Interstate highways and faster horses

At PRSA Chicago’s panel on organizational readiness for AI last week, I kept coming back to the line people attribute to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

(There’s no real evidence Ford said it, which feels right for a conversation about AI.)

Right now, some leaders are building the interstate highway system, and some leaders are still figuring out what to do with faster horses.

Most of the leaders I talk to are stuck in a faster-horse mindset, e.g. people in their organizations are getting Copilot licenses, maybe drafting emails quicker, or creating agents to do things they were already doing (only faster). But the workflows and org charts are mostly stay exactly where they are.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 changed where Americans lived and which towns thrived. It was a significant infrastructure investment that dramatically changed the shape of the economy. The AI equivalent: right now companies that are winning are redesigning workflows from scratch, updating data infrastructure, setting up governance that recognizes the possibility of runaway agents—and having honest conversations about what roles might need to look like in three years.

The interstate also came with social consequences: It bypassed small towns that lived off highway traffic; it was routed through Black neighborhoods in cities like St. Paul, where I-94 cut the neighborhood of Rondo in half in the 1960s. Infrastructure builders always decide who benefits and who pays.

Being ready to make hard structural choices around an AI-driven workplace is going to be increasingly important. We can’t prevent disruption, but I believe strongly we get the kind of disruption we’re willing to fight for. We can make those build choices with intention, and decide now who’s at the table when the work is redesigned.