Opinion
The end of the manual company
"Entrepreneurship will become a way of life rather than a profession or a cool title," writes Tamir Magen, co-founder and CEO of Spiritt. ".The AI revolution will turn all of us into entrepreneurs."
Humans adapt remarkably well. It's one reason the company feels like it has always been here. It hasn't. The company is a technology, just as much as the computer is.
Before it, enterprise meant people: a merchant, a guild master, a family like the Medici. Trade voyages were funded one at a time and dissolved when the ships came home. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company changed that with permanent capital, shares anyone could buy, and a venture built to outlive its founders. The company was invented for ambitious people with a vision, to gather resources around it and scale it, with other people as its working hands. Generations were trained to be those hands.
Scale needed a second technology: management. Daniel McCallum drew one of the first org charts to run the Erie Railroad. Frederick Taylor systematized work, and Peter Drucker turned management into a discipline. Management is to the company what an operating system is to a computer.
Today a technological revolution threatens both layers at once. What happens when a new digital worker is far better at being the working hands? And what happens when those hands no longer need management as their operating system, because they communicate with us and with each other orders of magnitude better? The model breaks. We won't get a faster company. We'll get a different invention. Not a faster horse, a car. Not a better radio, television. Not a faster company, a self-driving one.
The shift has started, and it looks like chaos. Agents live in chat windows, on laptops and in one-off scripts, spread across dozens of accounts, models and tools, holding whatever credentials someone handed them. Nobody decided what they can touch, and nobody can see what they did. That chaos is the signal. Big revolutions start from the bottom, with people voting with their feet.
We've seen this before. In the early 1980s employees smuggled PCs into the office, listing them on procurement forms as typewriters or even desks, and a Washington Post piece warned of "shadow" data departments hidden from management. Spreadsheets followed, full of unaudited formulas only their author understood. Email broke the mailroom's control over who could reach whom, and some companies considered requiring a manager's approval to send one.
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Each time, the winners didn't ban the chaos. Andy Grove's formula was "let chaos reign, then rein in chaos." They built a habitat: access rules, version history, permissions. Not a cage, and not the wild. Free range. That's the phase we're entering now: accepting that we can't fight the change, and building the infrastructure for it to thrive without killing the bottom-up ownership that drives it.
It starts with infrastructure deployed top-down across the organization that gives maximum freedom bottom-up. It should let new agents emerge anywhere and act autonomously, without compromising budgets or access to sensitive systems. It should get smarter from every experiment in every department through accumulated context. It should free the organization from chasing tools by keeping it at the frontier by default. It should adapt to each department. Above all, over time it should cut the cables one by one, until the company drives itself.
In my experience, two distinct approaches to this transformation are already emerging. Startups run on the new operating system from day one, and already look close to that picture. Large enterprises work on two tracks: organization-wide infrastructure that enables experiments and accumulates context passively, alongside concrete use cases with clear metrics that balance today's business with the one they are becoming. Sales and support are being handed to agents, marketing is turning fully agentic, and in some finance departments agents already run a large share of the work. The list keeps growing.
When the company drives itself, you return to what it was founded for: its vision, its understanding of the customer and the problem, where it should expand, which new ideas to research. A business is a thesis about a changing world, and it has to be tested constantly.
I believe entrepreneurship will become a way of life rather than a profession or a cool title. The last century turned most of us into knowledge workers, once the privilege of a few. The AI revolution will turn all of us into entrepreneurs.
Tamir Magen is co-founder and CEO of Spiritt.
