plays out. At one of the most critical points in their adventure, they must wait 16 days for a message to be sent and return (fortunately they had a diamond on hand to pay for it).** "Days of waiting are long, and D'Artagnan above all would have bet that the days now had 48 hours." Fortunately, they could always rely on the sage wisdom of Athos to get them through such periods —

"Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen. Sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of Chambertin."

Back in the daytime world, the company I kept had no problems with speed of feedback. Or resources. AI was accelerating ideas. Agentic AI was eliciting fantasies of innumerable armies of free resource.

But the unleashing of AI-enabled capacity that should be making organizations more effective is, in many cases, making them feel more chaotic. Last month's pilots are barely underway before new capabilities appear.

Technology has always increased the pace of life. Communication gets faster. I have lived through enough technology hype cycles to be among those suppressing the most jaded yawn when someone says, "this time is different…."

But AI is not just speeding things up — it is compressing time, and whole act-learn cycles. And that means something more than just faster business.

The Act – Find Out Cycle

The most significant organizational shift may not be automation or productivity, but cycle-time compression. Of course, polished but flawed, 'nearly there' documents can be 'written' in seconds. This 'workslop' is often used to explain the gap between the 92% of executives who say AI is improving productivity and the 40% of non-managers who say it saves them no time at all.

More significantly, however, AI reduces the gap between action and consequence, between strategy and reality, and between making a decision and finding out whether that decision was right. The FAFO cycle, if you will, is shortening. Fast.

This challenges assumptions and destabilizes processes across the organisation — from the human, the strategic and the operational.

Across these systems, two consequences matter most. Faster feedback loops do two things: they expose existing organisational weaknesses, and they create structural shifts in how value is created and captured.

Time as the hidden buffer

In practice, the organisations of the past have relied on time as a hidden buffer. Time allowed unclear priorities, weak alignment, slow learning and poor execution to be absorbed, hidden, or corrected before the consequences became too visible.

AI removes that buffer.

This is not about 'weak companies'. It is about the acceptable slack almost every organisation carries.

Where purpose, goals or strategic priorities are not explicit, shared and internalised, speed creates divergence rather than alignment. Where operational structure or discipline is missing, faster decisions translate into chaos rather than coordinated action. In low trust or low psychological safety environments, small misunderstandings quickly escalate and create negative spirals.

The list continues. Faster cycles also expose biased or narrow thinking, slow learning cycles, poor strategic scanning and more. These are not new problems. AI simply amplifies them while also reducing the time available to address them.

Let's take a simple example. Someone has a good idea. Previously, they would have to share the idea with others, explain it, sketch it, write it up, build support and secure the resources — and then develop a prototype with others. The process may have been frustrating, but it also forced some alignment.

Today, the same person can move from concept to prototype in hours. That is brilliant from a "show, don't tell" perspective. It supports rapid prototyping, testing and iteration.

But what happens when others on the team are doing the same thing? Or people in other teams? All well-intentioned, all engaged. Each producing equally valid candidates, but with slightly different language, assumptions, framing and implicit understanding of the larger goals.

There is real power, and value, to harness there. But most organisations are not yet set up for it.

The bottleneck moves from production capacity to clarity, judgment, prioritisation and integration. AI can increase activity faster than an organisation can increase coherence.

Where Value Moves

The second consequence is structural. In some cases, whole cycles collapse, changing the value of the process itself.

This pattern is visible at a strategic level in Francisco D'Souza's recent paper, The Great Decoupling. The paper is focused on the IT services industry but the principles are valid across sectors.

As AI devalues coding time, the sector moves from an economics based on scarcity — of skilled professionals — to an economics of abundance. In this world, firms can no longer rely on charging for inputs and time; they will need to deliver outcomes and results. The result is the biggest pressure on the business model since offshoring.

That is a structural shift. An entire production cycle has collapsed in value. When AI compresses the cycle, it can push a business, or indeed a sector, from one equilibrium to another. Value moves from production effort toward judgment, problem definition, and trust.

This is why "move faster" is an insufficient response. Speed on top of weak systems does not solve the problem; it brings the consequences forward. AI is not just changing what organizations can do. It is exposing how well they are set up to do it. And it is changing where they need to create value for customers.

So the practical question for leaders is not only: how do we use AI to move faster? It is also:

Are our assumptions, communication and coordination strong enough for the speed AI enables?

Do we know where value is moving from — and to — in our sector?

Under compressed time, unclear strategy and weak alignment do not disappear. They simply show up sooner.

In case you were wondering what befell our adventurers and philosophers, they eventually got their response. "D'Artagnan, with a trembling hand, broke the seal and opened the long awaited letter….

Thank you. Be easy."

——————————————————————————————

* Strongly recommended. In English, get the Richard Pevear translation / Penguin Classics edition.

** They also had their own means of encrypting the message contents. "Athos had found the term: 'a family matter.' A family matter was not subject to the cardinal's investigation; a family matter was nobody's concern; one could be occupied with a family matter in front of the whole world."