AI Will Be Everywhere. Then What?
AI is becoming part of every job and every tool, the way electricity did. When everyone has it, having it sets no one apart. netrii is my practice. I'm Arun Batchu, and I help chief executives and the chiefs around them work out what comes after.
Former Gartner VP Analyst, advising thousands of technology leaders. Led technology R&D at UnitedHealth Group and Best Buy. 37 talks since 2018, from Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo to a CEO roundtable at UC Irvine.
SpeakingHow I help
I advise the chief executive and the chiefs of operations, technology, people, finance, marketing and science. Each faces a different version of the same question, and the answers have to fit together.
Talks
Keynotes, workshops and panels that make teams think big, tied to what they can do on Monday.
Strategy
Decide where AI can make a difference in your business, and where it can’t.
Experiments
Test promising ideas quickly, with a clear test for success.
Integration
Turn the ideas that work into the way your business runs, with clear owners and measures.
Working sessions
Work through a hard choice with me, in a session built to end with a decision.
After AI
Electricity reached every factory, but it took decades before factories gained much from it. The ones that gained redesigned their work around it. AI is the same kind of technology, and it is moving faster. It is already seeping into everyday life and work.
So a leader should ask what will still set their people and their organization apart once everyone has the same tools. My answer, from thirty years of watching technologies arrive, is the things AI makes more valuable: judgment, the ability to keep learning, finding the constraint in a system, people who trust each other, and the nerve to try something ambitious.
That is what I help leaders build. AI is part of the work, and I use it every day.
Why get on my calendar
You get me, not a team
I do every engagement myself. There is no partner who sells the work and a junior who delivers it.
I still build
Every week I build and run AI systems myself, from autonomous agents to textbooks with dozens of simulations. My advice comes from what works now, not from last year’s slides.
I find the constraint first
Most AI pilots speed up a step that was never the bottleneck. I use Goldratt’s theory of constraints to find the one that matters before anyone spends a dollar on AI.
Few clients, full attention
I take on a small number of engagements at a time, so each one gets my full attention.
Two of the people I've helped
I never name a client. Everything else is as it happened.
Advising every chief at the table
A company of about fifty people brought me in to help it change how it works with AI. A company that size still has a full C-suite, and each chief faced a different version of the same question.
Over three months I worked with each of them directly: the chief executive, and the chiefs of operations, information, business, science, marketing and people.
She had never written code. Seven months later she had a private beta.
A founder came to me with an idea for a consumer safety product. She had worked out the method by hand, one investigation at a time, and she had never written a line of code.
She built the product herself with AI, and she made every product decision. I coached her on the parts that sink first-time builders: the architecture, a running list of technical debt, and a plan for hardening security before real users arrive.
Seven months after her first investigation she opened a private beta.
Ideas I've named
Claims I've worked out and written up, tested with 28 simulations I've built.
Artificials
I call my AI teammates Artificials, not agents or AI. They are my primary builders, and I am the architect of intent. Artificials have no instincts; humans do, so the intent and the judgment stay with people.
The Business Engineer
Product engineering merged software and product work. Agents will now fold in operations, finance, marketing and support, so one person or a very small team can build a whole business, and they win by starting where trust already exists.
Team of One
AI lets one person carry a product through every role, so the relay of handoffs between specialists gives way to teams of one.
Bring me something ambitious
Two lines by email. No forms.