# The beginning of the beginning

Every great technological revolution gave companies time to reinvent themselves. This may be the first one that doesn't.

- Columnist: [Daniel Farias](https://ceoone.com.br/en/columnist/daniel-farias)
- Published: October 19, 2026
- Address: https://ceoone.com.br/en/article/the-beginning-of-the-beginning
- Em português: https://ceoone.com.br/artigo/o-principio-do-principio.md

![An old filament light bulb glowing on a dark wooden table, next to an unlit kerosene lamp](https://pub-b80e49b2737940b3ab5d3f20d0578192.r2.dev/artigos/o-principio-do-principio.webp)

Produced by AI

## Key points

- At every technological turning point there was room to invent, reinvent and maintain: Standard Oil swapped kerosene for gasoline, and wagon makers became automakers.
- The time to adapt shrank from decades to years and cycles; with AI, which went from answering to executing and accelerates its own evolution, there is no more room to spare.
- The author points to three fronts for companies: the customer, now fought over inside machine-generated answers; what not to automate; and people, for whom the scarce resource becomes judgment.

Around the 18th day of gestation, long before any heartbeat, the human embryo forms an inconspicuous structure called the neural plate. It doesn't think, doesn't feel, doesn't decide anything. It is just a sketch. But from it will come the brain, the spinal cord and, one day, consciousness. The heart only starts beating days later. Before pumping blood, life prepares the ground for thinking.

This is my first piece for CEO One and, for a technology professional, it would be impossible not to talk about the big news of the moment: artificial intelligence. Like every major turning point, it arrives surrounded by euphoria, exaggerated promises and fears in equal measure. It was like that with electricity, with the automobile, with the internet. The euphoria passes; the transformation stays. That's why I don't want to treat it as the topic everyone talks about at dinner. I want to talk about what it means for your business and for the next generation of ventures, and to show the questions most companies haven't even started asking. Because we are at the beginning of the beginning. And, for the first time, technology may be moving faster than companies can reinvent themselves.

## Let there be light

I propose looking at this from the point of view of people who do business, going back to a specific date. No, I'm not talking about the first day of Genesis, when there was light. I'm talking about September 3, 1882, the eve of electric power. That day, thousands of businesses were running as usual. Merchants opened their doors, contracts were signed, families built wealth. The world worked, and it worked by the light of a flame.

The next day, September 4, Thomas Edison switched on the first commercial power plant in the United States, in New York. And the future, which until then had seemed predictable, stopped being so.

Many business owners saw a great opportunity there. But I keep imagining the people who sold kerosene, who made oil lamps, who made a living selling candles. What did they think that morning? Probably: I'm finished.

Some did go under. But not all of them disappeared. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was already a powerhouse precisely because it sold kerosene to light homes all over the world. The light bulb threatened to wipe out its main product. And then something happened that no strategic plan would have predicted.

## The disruption that saved the disruption

Four years after Edison's plant, in 1886, Karl Benz patented the first automobile. With it, a liquid that refineries treated almost as waste gained value: gasoline. Standard Oil didn't need to abandon what it knew how to do, refining oil. It only needed to realize that the world would start wanting another product from the same oil. And it had time for that, because electricity took decades to take over industry and homes. When half of American homes finally got electric light, around 1925, gasoline had already overtaken kerosene as the refineries' main product about a decade earlier. Technology was slow to arrive, and planning could keep up with that pace.

The car, in turn, frightened other people: carters, coachmen, horse breeders, wagon makers. Many became drivers, mechanics, gas station attendants. Some went further. Studebaker made wagons and became an automaker. William Durant, at the head of the largest carriage factory in the United States, founded General Motors in 1908. It is no coincidence that a car's body is still called coachwork.

Then came the airplane, and the bus, train and shipping companies must have thought: now it's over. It wasn't. They are still here, each in its own space. And kerosene, which seemed to have no future left, became the basis of commercial aviation fuel.

By this point, the pattern is taking shape. At each of these milestones, there was room to invent, to reinvent and also to maintain, which is the path of those who knew how to keep doing well what they already did.

## Faster and faster

But there is one detail that changes everything: the time to adapt kept shrinking. Electric power took more than four decades to reach half of American homes. Television, less than ten years. The internet and the smartphone, about six years each. And, with each revolution, the interval between the arrival of the technology, the reinvention of those affected and the adaptation of the whole market also got shorter.

In the 1950s, television frightened those who thought they had the public's attention guaranteed. Movie theater owners saw their audiences shrink and responded with what TV didn't have: giant screens, color, surround sound, the experience of going out. Radio moved into the car and became a companion for music, news and soccer. Both adapted and are still around today. They had one to two decades to do it, less than Standard Oil, but still with room to spare.

In more than 30 years in this profession, I have seen a few of these eves up close. Computing came and digitized entire markets, and then the internet, which we rightly call the great revolution. Today I suspect the internet wasn't the brain. It was the spinal cord: the bundle that carries the signals, connects every part of the body and waits for a brain to make sense of it all.

In parallel, the cell phone ended up in everyone's pocket. In 2007, two things happened almost at once: a company that rented DVDs by mail started streaming movies over the internet, and the smartphone put the full internet in the palm of your hand. Netflix, without killing cinema or television, started setting the rules for both. In 2008, the app stores opened.

Around the same time, we started living inside social networks: Orkut won over Brazil, Facebook took over the world and, soon after, came Instagram. New professions emerged, such as digital marketers and influencers, and much of what we buy came to be decided by what we see on social media.

Even the way we talk changed. WhatsApp emptied out the phone call, and carriers started making their living selling data. For many people, calling without sending a message first has become almost rude, and young people today don't like talking on the phone the way my grandmother and I did. It wasn't just a market that changed. It was a habit.

The app, in turn, stopped being a program and became an economic entity. Today there are app drivers, app delivery workers and entire app companies. Uber didn't just create a transportation service, it created a profession. iFood, the Brazilian delivery app, didn't just create an ordering channel, it helped create restaurants that exist only inside the app, with no dining room, no storefront, no tables. In a few years, professions that had no name came to support millions of families, and businesses that took decades to establish themselves had to remake themselves in a few planning cycles.

Decades, then years, then cycles.

## The 5 trillion dollar companies

Along the way, an online bookstore became the world's largest e-commerce power and, for those who don't connect the names, the largest cloud infrastructure provider on the planet: Amazon. Search engines became business engines, and ranking well on Google became decisive for any company.

And that apple company, which made computers, lost the war to the PC and nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s, was the same one that popularized the smartphone and ushered in the age of apps. On October 14, 2026, Apple closed the trading session worth 5 trillion dollars.

Meanwhile, a graphics card maker beloved by gamers discovered that the chips that drew virtual worlds were ideal for training artificial intelligence. Nvidia went from being the favorite brand of people who played games to an indispensable supplier for people who develop artificial intelligence. In October 2025, it became the first company in history to be worth 5 trillion dollars.

The only two companies to reach that value are precisely the one that ushered in the age of apps and the one that became the foundation of artificial intelligence. Together, Apple and Nvidia are worth almost four times everything Brazil produces in a year.

A little over a century ago, Rockefeller built what many consider the largest fortune in modern history by selling kerosene. Today, the planet's wealth no longer comes from oil. On its own, Nvidia is worth more than all the oil companies on the American stock exchange combined. Fortunes still come out of the ground. Only now they come out of silicon.

## Increasing speed and compressing time

Artificial intelligence wasn't born yesterday. The term was coined in 1956, and for decades there have been algorithms that read license plates, recognize numbers on bank checks and identify patterns in data. It has been taking shape slowly, like an embryo forming in silence.

But the revolution felt in the day-to-day of business has a date. On November 30, 2022, for the first time, an ordinary person at home could talk to an artificial intelligence capable of writing, summarizing, explaining and reasoning. In about two months, it had 100 million users. That was less than four years ago. Only four years.

And in that very short interval, something emerged that changes the nature of this revolution: self-acceleration. In the first years, AI answered. In the last one, it started to execute: it writes code, operates systems, carries out entire tasks and takes part in building the next versions of itself. Models already train other models, generate the data their successors learn from and help improve the very processes that created them. It is a technology that accelerates its own evolution. That is why the last year did what the previous three didn't, and the next one is likely to do what none of them did.

The point that tends to get lost in the enthusiasm is that artificial intelligence is not the end. It is the means. It is the brain in formation, and every brain exists to command something.

## The 20,000 dollar butler

*The cartoon future is now on pre-order.*

In industry, this body has existed for years. Robotic arms weld car bodies, sort orders and inspect parts, increasingly guided by artificial intelligence that sees, decides and corrects in real time.

The next step is domestic. In 1962, the Jetson family had Rosie, a robot maid, at home, and that was pure cartoon fantasy. Six decades later, she became a product: in October 2025, pre-orders opened for the first humanoid designed for home use, for 20,000 dollars or about 500 dollars a month, with deliveries planned for 2026. It is still clumsy. For tasks it doesn't know, like folding clothes, it depends on a specialist who supervises it remotely. It has neither a clearly defined function nor an efficiency that justifies the price.

But what stands out is not what this robot can do today. It's the fact that someone is already willing to pay for it. It was like that with Alexa, which in 2014 only gave the weather forecast and played music. A market starts to form even before the product finds its definitive use.

## What your company needs to look at

The most common mistake today is to start with the tool, not the problem. The fashionable question, "where can I fit artificial intelligence into my process?", almost always leads to projects that produce no results. AI makes sense when it solves a real problem, expands what the company already does well or makes possible what used to be impossible. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn't in improving what we do today, but in discovering what we'll do tomorrow. And there are at least three places worth looking at carefully.

The first is the customer. For decades, companies competed for people's attention: the shop window, the brand, the service, a friend's recommendation. That competition has already started to change. Google's AI Mode searches, compares and recommends before the consumer visits any website, and the fight to appear at the top of search now happens inside a machine-generated answer. The question is no longer just "does my customer like me?" but also "does the machine that decides for them find me, understand me and choose me?"

The second is what not to automate. In a world where almost everything can be done by machines, what remains human tends to become rarer, and what is rare tends to be worth more. The sommelier who knows the customer's taste, the salesperson who remembers the family's name, the chef who comes out of the kitchen to greet the table. For many businesses, especially those built on relationships, high-end retail and fine dining, the greatest asset may be precisely what AI should not replace.

The third is people. When the machine starts to execute, the scarce resource is no longer labor but judgment: knowing what to ask for, evaluating what was delivered, deciding what to do with it. Those who perform repetitive tasks today can move on to operating more powerful tools, and a team of the same size gains much greater productive capacity. It isn't about replacing people, but about giving them tools equal to the task, to make the most of what they know how to do.

And some say, quite legitimately: we're good without artificial intelligence, and putting it at the center of the business would ruin what brought us here. That may be true. But staying in the market has never been the same as being a settled company. Stability isn't standing still. It's having balance, and balance requires movement.

## The eve

Picture the scene. A personal artificial intelligence assistant takes care of your television, your car, your apps, your computer. The refrigerator notices the milk has run out and lets you know. The assistant chooses the brand, compares the price, places the order. And the one who receives the delivery at the door is your humanoid, your Rosie.

Is this our Jetsons future? Nobody knows where the heart of this technology is, or when it will start beating, and be wary of anyone who says they do. But it is possible to read the path.

It all starts with questions every company needs to ask itself: what are we truly good at, that brought our company this far? And, from here on, what do we do well that will take it further? Without artificial intelligence, because that's where our essence lies? With it, because it makes us better at what we already do? Or carefully, because it could make worse precisely what sets us apart?

Those who went through the previous eves didn't get this answer ready-made. They went back to the drawing board, looked at what they did best and redesigned themselves, often with decades to spare. This time, there is nothing to spare. Artificial intelligence doesn't wait for a fiscal year of planning, and what a company puts off today may decide its position in the market tomorrow.

Answering these questions requires two skills that are rarely at the same table: deep knowledge of the business and a real understanding of technology. It is about the meeting of the two that I will write here, column after column.

The eve was yesterday.

CEO ONE · https://ceoone.com.br