Special thanks to
Jan Morath, who spends hours discussing these topics with me.

Not a day goes by without me asking myself this question: what impact can artificial intelligence have on our social structures? It’s a huge question, I know. So I shrink it down, bring it to ground level, run it through the filter of my daily experience: what impact does AI have on companies?

Let me say something upfront. I’m not special. I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t have a magic wand. I only have questions. And in the best-case scenario — the best-case scenario for this blog — you’ll walk away with more questions than you came in with.

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I’m part of a team where AI has moved in heavily. All the code is generated by artificial intelligence. There are two of us: me, a software architect, and a colleague, the lead UX designer. Around us there are dozens of people — or as we like to say these days, stakeholders. But the productive core, the part that turns ideas into working code, is the two of us and a machine.

That alone should be enough to keep anyone who runs an organization up at night. But before I get to why, I want to tell a story.

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A few years ago I went to visit an old friend, a business partner from many lifetimes ago. He sells industrial 3D printers. He showed me what they can do, and I was fascinated. At some point I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: why don’t all manufacturing companies use them?

I was expecting the answer that would make me feel better — the comfortable one, the one that confirms what we already think: ignorance. Resistance to change. The kind of answer that lets you go home with the reassuring feeling that the world would be a better place if everyone were as enlightened as we are.

The answer was far more complex.

My friend picked up a small part — a kind of connecting rod, a mechanical arm. “See this piece?” he said. “A machine shop makes it out of metal because that’s what they know how to work with. But it doesn’t have to be metal. It could be plastic: cheaper, easier to produce, lighter.”

So far so good. That’s how progress works, right? You find a better material, you use it, everybody wins.

But then the story took a turn I wasn’t expecting.

If the company replaced that connecting rod with a plastic one, the motors would become oversized. They’d need to be swapped out for smaller, cheaper, lighter motors. And that would be a cascading change. Component by component, the entire machine would need to be redesigned. But that machine is sold to other companies, who in turn would face the same dilemma: downsize everything? And every redesigned component needs to be tested, the entire production line changes, their own customers are forced to change as well.

The connecting rod stays metal. The 3D printers don’t get purchased. Not because the technology doesn’t work, but because it works too well. Its potential is so radical that adopting it would mean questioning everything around it. One small connecting rod, like a butterfly effect.

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Now, you can see where I’m going with this.

Take a software company. Every element of its structure has been built around one fundamental assumption: code is written over weeks, months, and years by teams of people. Organizational structures, middle management, hiring processes, budgets, performance metrics, client contracts — everything orbits around that premise. It’s not a peripheral detail. It’s the main product. It’s the very heart of the business model.

With AI, software development happens in minutes or hours.

What happens to everything around it?

I don’t have the answer. But the question strikes me as the most important one a technology company can ask itself today. Because we’re not talking about an incremental improvement, a new tool that makes programmers a little faster. We’re talking about an order-of-magnitude change: ten times faster, a hundred times faster. And when something changes by an order of magnitude, it’s no longer the same phenomenon. A river flowing ten times faster isn’t a faster river. It’s a flood.

The same thing holds, more or less, across all companies. What happens when someone can do their job at a hundred times the speed? What becomes of the structure built around the previous pace? The managers who oversaw teams of ten, the approval processes designed to slow down human error, the budgets calibrated to predictable delivery timelines?

It’s the plastic connecting rod, all over again. But this time it’s not a single mechanical component. It’s cognitive work itself — the raw material around which we’ve built the entire knowledge economy.

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And here I arrive at the analogy in the title, which is deliberately provocative.

AI inside a traditional organization grows like a foreign body. Something expanding at a different speed from everything around it. Something that the company’s immune system — its procedures, its hierarchies, its habits — perceives as a threat. The temptation is to contain it, slow it down, domesticate it, make it look compatible with existing structures.

But is it cancer? Or is it a child growing in a mother’s womb?

Because the difference isn’t in the growth itself. Both grow, both redefine the body that hosts them, both transform it irreversibly. The difference lies in what comes after. Cancer destroys its host. A child passes through it, and on the other side there is something new.

I don’t know which one it is. I don’t think anyone does, not yet. But I know the answer will depend, at least in part, on how we choose to treat this growth. If we fight it like an infection, trying to preserve the body as it is at all costs, we risk killing the organism in the attempt to save it. If we ignore it entirely, we risk letting it expand without control and without direction.

Maybe — and here I return to my premise: I only have questions — maybe the answer is in the connecting rod. Not in rejecting it, but in understanding that replacing it means rethinking everything. And that rethinking everything is not a catastrophe. It’s a pregnancy. Painful, transformative, full of risk. But on the other side, if things go well, there is life.

The question is whether we’re ready to let it grow.