Building the brain vs. wiring the body: Why your AI strategy is obsolete

The coordination engine

I’d followed Sangeet Paul Choudary since his first book on platform businesses. But his latest book, Reshuffle, offered a new lens. Via Zoom, I called Choudary in his sunlit office in Dubai. What he said changed the way I thought about AI.

“Losers typically lose because they get really good at execution on a game that is no longer relevant,” he said. Companies are executing brilliantly, executing fast, but executing the wrong thing.

“TikTok did not beat Instagram by becoming a better Instagram,” said Choudary, who then explained how it broke the logic of the social graph entirely. Most people see AI as a faster way to get things done. They see automation, but Choudary sees coordination. He walked me through what he calls the “atomic unit of work”.

Every business, he explained, is organized around a basic building block: something that gets designed, produced, tested, and shipped. For traditional fashion houses, that unit is the seasonal collection. For Adobe, it is the file. The companies that win during technological shifts break the atomic unit into something smaller. He pointed out that Shein did not just speed up fashion; it dismantled the monolithic role of the designer.

Designers at traditional fashion houses create a cohesive seasonal collection. They manage the constraints of fabric, budget, manufacturing timelines, and trend forecasting. Their power comes from holding all of those threads together. Their judgment is the product. But Shein’s algorithm now holds those threads.

“Shein doesn’t test a full collection,” Choudary said. “It unbundles each of those monolithic pieces. The design brief is broken into micro-tasks, and the pre-production batch is tiny. The fashion catalog is now a micro-style that can be tested instantly.” These micro-tasks are dispatched to an on-demand network that commands hundreds of fragmented factories in Guangzhou. The cycle is instantaneous. The designer still exists, but they only fill one small box.

Next, Choudary described how Figma gutted Adobe. Adobe had better rendering tools and decades of technical supremacy, but Figma realized that design was no longer about rendering a perfect pixel. It was about coordinating 50 people looking at the same elements simultaneously across different time zones. Figma redefined the unit of work. Adobe treated cloud as storage, while Figma treated cloud as a shared workspace, eliminating the translation cost – the effort of converting one team’s output into another team’s usable input. When translation costs drop, a disjointed set of actors can suddenly move together.

By the time Adobe noticed, the architecture of design work had moved on. Adobe tried to acquire Figma, but regulators effectively blocked it. The old game could not buy its way into the new one. “Once you can break knowledge work into micro-tasks and have AI coordinate them, you commoditize expertise,” Choudary explained.

From this angle, China’s deployment advantage is obvious: its supply chains and ecosystems are already in place. When I visited Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters earlier this year, a visitor held up a medicine package. I was expecting a product description or a price comparison. With one scan, WeChat pulled up her medical history, linked her appointments, and generated a personalized dosage regimen. No app download. No fumbling with passwords. The AI knew the context of her life. Last July, in San Francisco, ChatGPT agent launched to four million weekly users. Within months, that number reportedly fell below one million: brilliant agent design, but no ecosystem to plug into.