When Six-month Plans Meet Six-second Solutions
By: Mark Shedd
In 2023, a new AI foundation model was released every 2.4 days.
Let that sink in for a moment. While your leadership team was scheduling quarterly strategy reviews, the fundamental building blocks of artificial intelligence were evolving faster than most
companies could update their software.
I've been watching companies get steamrolled by their own planning processes for twenty years, but 2024 was different. That relentless pace—149 foundation models in a single year—created something I'd never seen before: six-month strategies
becoming obsolete before the ink dried.
Case in point: A Fortune 500 client (I can't name them, but let's just say they make things that go beep in hospitals) called me in January with what they thought was a sophisticated AI
strategy—six months in development. Beautiful presentation—probably cost them $200K in consulting fees alone.
The problem? By the time they finished planning, the AI landscape had fundamentally shifted. Their masterpiece was built on assumptions about capabilities that were already two generations
behind. I had the uncomfortable job of telling the CEO that their "cutting-edge" strategy was based on AI models that were basically ancient history.
Here's what that breakneck release schedule means: planning cycles designed for predictable change are colliding with exponential innovation. While committees debate governance frameworks,
the computational power needed to create these models has been doubling every six months. We're talking
about capabilities that would have seemed like science fiction becoming commercially available before most companies can evaluate them.
The bottleneck isn't technology anymore. It's organizational speed. And honestly? Most executives still don't understand what they're up against.
This reminds me of Almon Strowger, the undertaker who got tired of being screwed over by biased telephone operators in 1891. Instead of filing complaints or forming committees (sound familiar?),
he built an automatic switching system from a collar box and straight pins in his workshop. Crude? Absolutely. Effective? It launched the entire modern phone network.
Strowger understood something most executives miss: speed beats perfection. His janky prototype proved you can compress learning cycles from months to minutes if you're willing to
act.
We're in another Strowger moment. Except this time, the acceleration is so intense that AI benchmarks designed to measure progress are becoming "saturated". Systems are scoring so high that they
render the tests useless. The question isn't whether your industry will be transformed. It's whether you'll be leading the transformation or reading about it in case studies.
What This Velocity Actually Means
Let me translate that lightning-fast model release pace into business reality—and I'll be honest, some of this still surprises me.
Every time a new foundation model drops, it potentially rewrites what's possible in your organization. Last month, I watched a marketing director at a mid-size SaaS company transform her entire
content operation by telling Claude: "Analyze these competitor campaigns and draft our Q4 strategy with messaging framework, channel mix, and budget allocation."
Thirty minutes later, she had what used to take her team weeks to produce. I'm still not entirely sure how the AI parsed all that competitive intelligence so quickly, but the output was solid.
That's category-shifting acceleration happening in real-time.
The deeper transformation is that these models understand and generate structured business logic, not just marketing copy. I've seen product managers say, "Build me a customer churn prediction
model that integrates with Salesforce," and get working code in response. No development team is required. Now, I'm not a coder—never
