It’s widely believed that ‘the data’ admits us to a comforting future of increasing precision and predictability. But there’s another, darker and far less explored, side to this precious coin.

Considering data today as simply an essential ingredient of information and knowledge is no longer adequate. It throws up genuinely existential challenges, forming an entirely new context.

The same data, devices and networks that enable our navigation of the phenomenal world, informing and enhancing our moment to moment understanding, decisions and actions, create another radically different, alien environment, for which neither the human mind nor society are prepared.

These abstracted, ethereal ‘maps’ not only create new ‘territories’: they have the power to influence and manipulate our experience, to undermine and even overwhelm it.

In a time when artificial intelligence increasingly mimics human capabilities - writing essays, creating art, and engaging in seemingly meaningful conversations - we find ourselves at a curious philosophical crossroads.

The work of psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980), particularly his 1964 book ‘The Heart of Man’, offers a prescient framework for understanding the fundamental limitations of even our most sophisticated AI systems.

The true danger is not that AI will outcompete humanity, but that we may, in our fascination with the machine, adopt necrophilous values ourselves - prioritising control over growth, mechanical efficiency over organic messiness, and simulation over authentic experience.

As Fromm might caution us, in embracing technological progress, we must be careful not to lose the biophilic heart that makes human creativity, connection, and conscience possible.

The case of Dr. P, chronicled in Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", provides a powerful metaphor. Dr. P, suffering from visual agnosia due to damage to his right hemisphere, could perceive details but not wholes - he saw features but could not recognise faces.

As Sacks observed, "He approached faces - even of close relatives - as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold them."

This neurological case study offers a striking parallel to the limitations of current generative AI systems. Both represent what happens when analytical, feature-detecting processes (associated with left-brain functions) operate without the integrative, contextual understanding typically provided by right-brain capabilities.

This session explores this parallel crisis and its implications for leadership in an increasingly data-driven world.

For the seventh session in this series, we examine Agentic AI's radical and long-awaited enablement of intelligent, contextual customer services.

Where the majority of current AI applications - especially in marketing - are focused on efficiency (doing things better), opportunities for powerful service innovation (doing better things) are arriving now.

We step back from exploring how this century’s giant network innovators have leveraged radical new models of value, looking at the history of how information itself has steadily unpicked previously robust and reassuring value chains, replacing them with highly disruptive and fluid ecosystems.

How GAFA and NATU overturned value

For the fifth article in this series, we move on from digital disruption to explore how this century’s giant network innovators have gone further in overturning previous models of innovation and growth, by leveraging unprecedented new models of value.

As we’ll come to see, the quite similar philosophies that these giant disruptors have adopted do not, in themselves, hold the magic key. They are all propelled by the power and speed of The Network.

And it’s The Network itself, in fact, that is the great disruptor. In other words, the medium itself has become both riveting opportunity and relentless threat.

For this fourth episode, we turn from the value proposition to customer value itself.

How has the digital revolution overturned it, and what are the implications for innovators?

While it’s typically disruptive technology brands that get most of the attention, the disruptions that matter are not driven by technology per se, but by brands that are able to revolutionise customer value itself, and from there take a dominant position in that new segment.

In this third session, to set the scene for developing a fit-for-purpose value proposition, we need to get inside the mind of the customer and see our offerings from their - unique and invariably different - perspectives.

Where value as a benefit for a firm is, by comparison, almost childishly simple, customer value is a particular type of benefit that is not only utterly subjective, but entirely contingent upon context and usage that, if not practically then certainly theoretically, change every second for every potential customer.

Consciously or otherwise, each customer brings their own personal and circumstantial criteria to meet the firm’s proposition.