Human-in-the-Loop Series
AI Will Force You to Rethink and Redesign Your Business System
AI is Making Your Carefully Designed Systems Irrelevant
Three weeks ago, I watched in stunned silence with newly implemented AI casually informed a team that their meticulously crafted five-year growth strategy had approximately the same relevance to current market conditions as a Mongolian horde battle plan has to modern warfare.
Damn.
It then proceeded to generate an alternative approach, complete with financial modeling, risk analysis, and competitive intelligence that would have taken our strategy team months to compile — all while seemingly running a background process to optimize the building’s temperature controls because it had “noticed some inefficiencies.”
Double damn.
That moment of surprise is what I’d been anxiously feeling for months: my carefully accumulated expertise in business systems, systems engineering and design at the most prolific high-tech companies was rapidly becoming as useful as knowing how to expertly operate a rusty shovel in the age of autonomous Caterpillar tractors.
Let me stay composed and break this down, while not having a professional break down.
Architectural Identity Crisis
Business Systems Architecture (BSA) has long been the quiet backbone of organizational structure — the pragmatic, slightly boring cousin who always remembered to bring those cheap napkins to the family picnic.
It did its job reliably and without fanfare, orchestrating workflows, mapping processes, and making sure the right information reached the right people at approximately the right time.
It was the kind of job where the goal was to get systems and teams humming along smoothly — most of the time, anyway.
Then AI showed up wearing sunglasses indoors, carrying a hoverboard, and speaking in what sounded suspiciously like beat poetry about neural networks.
It was the corporate equivalent of having Ferris Bueller crash your accounting department’s monthly reconciliation meeting.
It’s not that the old ways of architectural thinking were wrong — they were just designed for a world where change was polite enough to knock before entering.
The traditional BSA approach assumed stability was the norm and change was the exception.
Systems were designed to be robust, dependable, and above all, predictable. They were built to withstand the occasional storm, not to surf perpetually shifting tides.
This made perfect sense in an era where competitive advantages lasted years, not milliseconds.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth your digital transformation consultant probably tap-dances around: when your business systems can’t adapt at the speed of AI, they become artifacts rather than assets.
Why Your Charts Resemble Abstract Expressionism
Remember when reporting lines were clear and everyone knew exactly whose permission they needed to ignore?
Those neatly arranged boxes and lines have melted into something more resembling the work of my favorite painter Jackson Pollock, where the untrained eye sees a bunch of child-like chaotic splashes on canvas instead of deliberate patterns.
I once spent three weeks creating what I thought was the perfect user journey flowchart, complete with color-coded shapes and cute little icons to represent different sub-systems.
It was laminated.
It was awesome.
That lasted exactly four days before I used an AI tool to render it so obsolete that the lamination was the most valuable part. I now use it as a particularly rigid placemat to protect my desk from coffee spills.
This isn’t mere organizational and process anarchy. It’s the inevitable visual representation of what happens when systems architecture shifts from static constructions to dynamic conversations.
The new BSA doesn’t just accommodate AI — it assumes AI’s omnipresence the way fish assume water, or the way my bulldog assumes my closed Macbook laptop is actually a very expensive heating pad designed specifically for napping.
Consider the humble approval process. Once upon a time (circa 2020), it was a sequence of human judgments, each adding a sprinkle of delay seasoned with the occasional misunderstanding.
Today, AI doesn’t just accelerate these processes — it fundamentally questions their validity. When algorithms can detect patterns across millions of previous decisions, the very concept of hierarchical approval becomes quaintly retrograde, like insisting on reviewing email printouts.
Architectural Apocalypse ?
Business system overhauls don’t happen in isolation, unless your IT department is allergic to progress. I’ve seen server rooms that look like a time capsule from the last tech boom — I’m pretty sure ‘legacy system’ is just a nice way of saying ‘we forgot we had this’
Three fundamental shifts are forcing this architectural renaissance, plus one trend that doesn’t quite know what it’s doing but is trying its best:
Shift 1: The Collapse of Decision Latency
When Netflix recommends your next binge-worthy obsession before you’ve finished processing the emotional trauma of your current one, that’s not just algorithmic wizardry — it’s the elimination of decision latency.
Similarly, modern business can no longer tolerate the luxury of contemplative decision cycles.
I experienced this personally during on a product launch when our AI analytics platform recommended pivoting our marketing strategy mid-campaign.
I asked for time to review the data, and the system responded by showing a notification and some random countdown timer.
Message received.
Traditional architecture assumed human decision speeds, which is roughly equivalent to designing a highway system for vehicles powered by particularly motivated snails.
New BSA assumes decisions happen at computational velocity, with humans serving as ethical guardrails rather than processing bottlenecks.
This isn’t delegating control; it’s acknowledging that in complex adaptive systems, control was always somewhat illusory — like my attempts to stick to a diet when there’s old-ass cake in the office kitchen.
Shift 2: The Rise of Emergent Strategy
Strategic planning used to be a sacred annual ritual where executives would retreat to scenic locations to craft five-year plans that became obsolete roughly fifteen minutes after the final PowerPoint slide.
It was corporate theater at its finest — complete with vision statements so broad they could apply to literally any business from nuclear physics to artisanal cheese-making.
Today’s BSA recognizes that strategy emerges from the complex interaction of responsive systems rather than descending from mountaintop revelations delivered via sacred PowerPoint templates.
This requires architectural humility — designing systems not to execute predetermined paths but to recognize and amplify successful patterns as they naturally emerge.
It’s less like engineering a highway and more like creating an environment where beneficial paths can be discovered, used, and continuously improved — essentially letting the organizational desire paths emerge naturally, like those shortcuts pedestrians create across grassy campus lawns despite the perfectly good sidewalks nearby.
Shift 3: The Inversion of Expertise
Perhaps most disorienting is how AI inverts traditional notions of expertise.
Not long ago, experience correlated with expertise. Veterans of the industry accumulated wisdom through years of trial and error.
AI, however, can process the equivalent of multiple lifetimes of specialized experience in days or hours, making your thirty years of industry experience roughly equivalent to a toddler’s understanding of quantum physics.
I had my own humbling moment when testing an AI that reviewed a marketing strategy I’d spent three weeks perfecting.
In approximately 2.8 seconds, it identified seventeen optimization opportunities I’d missed, politely explained why my approach was “charmingly vintage,” and somehow managed to make me feel both professionally inadequate and oddly proud at the same time — like watching your child beat you at chess for the first time.
Progressive BSA doesn’t pit human against machine expertise — it reframes human expertise as asking the right questions rather than having all the answers.
The architecture supports this by creating interfaces where AI augments human intuition instead of replacing it.
It’s less “human versus machine” and more “human with superpowers,” assuming those superpowers include occasionally being corrected by an entity that never needs coffee breaks or gets distracted by those lovable dog videos.
Shift 4: Middle Management Identity Crisis
And then there’s the fourth trend, as AI revolutionizes decision-making at both strategic and operational levels, the traditional role of middle management is having an existential crisis of epic proportions.
It’s not hard to imagine that the next quarterly planning meeting where company’s middle managers sit in uncomfortable silence as the AI system presented its operational recommendations.
One manager will raise his hand and ask, “So… what exactly am I supposed to do now?”
The AI helpfully suggested “higher-order thinking and emotional support,” which I’m pretty sure will make him consider a career in artisanal woodworking on the spot.
👋 Pardon this momentary intrusion into your architectural existential crisis — believe me, I know how precious those are. But I’d be professionally negligent if I didn’t mention that you can experience more of these illuminating moments of technological humbling by subscribing to Forge the Future.
Why Should You Care? Besides the Whole “Continued Employment” Thing
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering why this matters beyond intellectual curiosity or the primal fear of obsolescence.
Or perhaps you’re just enjoying watching me process my architectural trauma through sarcasm and strained metaphors. Either way, I appreciate your commitment.
I asked myself this same question at 3 AM while staring at the ceiling, contemplating whether my entire career in both systems architecture and marketing strategy had prepared me for anything other than creating exquisitely detailed diagrams that would now be obsolete faster than milk left on a summer sidewalk.
The answer, surprisingly, wasn’t as bleak as my late-night existential crisis suggested.
Here’s why: organizations that understand this architectural shift don’t just survive — they develop competitive advantages that border on precognition.
When your business systems architecture embraces AI as a fundamental element rather than a bolt-on feature (like those “innovative” cup holders awkwardly retrofitted into 1990s car dashboards), you gain the ability to:
- See around corners — detecting market shifts before they become obvious, like having a business superpower that’s one part Spider-sense and two parts fortune-telling
- Learn exponentially — improving not just through experience but through the patterns discovered in that experience, essentially achieving corporate enlightenment without the need for meditation retreats
- Achieve quantum organizational leaps — transforming faster than incremental improvement would allow, leaving competitors looking like they’re running through molasses while you’ve discovered teleportation
This isn’t futurism; it’s already happening.
Companies with AI-native BSA don’t just make better predictions — they operate in what feels like an entirely different competitive dimension, like they’ve somehow gained access to the business equivalent of cheat codes.
Dance in the Drunken Conga Line
So how do we redesign our business systems architecture for this brave new world?
Counterintuitively, by embracing a certain degree of mess.
Yessir, I said it. Mess. Creative chaos.
The architectural equivalent of letting kids design their own bedroom where it could be terrifying at first, but occasionally resulting in genius you’d never have conceived.
I learned this lesson after spending six months creating what I thought was the perfect modular architecture for a client. It was beautiful — symmetrical, efficient, and completely logical. It was also completely useless within weeks because I had optimized for order rather than adaptation.
My architectural masterpiece now serves as another sad artifact saved in a folder called “stuff” on Google Drive. This is a constant reminder that perfect order is the enemy of necessary evolution.
The neat, ordered, hierarchical architectures of yesterday functioned precisely because they limited possibilities to manageable levels.
Tomorrow’s architectures must do the opposite — creating spaces where possibilities can expand and contract dynamically based on emerging conditions.
This requires architectural principles that might initially seem counterintuitive:
- Design for constant disposal — assume every system component has a limited shelf life, like yogurt but with API keys
- Prioritize connections over components — the relationships between systems matter more than the systems themselves, essentially applying relationship counseling techniques to your tech stack
- Embrace productive redundancy — efficiency sometimes means having multiple overlapping approaches, like carrying both an umbrella AND a raincoat, which seems excessive until that windy day when your umbrella turns inside out
- Build for reversibility — the ability to undo changes is often more valuable than the changes themselves, as anyone who has ever sent an email to the wrong person can attest
Fundamentally, the new BSA role must facilitate organizational learning at machine speeds. This means creating architectures where:
Love the Algorithm
If this all sounds overwhelming, take heart. The last time humanity faced this level of paradigm shift was probably the Industrial Revolution, and we managed to fumble our way through that one despite our best efforts to resist it.
I’m pretty sure there was a point where some factory owner was complaining that steam engines didn’t have the same reliable work ethic as horses.
The renaissance of Business Systems Architecture isn’t really about AI at all — it’s about recognizing that our organizations always were complex adaptive systems; we just didn’t have the tools to see them that way until now.
It’s like we’ve been trying to understand the ocean by looking at it through a drinking straw, and suddenly someone’s handed us underwater goggles.
AI isn’t changing the fundamental nature of business; it’s simply making the true nature of organizations visible by operating at scales and speeds that reveal patterns previously hidden.
In the end, the rebirth of business systems architecture isn’t a technical challenge but a philosophical one.
It asks us to reconsider fundamental assumptions about control, expertise, and even the purpose of business systems.
Those who make this leap won’t just survive the AI revolution — they’ll wonder how they ever operated any other way.
