The Mega-Bill McDermott Prophecy: Why Your AI Strategy Is Too Human

I have a provocative tech theory. I cannot help but go into the future everyday. I have come back with this. Even people who expect human-level AI soon are still seriously underestimating how different the world will look when we have it.

The reason? It's not just about individual AI capabilities—it's about the collective advantages these systems will have. They can be copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved in ways humans simply can't.

As CEOs at Shopify, Duolingo, and Box release manifestos declaring their companies "AI-first" and Microsoft heralds the birth of the "frontier firm" in its 2025 Work Trend Index, my vision of fully automated enterprises is rapidly transitioning from speculative futurism to corporate strategy.

The Copying Advantage

Picture this: What if Google had a million AI software engineers? Not generic "workers," but identical copies of their top talent—the AI equivalents of Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer, with all their skills, judgment, and tacit knowledge intact.

This ability to turn capital into compute and compute into equivalents of your top talent is a fundamental transformation. Since you can amortise the training cost across thousands of copies, you could sensibly give these AI’s ever-deeper expertise.

For Dow Inc, this isn't theoretical. The global materials science company has deployed agent systems to detect hidden losses and streamline shipping operations. Once fully scaled, they expect the system will save millions in the first year through increased accuracy in logistics rates and billing.

Similarly, at Wells Fargo, an AI agent built for 35,000 bankers across 4,000 branches has cut query response times from 10 minutes to just 30 seconds, with 75% of searches now happening through the system.

Micromanagement at Scale

But copying goes beyond replicating star performers. It transforms management even more radically than labour.

Human Bill McDermott simply doesn't have the bandwidth to directly oversee 30 000 employees, hundreds of products, and millions of customers. But AI Bill’s bandwidth is capped only by the number of TPUs you give him to run on.

This enables a level of oversight that makes current management practices look primitive. I envision a world where all of ServiceNow’s middle managers could be replaced with AI Bill copies, reviewing every pull request, crafting every product strategy, and handling every negotiation—all flowing from a single coherent vision.

The concept directly parallels what Microsoft has identified as a key trait of frontier firms: the rise of the "agent boss." According to their research, 28% of managers are already considering hiring AI workforce managers to lead hybrid teams of people and agents, while 32% plan to hire AI agent specialists within the next year.

Knowledge Transfer Without Limits