It Didn’t Arrive With a Bang
Sam Altman just signaled what many builders already feel: the superintelligence era isn’t a distant firework—it’s already threading into our products and processes. If that’s true, the strategic question shifts from “Who has the biggest model?” to “Who can operate superhuman agents with production-grade control?” Size won’t save you. Stewardship will.
The Moat: Verifiable, Billable, Rate‑Limited
The competitive edge now is a governance-grade layer: agent identity and permissions, signed actions, tamper‑evident logs, cost-aware rate limits, and per-action billing that your CFO can trust. Think payments-era rigor meets cloud reliability. If an AI agent can spend money, touch data, or ship code, you need a ledger, not just a log; a circuit-breaker, not just a dashboard; and a permissioning model that’s default-deny. Predictable cost beats peak IQ when budgets get real.
The Metric That Matters: Autonomy per Dollar
Stop chasing one more benchmark point. Track autonomy per dollar: the number of valuable tasks an agent completes end-to-end—within policy—per unit of spend. Measure useful completions, human handoffs avoided, and time-to-resolution against cost. Plot it across reliability (SLOs), safety incidents (zero-tolerance), and latency budgets. If you can raise autonomy per dollar while holding the line on safety and SLAs, you’re compounding advantage.
Build the Governance Layer Now
Practical blueprint: issue cryptographic identities to agents; enforce least-privilege via a policy engine; meter every call and cost; set rate limits and spend caps; keep append-only audit trails; require human-in-the-loop on high-impact actions; sign outputs for provenance; maintain red-team and eval pipelines; and wire a global kill switch. Vendors should offer audit-ready APIs, stable pricing, eval artifacts, and first-class observability. If they can’t be audited, they can’t be trusted.
Strategy: Conservative by Design
This is the fiscally responsible path: ship value fast, but prove control faster. Favor reliability over novelty, measurable ROI over leaderboard glow, and governance over guesswork. Superintelligence may be arriving quietly—but the companies that win will be the ones that made it accountable, billable, and rate-limited from day one.
