Business in the age of AI: From economies of scale to ecosystems of success

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World Central Kitchen/ZDNET

If you wanted to provide food relief to crises around the world, how would you start?

Most of us, wanting to do the most good possible, would look at the money we have available and go “OK, how can I make as many meals as humanly possible with what I’ve got?”

Reasonable right? You go in thinking that if you minimize the cost of each meal you can feed the most people. This is standard, time-honored resource management at work. It’s about being efficient and getting the most out of what you have. This is how all of our businesses and institutions are organized and run.

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But, wait! If you start with the unit cost per meal as your key variable, you’ll probably end up using centralized commissaries (food factories), the cheapest ingredients, and a volunteer meal production workforce. You’ll probably air-lift the meals to a safe place and arrange for them to be handed out to the locals from there.

And — this is in no way a criticism — when you start with your resources first and with a high-volume, low-unit-cost mindset, a mindset that’s all about “doing more with less” and economies of scale, that’s the operating model you’ll end up with. You’ll have unintentionally built a silo, an organization that is designed to accumulate resources and then protect and extract the most value from them possible.

The thing about silos is — they work. They’re successful (at least for their owners and managers). And they’re easy to implement. Silos are the simplest way to manage resources — centralize and protect. Organizations have done it this way for years — actually, for thousands of years.

Here’s the problem: The success enjoyed by silos enjoy usually comes at the expense of the rest of the organization, business ecosystem, or community that needs those resources. Silos can slow down the systems of which they’re a part and even cause their collapse. Silos kill. Especially in the age of AI where speed is going to become essential. More than ever, our companies, institutions, and ecosystems need another way.

We asked ourselves: What would it look like to manage resources without creating silos? Is it possible? Is anyone doing it?

This was the driving question for my co-author Henry King and me behind our book Boundless. Could we find any organizations in any industry who were thinking about their resources differently, in a way that prioritized things other than efficiency, things like value to customers and other stakeholders, things like speed to value, resilience, and sustainability?

We didn’t find that many, to be honest.

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Those that we did find are very successful and differentiated in their respective industries. They’re not small or obscure, they’re leaders, and they’ve been around for a good while. We’re talking here about industries as varied as high-tech, retail, product and process manufacturing, education, agriculture, and healthcare. And in the critical area of disaster and crisis relief, we found Chef Jose Andres and his organization, World Central Kitchen (WCK).

Before 2010, Chef José Andrés was best known as one of the world’s greatest chefs. One night, watching the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold on TV, he was struck by scenes at the New Orleans Superdome where hundreds of newly homeless people were sheltered but without any obvious signs of activity from relief organizations or volunteers. It was this inactivity that drove him to fly to Haiti — in the aftermath of the earthquake there — with no plan, no team, only a credit card, and a deep desire to act, to do something to help. 

“Cooking alongside displaced families in a camp,” according to World Central Kitchen, Chef Andrés “was guided on the proper way to cook black beans the way Haitians like to eat them: mashed and sieved into a creamy sauce. It wasn’t just about feeding people in need — it was about listening, learning, and cooking side by side with the people impacted by the crisis.” 

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That experience led Chef Andrés to create World Central Kitchen — to respond to humanitarian, climate, and community crises in the US and around the world and provide food relief to the local people directly affected by these crises. That accomplishment by itself is worth recognizing and celebrating.

But everyone in the crisis relief world is driven by the desire to help individuals and communities in need — that’s a given. What’s so interesting about World Central Kitchen is the radically different approach it uses to get there — a new model for disaster relief.

The World Central Kitchen approach

World Central Kitchen does not find the cheapest possible ingredients. It does not get unqualified volunteers to make vast batches in factory conditions. It does not optimize for scale in the way most of us would define it. It does not minimize unit cost and maximize volume output.

Here’s what it does: It pays local restaurants, food trucks, and other related providers to source, cook, and deliver food in and for the communities in need. While significantly more expensive per meal, all the donor money goes straight to the local economy to help it recover faster rather than bypassing it with external services. In this way, World Central Kitchen helps devastated communities recover and establish resilient food systems. 

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The importance of this cannot be overstated. By engaging with the affected community members themselves and making them a core part of the relief, Chef Andrés and his team change the communities’ perceptions of themselves. Rather than being powerless victims, they are enabled to be part of the solution, to act and to build their own resilience for the future. Their dignity, identity, and culture are never taken from them in the name of assistance. They become the heroes in their own story.

So what do we learn from all of this that is different from the conventional silo model of resource management? We see three major lessons:

Lesson 1: Shared success

The first and most important difference is that everyone wins from this approach. The individuals in need get nourishing food that respects their traditions and culture The local businesses, especially the restaurants, get paid for cooking the food which means they can stay in business and pay their employees, who then, in turn, have money for their family and to spend in other local businesses.

The donors see that their funds go directly to the impacted communities, not to building organizational infrastructure. Volunteers engage directly with people in need and support them emotionally, not work in kitchens doing work they’re unqualified for.

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World Central Kitchen gets to deliver more than 1 million meals a day, every day, and to respond quickly to emerging crises and disasters around the world — with no infrastructure to slow them down. Some call this a win-win, others a zero-sum game. We call it shared success. And it’s the guiding principle for all Boundless organizations, for-profit and nonprofit alike. Instead of the siloed focus on economies of scale, here we observed a focus on ecosystems of success.

When shared success is the guiding principle, it is most commonly the outcome as well.

Lesson 2: Scale through connection, distribution, and integration

The second thing we learned about is the principle of Connection. World Central Kitchen engages with its ecosystems and its communities far more intentionally and deeply than the traditional company. WCK listens, observes, respects, and learns — and in this way, it becomes connected to all its partners and other stakeholders. And through Connection, it achieves Scale. 

Scale is as important to World Central Kitchen as it is to any for-profit business, but WCK scales through the network and the ecosystem, not through its own organization and its own resources. By scaling through the community networks of restaurants, food trucks, individually owned cars, bicycles, and whatever other transportation options are available, they have access to far more resources than they could ever own and control — and they can distribute aid far more rapidly and to far more people.

So how big is World Central Kitchen that it’s able to deliver more than 1 million meals per day? Well, you can look at it in two ways: First, you could use normal organizational metrics and say it’s tiny. It employs just under 100 people and has no permanent physical infrastructure. Or, you can look at the ecosystem through Chef Andres’ eyes and declare WCK the “biggest organization in the history of mankind.” 

Lesson 3: Speed through flow and designing for movement

The third thing we learned is that WCK is built for speed. It aims to be among the first responders to crises and to have boots on the ground preparing and delivering food — even if it’s only sandwiches — on the first day it’s there. WCK can move fast because it needs minimum infrastructure, activating local resources wherever possible and working with whatever is available on site.

But if you want to be able to move at speed, first you have to be built to move — or “Flow”, as we like to think of it. You have to be built like a car or an airplane, a runner or a bird — and not like a house. When we talk about the “foundations” or “pillars” of an organization, these words describe an ancient Greek temple, not a 21st-century company. Speed is one of the currencies of the AI age, and you can’t be fast — consistently and continuously fast — if you’re not built to move in the first place.

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In my industry, speed to value is of the essence. In other industries, speed suffers from its associations with the word “fast” but we should be in no doubt about one thing: We’re all missing our sustainability goals. According to a recent survey, only 17% of the sustainable development goals are currently being met. AI can help with both scale and speed. They say “Speed kills” but stoppages, blockages, and silos are the worst killers. We need continuous movement built into every core process. This is speed made routine. And that’s what we need now if we’re going to meet our sustainability goals before it’s too late. 

Chefs versus cooks

So let’s try to sum this all up and join the dots. We live in a world dominated by the silo model of resource management. But there’s another way, personified by Chef Jose Andrés and World Central Kitchen, which achieves scale and speed by ignoring conventional wisdom, and which generates and shares success across all stakeholders. We call this becoming Boundless.

Silos measure success by their own health. Boundless entities measure success by the health of their ecosystems. Boundless organizations are sustainable organizations, even regenerative ones. Silos scale through centralization. Boundless entities scale through connection and distribution. Silos inhibit speed. Boundless entities enable it.

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To be boundless, we need to adopt a new mindset. We need to operate like chefs, not cooks. “I’ve been a cook all my life, but I am still learning to be a good chef. I’m always learning new techniques and improving beyond my own knowledge because there is always something new to learn and new horizons to discover,” says Chef Jose Andrés. 

A cook uses recipes to create — learning by analogy. A chef does not need a recipe. A chef learns the taste of each ingredient and can combine the right ingredients to prepare a delicious plate — learning by first principles. 

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Be a chef versus a cook, learning by first principles versus analogy.

Henry King and Vala Afshar

In a new world, defined by new killer ingredients like generative and agentic AI, we must all learn to be good chefs. This is the only way we can recognize new ingredients that are required to create new, beautiful, and impactful products and services. AI is electricity for the 21st century, and if we are not operating like chefs, we will be in the dark, unable to produce actions that scale. 

World Central Kitchen was able to scale its distribution and value-creation abilities by activating thousands of restaurants. Today, businesses are scaling their abilities by activating digital AI agents. AI agents are the most important strategic technology for 2025 and beyond. One-third of consumers would prefer working with AI agents for faster service, according to the latest Salesforce research.

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Furthermore, research shows that CIOs are learning to be more like chefs. CIOs must also serve as chief AI officers, according to a Salesforce survey. Even though the majority of chief information officers believe AI is a game changer, only 11% say they’ve fully implemented the technology — and the business wants more of them. Companies are looking for their CIOs to be AI experts. However, 61% of CIOs feel they’re expected to know more about AI than they do, and their peers at other companies are their top sources of information.

We’ve been focused on ideas that scale — and ideas are important. But today, we need to go further than that. We need actions that scale. Become like Chef Jose Andrés. In a world of silos, become Boundless.

This article was co-authored by Henry King, business innovation and transformation strategy leader and co-author of Boundless: A New Mindset for Unlimited Business Success. 

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