The key to growth? Race with the machines

Racing Machines to Unlock New Business Frontiers

A mid-sized logistics firm watches its delivery routes stall as automated scheduling tools displace veteran planners, leaving teams idle and revenue flat despite rising demand. Executives debate cuts while competitors experiment with AI, unsure whether the technology signals decline or a doorway to reinvention.

Erik Brynjolfsson's talk "The key to growth? Race with the machines" meets this moment by rejecting the notion that automation ends economic expansion. Instead, he frames displacement as the temporary friction of an economy reorganizing around new combinations of human and machine capabilities. The central claim is that growth resumes when organizations stop treating AI as a substitute and begin redesigning workflows so that machines amplify uniquely human strengths such as creativity, judgment, and relationship-building.

Brynjolfsson argues this shift requires deliberate business-model changes rather than passive adoption. Companies must map tasks to the complementary advantages each side offers, then restructure roles, incentives, and customer offerings around those pairings. The result is not fewer jobs but different jobs that leverage both speed and insight.

Applied to the logistics firm, this thinking suggests keeping human planners in the loop to handle exceptions, negotiate with local partners, and design resilient contingency plans while machines optimize routine routing. New services could emerge, such as personalized delivery windows or real-time sustainability adjustments, that neither humans nor algorithms could deliver alone.

• Identify core human skills that remain bottlenecks even after automation.
• Redesign incentives so employees gain from machine performance rather than compete with it.
• Prototype offerings that combine algorithmic efficiency with human nuance.

The approach resolves the opening tension by converting apparent job loss into a platform for expanded value. Growth returns once the firm stops racing against machines and starts racing with them.

What new human-machine partnership will your organization build before the next wave of automation arrives?