The world as we know it is ending, but the world itself is not.
The organizational forms of the 20th century — optimized for a world of high transaction costs, information asymmetry, and human-speed coordination — are dissolving into something we can barely comprehend, let alone name.
We are not witnessing the future of the company. We are witnessing the future of what comes after it. And the sooner we begin to grapple with that question honestly, with clear eyes and open hearts, the better prepared we’ll be for what’s already arriving.
AI agents are not optimizing the corporation. They are dissolving the rationale for its existence.
In 1937, the economist Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize for his answer. Companies exist because coordinating labor under one roof is cheaper than doing it through the open market.
The corporation is an optimization engine — a way to aggregate and transform value through a series of steps and deliver it to a customer willing to pay.
That's it. That's the point. To coordinate activity in a way that produces value. Not to ensure compliance. Not risk management. Not audit or reporting or security or maintenance. Those are the necessary overheads of the form, not its purpose.
Complex systems generate layer upon layer of administrative infrastructure to manage problems created by earlier layers, until the cost of complexity itself outweighs the benefits (per Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies).
We have confused the scaffolding for the building. And now the scaffolding is being eaten.
If agents can aggregate and transform value for a customer without the overhead of a compliance team, without enterprise software, without organizational maintenance — why do you need the organization?
Why do you care about SaaS? Why do you care about compliance? For a growing number of value chains, the honest answer is: you don't.
Coase's logic runs in reverse: if transaction costs approach zero, the firm has no reason to exist in its current form. And I don't know what replaces it.
The agentic infrastructure, the autonomous coordination layers — these are not tools for making better companies. They are the foundation of something other than the corporation as we know it.
The question isn't how to optimize the firm. The question is whether the firm survives at all.
And that is the thread I want to pull on.