INTRODUCTION
Your guide to Rewired

Business leaders will be transforming their companies with technology for the rest of their careers.

That was the opening line of the first edition of Rewired, and events have just underscored how true that is. When we wrote it, GenAI had just broken into the public consciousness and agentic AI was a glimmer in someone's eye. These technologies have roared to the top of the corporate agenda since then, forcing companies to come to terms with a fresh wave of change.

As the dominant force shaping business, technology now runs through nearly every strategic priority: customer experience, new products and services, growth, productivity, talent, etc. With generative technologies, we are at the beginning of a new business innovation S-curve.

Imagine what becomes possible with 20 times more software development output for the same budget. Digital products, services, and business models that were once uneconomical-or simply impossible-suddenly are within reach.

Now consider complex business operations such as hospitals, airlines, banks, manufacturing plants, or retail networks. What if planning, execution, exception handling, and operational decision-making were continuously synchronized across functions, systems, and time horizons? In that world, AI does not merely support work at the margins; it becomes embedded in the operating fabric of the enterprise, shaping how the business actually runs.

This is not science fiction. This is the emerging reality that businesses have to adjust to, as we explore in the pages of this book.

Let's be clear up front: Rewired is not about the broad adoption of AI tools in employees' day-to-day work. That's important but tool adoption quickly becomes table stakes. Competitive advantage comes from something much harder: reimagining core business processes, products, and services end to end with AI systems developed and embedded at the core.

Rewired is about the capabilities leaders must develop to do exactly that.

This book is not about technology for technology's sake. We deliberately spend little time describing specific tools or algorithms. Rewired is about how technology-particularly AI-gets applied in businesses to create meaningful improvements in performance.

Tech & AI

Throughout the book, we refer to "Tech & AI" transformations and capabilities because technology broadly and artificial intelligence specifically underpin so much of the change that's reshaping business.

The Rewired enterprise

We like to say that Rewired is both timeless and timely. In the first edition, we described six core capabilities required for enterprises to outcompete in a Tech & AI world (Exhibit I.1). That key insight remains unchanged: companies must be strong across all six to win. That's the "timeless" part. What has changed is the shift in what "good" looks like. That's what we mean by "timely."

EXHIBIT I.1

Two forces drive this shift. First, agentic AI has introduced new capability requirements, including the integration of unstructured data and the development of agentic workflows. Second, managerial practices have evolved-most notably in the expectation that business leaders can reimagine their business with technology and in the depth of organizational change demanded to achieve faster innovation cycles. That's why we decided it was time to update Rewired.

All told, 40% of this second edition is entirely new, and another 25% has been substantially expanded-an indication of just how fast the field has evolved in only three years.

The book is organized in six sections, each focused on how to develop and scale a rewired capability. Throughout the book, we highlight many examples, and the seventh section is where we have four in-depth company case studies illustrating what it looks like to develop all six capabilities and the business impact these capabilities can deliver.

We introduce each core capability below and call out what is new in this second edition. We then provide an overview of how these capabilities should evolve.

Section One: Creating the Transformation Roadmap

This first section explores how to inspire and align your top team and put your company on a successful transformation path. It highlights the practices of organizations that sustain momentum-aligning early on ambition and value, focusing investment on a small number of high-impact business domains, and keeping the reimagination of these domains firmly in the hands of senior business leaders.

In this edition, we pay special attention to agentic AI, specifically around how to select workflows that are good candidates for agentic automation. We also share some hard-won lessons from agentic trailblazers. Finally, we highlight the roles that each C-suite leader must play to ensure success.

Section Two: Building Your Talent Bench

This section focuses not only on attracting and growing strong tech talent, but also on developing tech-capable senior business leaders who play such a central role in orchestrating business transformation with AI. We delve into the hard but necessary transformation of IT talent, the shift toward skills-based talent systems, and how to create environments where top technologists thrive.

This second edition also looks ahead to a world of human-agent collaboration and what new capabilities leaders and teams must develop to succeed in it.

Section Three: An Operating Model That Outruns the Competition

Technology is widely available; advantage now comes from how fast and effectively organizations use it. That's an operating model question because it defines how a company organizes itself to deliver its strategy and create value day to day. Developing and implementing such a new operating model is perhaps the most complex and important aspect of becoming a rewired enterprise.

For this reason, our second edition substantially deepens our coverage of the operating model. We look into how to set up the structure (who owns what), management systems (how decisions are made), processes (how work flows), talent (which skills go where), and cultural norms (what guides behaviors). Through detailed examples, we explore three dominant operating model archetypes and how to transition to them in a controlled way.

Section Four: Technology for Speed and Distributed Innovation

This section helps executives understand how technology platforms enable teams to innovate quickly and securely by building once and reusing across the enterprise. It explains the platform architecture and modern engineering practices that have become foundational for organizations leading with Tech & AI.

New to this edition is a deep dive into one of the most profound shifts underway today: how AI is transforming software development itself. We explore the evolution from copilots to autonomous agent factories, and the step-change productivity gains they unlock. The section also introduces the emerging engineering capability of building agentic systems that will increasingly differentiate high-performing organizations.

You might be tempted to skip this section. Don't. We've made the content accessible to non-technologists, and for good reason: understanding how these platforms and practices work is now essential to leading successful transformations-and ultimately, successful businesses.

Section Five: Embedding Data Everywhere

Data is the most important asset in an AI-driven enterprise-yet it is often the biggest constraint on value creation because it is not effectively used. We begin by explaining how leading organizations start by being explicit about where data can unlock the most value. From there, the focus shifts to making data easy to discover, access, and use. Three foundational elements make this possible: a modern data architecture that provides a unified data environment; the productization of data to make it easy to consume; and a federated governance model that enforces business accountability for data while ensuring enterprise-wide consistency.

This second edition expands the discussion to include unstructured data for GenAI and agentic applications, and the growing need for automated data protection in an LLM-enabled world. We conclude the section by reframing data as a strategic asset class-one that requires sustained investment to enrich over time.

Section Six: Adoption and Scaling-Your Force Multipliers

Building Tech & AI solutions is difficult; realizing their value at scale is harder still. This section focuses on adoption and scaling-the two force multipliers that determine whether AI delivers sustained business impact. Adoption happens at the domain level. It requires involving end users in solution design and it demands reconfiguring the surrounding business processes so solutions actually translate into value.

Scaling happens at the enterprise level. It is about replicating proven solutions across markets, factories, customer segments, or product lines-quickly and economically. That requires modular architectures and strong field deployment practices.

In this second edition, we examine how...