By Shailesh Haribhakti & Anil Nair, Haribhakti is an independent director on many boards. Nair is Founder, ThinkStreet
Humanity needs abundance, not scarcity. We thrive when there’s a safety net of abundance, while scarcity unleashes survivalist friction. This is accentuated with brutal clarity in times of conflict, when even surpluses shrink, and food reserves, energy, and medical supplies plunge into deficits.
Digital utopia is about humanity entering a new civilisational phase, of abundance, powered by two mutually reinforcing streams of progress: consumer AI which is increasingly becoming intuitive, multi-modal, and deeply personal; and enterprise AI which is becoming more autonomous, agentic, and significantly transformative in terms of productivity.
A global geopolitical scramble is on, for the ultimate force multiplier that will change the future of nations. Unlike Moore’s law that governed hardware for decades, laws governing scale models are being rewritten every day, defying economic cycles. Beneath the noise, a profound truth is emerging—Digital utopia is not a fantasy, it’s under construction.
Consumer models are conversational, context-aware, and collaborative, capable of synthesis, reasoning, creation, and execution, armed with memory and multimedia, proficient at multiplexing across tasks, leveraging tools, and progressive product improvement. Every interaction is like contact with living intelligence.
Enterprise AI is moving from copilots to co-working, assistance to agency, prompts to workflows, and from dashboards to decisioning. The enterprise stack is more agentic, API-linked, auditable, and economically measurable, progressing from being task-driven to becoming autonomous. This digital utopia is being forged in competitive terrain. There are many battles being fought simultaneously. Open-source vs closed, large vs specialised models, application layer vs infrastructure layer, cloud vs edge, speed vs safety, and scale vs depth, among others.
Together, a civilisation is accelerating, testing AI, and vice versa.
Tectonic shifts in consumer and enterprise AI
The static age is behind us. We are entering an age of living systems that grow. The invisible plumbing is quietly improving through use, feedback, and recursive learning loops.
In consumer AI, a revolution is underway, with the shift from building massive, raw libraries of accumulated human knowledge, to refining what’s there, enabling effective utilisation. This includes tailored bots that could run internal simulations before answering queries, making intelligence feel embodied, elevating the experience beyond retrieval, ascribable to next-level orchestration.
In enterprise AI, agentic AI will do to organisational work what spreadsheets did to arithmetic. The training of models is now tuned for inference at a pragmatic scale, and domain-specific models are replacing general-purpose models. Agentic workflows are turning AI into digital employees, capable of end-to-end efficient execution across operational areas. Orchestration frameworks are maturing, as agent swarms move from demos to deployment and use cases multiply—in coding, customer experience and services, research, workflow automation, and compliance. Enterprise players are fighting for workflow ownership, developer mindshare, and credibility vis-à-vis security and trust, in a battleground where code generation, cyber defence, service operations, and knowledge workflows are the primary elements. It’s as if “default status” is the sought-after prize.
Productivity is rising at a breathtaking pace. What we’re seeing is unprecedented acceleration in individual productivity, compression of cycle times, a reduction in costs associated with coordination, faster experimentation, the democratisation of capability, and large firms behaving with start-up speed. It’s also about the new triad: agents for speed, memory, coordination, search, execution, and continuous optimisation; robots for physical precision, endurance, safety, and embodied action; and humans for ethics, judgement, trust, imagination, and purpose. Teams of the future will all include digital colleagues. Consequently, we will see lower friction in daily life, new creative expression, and cheaper and faster services in healthcare, education, finance, mobility, and governance.
We stand at the gates of a new world, in which intelligence is not scarce, where consumers will experience magic every day, where enterprises become living systems—in a workforce comprising humans, agents, and robots. Digital utopia will not remain an aspiration, but an operating system of a better civilisation. However, what is not guaranteed by technology must be designed by society.
A utopia designed by society
As the cost of intelligence plunges, and traditional organisational structures get dismantled, traditional mechanisms to distribute surpluses will get emasculated too. Disintermediation will happen at an unprecedented scale, with brokers, junior analysts, paralegals, and mid-level managers being among the many displaced.
Various reports, including Citrini Research, Anthropic’s “Labor market impacts of AI” and WEF, have discussed multiple facets of this. It emerges that jobs involving digitisation are at greater risk, compared with those which predominantly involve manual labour, like agriculture, delivery, plumbing or construction. WEF’s “Future of Jobs Report 2025” actually projects that between 2025 and 2030, 92 million jobs will be displaced, while 170 million new jobs will be created.
Digital transformation must thus be a conscious decision, designed by society rather than society becoming a victim. We have some imperatives and many choices.
We have to unleash a reskilling revolution, as the vast majority risks redundancy without being trained to perform projected jobs on offer. What’s more, reinforcing core human skills including analytical thinking, curiosity, resilience, social influence, cognitive skills, collaboration, and environmental stewardship is an imperative.
Equally, the entrepreneurial wave needs added encouragement as it is a very powerful vehicle for wealth distribution. “Ease of entrepreneurship” is critical to “ease of doing business”.
We tax human income. Instead, compute, data, and algorithmic output could be taxed. Corporates too, like before.
When the shift is complete, healthcare, energy, transportation, and education could become human rights. Universal basic income too.
AI-led farms could provide food, 3D housing could provide shelter, and AI-driven solar farms could provide limitless energy.
In essence, we’ve spent centuries defining human worth by what we do. A new post-utility social contract will emerge—sooner than we think.