AI Made Building Easy. Coherence Decides What Survives.
Fast Company
“When anyone can produce an app in 20 minutes, the question of whether that thing deserves to exist becomes the only question that matters.”
In this Fast Company column, Fantasy CXO and managing partner Peter Smart argues that AI has made building software cheap and fast, so building alone no longer sets a company apart. The advantage moves to coherence: the degree to which a company’s product, people, positioning and decisions move in the same direction at the same time.
Coherence matters more as AI agents sit between brands and customers. Agents read a company’s data and systems directly, and a polished surface cannot hide a fragmented backend from them.
Read the full column on Fast Company
Key points
How can you tell if your company has a coherence problem?
- Ask 10 people. If you asked 10 people across the organization for this year’s single most important product priority, would all 10 give the same answer?
- Check three touchpoints. When customers use your product across three different touchpoints, does it feel like one company built all three?
- Imagine an agent audit. If an AI agent audited your entire digital presence tonight, what would it find?
- Trace five decisions. Take your last five major product decisions and trace each back to the stated strategy. If more than two cannot connect to a clear strategic rationale, you have a coherence problem.