Originally published on Lex Sisney’s Enterprise AI Strategies Newsletter.

We’re living through the most profound shift in organizational capability since the internet—and most companies don’t see it coming. For the past few years, we’ve experienced the AI Individual Era, where anyone with a chat window and curiosity could 10x their writing, coding, designing, or thinking speed.

But the next leap—the one that separates noise from signal—isn’t about faster individuals. It’s about something deeper: building augmented teams, where AI isn’t just in your tools, but in the shared cognitive system your organization uses to operate, align, and scale.

Phase One: The Personal AI Revolution

ChatGPT was never meant to be a consumer tool—and yet it became the fastest-growing product in history. Adoption wasn’t sparked by enterprise mandates. It happened bottom-up. Individual by individual. Curiosity by curiosity.

My own mother is 83. She uses ChatGPT to manage her health, maintain her design work, and explore ideas she’s curious about. An octogenarian, running on a personal superintelligence. Think about that.

We’re seeing the rise of the AI-powered individual—augmented thinkers who can:

  • Ideate better
  • Learn faster
  • Produce more
  • Make decisions with more confidence

The baseline productivity uplift now averages 30–70% depending on skill level. Multiply that across knowledge workers worldwide, and you get seismic shifts in output, GDP, and innovation velocity.

But here’s the deeper truth: what made humans the dominant species was never just our individual abilities. It was our ability to coordinate—to form tribes, tell stories, build cultures, and align behavior around shared purpose.

That’s the real multiplier.

Phase Two: Enter the AI Team Era

Welcome to the real inflection point.

Three enterprise AI layers are now emerging. Together, they form the stack of the future.

The Modern AI Stack:

  1. Augmented Individuals – People with AI copilots doing creative, analytic, and technical work faster. (Already at scale.)
  2. AI Agents – Autonomous agents handling tasks, workflows, handoffs between tools. (Currently in “nail-it” deployment.)
  3. The Centralized AI Brain – A persistent context layer that unifies humans and machines around shared goals, knowledge, and updated reality. (Now in early pilots — and everything depends on this.)

That last layer is where the leverage lives.

Without it, you’ll have a pile of smart tools bolted to an outdated structure—and your team drowns in duplicated work, context loss, and productivity noise.

With it, you get collective superintelligence: low-friction coordination, shared decision context, and compound learning loops.

Context Is the Real Multiplier

Context is what makes a team—human or machine—coherent. It connects:

  • Goals to everyday actions
  • Strategy to workflows
  • People to purpose
  • Memory to prediction

AI amplifies whatever it touches. That’s why:

  • If your structure is misaligned, AI will magnify the chaos.
  • If your workflows are siloed, AI will generate localized noise.
  • If priorities aren’t shared, AI will move fast—in the wrong direction.

But if you’ve built a system that already shares and reinforces context, then adding AI isn’t just efficient. It’s exponential.

Five Years From Now: What Will Be Obvious?

Fast-forward five years. What will almost every company have in place?

✅ Will employees use AI copilots?
Yes. Obviously.

✅ Will workflows be automated and agentic?
Yes—whether via agents or orchestration layers, routine complexity will vanish.

✅ Will companies have more or fewer humans?
That depends on industry—but every human will be augmented.

✅ What’s the competitive edge?
Whether you’ve built a centralized AI brain to maintain shared context and adaptive priorities.

The Shift Every CEO Must Master

Smart CEOs already see it:
The real differentiator isn’t having AI tools. It’s operating with shared intelligence—at speed and scale.

So how do you prepare for the AI Team Era without getting trapped in vaporware and hype cycles?

Here’s your roadmap.

How to Win The AI Team Era: A 5-Point Plan for CEOs

1. Make AI Personal—First.

Don’t delegate this. Use AI tools deeply. Learn firsthand how your thinking, output, and judgment change. Leaders who gain intuition early will lead better and faster.

2. Greenlight Focused Experiments.

Give a few cross-functional teams permission to test copilots and simple agents in real workflows. Use live operational use cases with clear measurement—like support response times or lead qualification. Then, watch the AI flywheels start to turn.

3. Activate Your Knowledge Graph.

Don’t try to centralize everything at once. Ask: What knowledge flows matter most to running the business?
Think: product design, customer pipelines, core analytics.
Start with organizing and connecting those. This is your minimum viable context layer. You can always extend from a strong foundation.

4. Close Your Context Leaks.

Right now, your org leaks context through silos, handoffs, and disconnected goals. Fix them.
Make ownership and priorities transparent. If your team can’t answer “Why are we doing this?” without summoning a VP, your AI brain won’t save you.

5. Time Your Move onto the Central AI Brain.

The central AI brain is in early pilots. You don’t need to bet the whole organization yet—but you do need to prepare your structure, workflows, and leadership culture to adopt it fast when the time is right. (If you’re ready to pilot, then DM me with more info. I may have the solution for you.)

Why Organizational Physics Creates the Edge

The winners of the AI Team Era won’t be the companies with the most tools. They’ll be the ones who master context at scale.

This is where Organizational Physics gives you an edge. What I’m about to say may sound self-serving, but it doesn’t make it less true: the companies already using Organizational Physics under my guidance are far better positioned to adopt and leverage a centralized AI brain.

Here’s why:

  • They have a clear, lifecycle-stage growth strategy.
  • Their structure is designed to support that strategy.
  • They run a Strategic Execution Team (SET) model that builds deep, persistent context across leadership.
  • The CEO is (ideally) reinforcing context—through their SET, weekly context messages, and all-hands meetings.
  • They already have a single source of truth from automated data pipelines tracking the company’s most vital health metrics.
  • They use SET and PSIU to ensure leaders and teams are in the right roles.
  • They share a common lens and language, grounded in first principles, that accelerates decision-making.

In short, the fundamentals are in place. When you add a centralized AI brain into this environment, performance doesn’t just improve—it compounds. But if you’re missing these elements, your AI deployments will stall until you fix the foundation.

Final Word: A Big Wind Is Coming

A good captain doesn’t wait for the storm to train their crew. They prepare the ship consistently—so that when the strong wind hits, they fly.

The enterprise AI wind is coming.

The question is:
Will your business capture it—or capsize under the weight of its own misalignment?

📌 P.S. I believe so strongly in this shift from AI tools to AI teams that—with Jason Baxter (CEO of FostrAI.com)—we’re launching a Slack group + course exclusively for forward-looking CEOs prepping for the AI Team Era.
Want in? DM me with “AI Brain” and I’ll send an invite.