Frameworks · AI Don't Fix Stupidity

The Six Shifts

The Six Shifts define what "AI-first" means in practice: six transformations that together create a new way of working, each building toward the endgame: a Digital Coworker for every employee, an industry-specific, memory-equipped AI with access to enterprise tools and autonomous capability within governed boundaries.

The Six Shifts describe the target operating model of an AI-first organisation. Each shift is a movement from an old way of working to a new one. The book insists they are "interdependent, not sequential": you advance all six together, at different speeds in different teams, and the effort collapses if one is neglected. Which shift you talk about first is a communication choice, not a delivery order. Each shift has one metric that shows it is real, for example time from question to answer for Shift 1, and the human-to-AI ratio per function for Shift 6. The book singles out Shifts 3 and 4 as the most confused: Shift 3 is the intelligence, Shift 4 the plumbing, and Norvik's mid-year pricing crisis happened when the plumbing ran ahead of the intelligence.