The next enterprise AI breakthrough will look obvious in retrospect

I’ve spent the last several months writing about what I believe is the central problem in enterprise AI. Not the models. Not the prompts. Not the context windows. Not even the agents. The architecture. Across a series of articles, I argued that large language models were never designed to run companies. Companies operate through memory, context, state, constraints, permissions, incentives, workflows, and feedback loops. Language models operate by predicting the next token. That mismatch explains a surprising amount of what we see today. It explains why enterprise AI adoption is widespread, but business transformation remains elusive. It explains why organizations report productivity gains while struggling to produce meaningful operational impact. It explains why so many deployments still depend on consultants, systems integrators, and increasingly, forward deployed engineers embedded inside customer organizations. It explains why enterprise AI often feels simultaneously revolutionary and incomplete. Taken separately, each of those observations is, I believe, interesting. But taken together, they point to something bigger: They suggest that enterprise AI is approaching a discontinuity. And not eventually—soon. My prediction is simple: Before the end of this year, someone will launch a product that fundamentally changes how companies think about AI. Not a better chatbot. Not a more capable copilot. Not an agent with a longer context window—a new layer. And once it appears, much of today’s enterprise AI landscape will start to look transitional. The internet worked before the web One reason technological transitions are difficult to recognize is that the underlying technology often arrives years before the architecture that makes it useful. In 1991, the internet already worked. TCP/IP moved packets. Email connected institutions. FTP transferred files. Universities and technically sophisticated organizations could use the network effectively. But the internet was not ye