Beyond AI: Creating Advantages Through Organisational Intelligences
By Prof Jefferson Yu-Jen Chen
Beyond Automating the Existing Process
A customer places an order. Easy.
Except it arrives as a PDF, spreadsheet, email, or Whatsapp using descriptions that do not quite match the supplier’s catalogue. Extracting the information is straightforward. Understanding what the customer actually wants is not.
That is the problem tackled by South African technology company Weeva. Much of the missing intelligence sits inside experienced employees who simply know what particular customers mean.
Weeva initially pursued broader workflow automation, but market demand pulled it towards order automation. The interesting part is not simply its agentic AI suite working in the background. It is the partnership between Weeva, its clients and its clients’ customers.
AI agents perform tasks behind the scenes. Humans step in when judgement is required. Humans keep AI in check. Controls and auditability also help keep humans in check.
Customer knowledge, employee experience and artificial intelligence work together. Individual knowledge becomes various scalable organisational intelligences.
Redesign Business and Operating Models Around Intelligences
Now consider China’s Ping An.
It began in 1988 as a property and casualty insurer. Today it spans financial services, healthcare and senior care, supported by an ecosystem including more than 37,000 hospitals.
Ping An is moving towards an interface where customers simply express what they want. Behind it, AI recognises intent, coordinates systems and executes services. Its Express Service connects more than 300 services across 40 common scenarios.
This is not an insurer installing a few clever chatbots. Financial expertise, healthcare knowledge, customer relationships, data, AI and external partners are being connected differently. Processes change. Organisational boundaries shift. Even “What business are we actually in?” becomes more interesting.
Two very different companies reveal the same point. The real prize is not AI. It is what happens when organisations harness, connect and leverage their intelligences differently.
AI Is Becoming the Price of Entry
Organisations that fail to use AI will increasingly struggle to compete. But using AI does not guarantee they will win when everyone has access to it. As powerful models, agents and tools become more accessible, AI increasingly becomes the price of entry, not the prize.
Yet boards ask, “What progress are we making on AI?” CEOs ask, “Are our employees using AI?” Dashboards count licences, users, prompts, agents, pilots and use cases. A few efficiencies improve, and everyone looks pleased.
But the question is not, “How much AI are we using?” It is: “What advantages are our organisational intelligences enabling us to create?”
Organisational Intelligences Create Advantages
This concept of organisational intelligences has a longer history than today’s AI excitement.
Japanese management scholar Takehiko Matsuda was writing about organisational intelligence by the late 1980s and early 1990s, decades before large language models started popping up like mushrooms after rain. He considered how human and machine intelligence could be coordinated to enhance an organisation’s intellectual problem-handling capability.
Today, organisations can cultivate multiple intelligences: memory, perceptual, relational, judgement, strategic, execution, innovation, adaptation and learning.
AI can strengthen many. It does not replace them and, used badly, could weaken some. Combined synergistically, these intelligences can produce three forms of advantage.
Collective Human Advantage comes from expertise, creativity, relationships, judgement, accountability and trust. Collective AI Advantage comes from speed, scale, analysis, prediction, memory and consistency. A poorly orchestrated swarm of AI agents can cause more harm than advantage. Hybrid Collective Advantage emerges when human and artificial capabilities combine to achieve what neither could do as effectively alone.
These advantages do not magically appear because employees have Copilot licences and AI literacy training. Critical thinking, innovation mechanisms, renewed leadership practices, governance, risk and compliance, and innovative interdepartmental collaboration must also be cultivated intentionally.
From AI Adoption to Ethical Unique Competitiveness
Look again at Weeva and Ping An.
Weeva contributes to its clients’ ethical unique competitiveness by connecting customer knowledge, employee judgement, organisational processes and AI agents. Humans provide context and resolve ambiguity. AI provides speed, memory, learning and scale.
Ping An does this at greater scale. Financial and healthcare expertise combine with customer knowledge, data, AI and partners. Its business and operating models connect intelligences previously sitting apart.
Technology matters enormously. But the architecture and interconnectedness of organisational intelligences determine what advantages an organisation can create.
The leadership challenge is to cultivate organisational intelligences that produce the three advantages, then combine them in the right rhythms and ratios to build “ethical unique competitiveness”. That is rather different from “AI adoption”.
Leading the Intelligent Organisation
Start with competitiveness, not technology.
What valuable advantages are we trying to create? Why should customers choose us? What should we become unusually good at? Can we do it in ethically defensible ways?
Then work backwards.
Which organisational intelligences does that require? Which are strong, weak or trapped inside employees, customers, partners, documents and disconnected systems?
Examine the rhythms and ratios between humans, AI, and human-AI combinations. Where should humans lead? Where should AI lead? Where should they challenge each other? Where does combining them create something genuinely better?
Redesign processes, decision rights, partnerships and value chains accordingly. Humans should catch AI’s errors, contextual failures and ethical problems. AI can expose human inconsistency, forgotten information, weak assumptions and that wonderfully expensive corporate habit: “We’ve always done it this way.”
Another trap is having a huge appetite for AI but weak mechanisms for innovation. More technology poured into the same thinking, structures and incentives will not magically produce new advantages.
Measure revenues from new business models, customer value, employee sentiment and societal contributions. Not merely licences, prompts and use cases.
Not using AI will increasingly be a good way to lose. But using AI without creating Collective Human, Collective AI and Hybrid Collective Advantages is hardly a strategy for winning.
So, boards and executives, it is time to ask: “Are we cultivating the right organisational intelligences, orchestrating them into the right advantages, and continually reinventing what our organisation can uniquely and ethically do better than others?”
That is the essence of leading an intelligent organisation.
Prof Jefferson Yu-Jen Chen is an associate professor and full-time Faculty member of the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria. Apart from coaching, delivering speeches and advising leaders across different sectors in his consulting capacity, Prof Chen is also involved in designing and lecturing on various customised executive education modules. Many of these modules aim at fostering innovative leaders, strategists, and consultants.
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