While most people argue over whether AI is good or bad for jobs, they’re missing the real story.

The debate feels stuck. On one side, doomsayers warn that automation will wipe out whole professions. On the other, techno-optimists reassure us that innovation always creates more than it destroys.

Both sides miss the point.

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In Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy, Sangeet Paul Choudary argues that limiting AI’s role to automation misses the larger point. AI, the book argues, is a coordination technology – one that reshapes workflows, organizations, and even entire industries.

What struck me most is how clearly Sangeet explains how technologies of coordination transform economic systems, redistributing value and power in the process. He draws on historical parallels like container shipping, which restructured global trade, and barcodes, which transformed power structures in retail. In the same way, AI is becoming the engine that forces every industry to rethink how it operates.

The book starts with reframing how we think about the impact of technology on value and power, then moves to explaining how AI will change jobs, organizations, and entrepreneurship, while also rewriting the rules of competition and creating new tensions between the old guard and the new. It closes out by explaining how to think about strategy in the midst of uncertainty – a powerful lesson for today’s world.

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A few powerful excerpts from the opening chapter of the book:

“When people discuss AI, the conversation often veers toward the wrong questions, concerns such as consciousness, creativity, or whether machines will replace human minds, fueled by polarizing debates and speculative extremes. 

The fundamental mistake is judging AI by how human it seems, rather than by what it can do. This ‘intelligence distraction’, constantly searching for human-like traits in AI, keeps us from focusing on the economic and systemic implications of its actual capabilities.”

“Instead of dwelling on AI’s technological advancements, this book focuses on the systems into which AI is introduced – jobs, customer journeys, workflows, organizations, and even entire competitive ecosystems – and how they must evolve to exploit AI’s capabilities fully. Central to this approach is the framework of unbundling and rebundling: breaking down existing systems into their components and reassembling them in new ways to create value.”

“What makes AI truly transformative is not its performance on benchmarks of intelligence but rather its ability to model, mediate, and move fragmented systems toward alignment. The real promise and potential of AI lies in whether it can extend coordination into thus-far uncoordinated segments of the economy. In this sense, AI’s real power lies not in automating individual tasks but in coordinating entire systems.” 

“To understand how AI might truly transform the economy, we need to ask better questions. How does the economic system change when AI is introduced? Which constraints on the system are removed, and which new ones emerge? Where do new risks show up, and who manages them?

Benchmarks demonstrate what AI can achieve in controlled environments, but only systems thinking shows what AI will change in the real world. AI’s ability to identify patterns, make predictions based on them, and continually learn from outcomes may not create human-like intelligence, but it creates something arguably more valuable and practical: the ability to adapt in response to uncertainty.” 

“Compounding is an easy story to tell.  And yet, when we look at how economic systems actually evolve, compounding turns out to be a surprisingly incomplete explanation. Compounding might explain how technologies evolve – faster chips, improving models, and more data. However, economic and social systems don’t scale simply because things become bigger or faster. They scale because things start working together in fundamentally new ways. This is the untold story of global trade.

At first, the impact of containerization seemed obvious. Ports got more efficient, ships spent less time waiting, and dock work declined. But these were only first-order effects – the initial incremental gains you’d expect from a compounding model.

The real transformation came later, not through scale, but through scope. Standardized containers and standardized contracts enabled intermodal transport. With that, freight became faster, cheaper, and more reliable. And that reliability broke the logic of vertical integration. Firms could specialize and outsource. And as companies specialized, components improved. Improving components led to greater product innovation. And the cascade continued. High-knowledge work was separated from high-efficiency production, inventory management changed, and trade accelerated. This didn’t happen because of compounding. It happened because of cascading effects – one solved coordination problem, unlocking the next layer of opportunity.

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For executives, strategists, and anyone shaping the future of work, this book is essential reading.

Sangeet isn’t new to this conversation; he also co-authored Platform Revolution, which became a defining playbook for the rise of digital platforms. Reshuffle feels just as timely, but this time the stakes are even higher.

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👉 Highly recommend giving it a read, reflecting on its arguments, and discussing what it means for your industry. You can grab a copy here: http://amazon.com/dp/B0DTKW6NQV