The Great Unbundling (and Rebundling) of Knowledge Work

Navigating the Shifting Landscape of Knowledge Work in the Age of AI

One pretty concise way of framing the story of the digital era is as an extended saga of unbundling and rebundling. Picking products and even institutions apart to find new, more efficient, lower friction ways of delivering disintermediated goods – and then, quite often, rolling those goods back into new packages that benefit their new providers. This, writ concisely, is the 21st-century story of news and information, of music, of movies and shows. Education to a certain extent.

The American tech executive and investor Jim Barksdale, who alternately had a hand in or a front-row seat to much of the dot-com and social web action, famously went so far as to quip: “There’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.” Pretty good sound bite.

In a 2014 interview with HBR, Barksdale’s longtime friend and sometime business partner, Marc Andreesen, sketched the bundling/unbundling dynamic and identified tech as the key driver:  

I think a lot of it is based on the underlying technology change. The way I think about it is — at least in the world that I work in, sort of tech and Internet media — bundles emerge as a consequence of the current technology.

He went on to describe how he and Barksdale envisioned the futures of unbundled and rebundled products and businesses:

We look for something to change in the underlying technology, and then basically say, “Well, you know, gee, if you were to sit down today with a clean sheet of paper, and you knew that the technology was changing, then what would be the proper form of the product, if you were starting from scratch?

All of which brings me to the release of Anthropic’s new Claude computer use model and to a product you’re absolutely in the business of providing to the market: your expertise, skills, capabilities, insights, analysis, leadership, and general what-have-you. If you’re reading this briefing, there’s like a 99.9% chance that you’re a knowledge worker – although if you’re a ceramicist reading the radical Briefing, please message me (Jeffrey) directly. 

For the rest of you/us, we’re shipping a bundle of knowledge work. And that bundle looks to be on the precipice of a significant – and potentially swift – unbundling. Give a read to Ethan Mollick’s report on his experience setting the new Claude model to a novel, strategic task. The imperfect but impactful future of agentic AI (something we’ve been writing about here for more than a year) is arriving – and to be clear: This isn’t about one new model. It’s about the coming wave.  

So what to do?

Panic? No. As Simon Willison dutifully catalogs, there are all kinds of challenges (security and performance) to rolling out something like the computer use model at the enterprise level. And besides, the robots aren’t coming for your job; they’re coming for your tasks – so long as you can differentiate between the two.

So do that. Relentlessly. 

Actively participate in the unbundling of your own work as a product. Find and leverage those new efficiencies and capabilities to present a better, more compelling product. I love an example like this one. What’s your version? And as you unbundle your tasks, how can you redefine the product of your work? What is the “rebundling” that you, super empowered, want to bring to market?

I’ll close with one more thought-provoker from the HBR archives (HBRchives?). This time from our sagacious friend John Hagel, peering into the future waaaay back in 1999:

As more business interactions move onto electronic networks like the Internet, basic assumptions about corporate organization will be overturned. Activities that companies have always believed to be central to their business will suddenly be offered by new, specialized competitors that can do them better, faster, and more efficiently.

Now swap out “electronic networks like the Internet” with “agentic AI tools” and assume that the corporate organizations and companies in question are knowledge workers like you and me. What are we going to do with this unique moment?

@Jeffrey