Asymmetrical Interconnectedness.
Image: MidJourney
There is another AI we need to be thinking of as we plan our futures.
Asymmetrical Interconnectedness.
Scale and size while important are not enough and often can be a disadvantage.
Our societies may be polarized and our leaders more parochial but the world is growing more interconnected.
No strategy can remain relevant if it does not align with or is prepared to defend against competitors who leverage asymmetrical interconnectedness.
Here are three examples of this “other AI”:
1) The Middle East: Iran’s conventional army has been decimated but that has not prevented a combination of their drone and speedboat forces from creating havoc in Strait of Hormuz and also attacking key refineries of oil and data in the UAE.
With 20 percent of the world’s oil and much more of LNG and fertilizer supplies going through the strait it is a chokehold which is causing havoc world wide.
Modern asymmetrical weapons combined with critical connection points can offset armadas of scaled weapons.
The ripple effects have just begun to spread. For instance, the need to allocate more funds on defense and repair due the war might lead to less capital investment in AI data centers from Saudi and UAE wealth funds which will slow the global AI build out.
A poetic reminder of our interconnectedness…
2) The Rise of Influencers: Google Search in AI Mode responding to the question “Please compare Mr Beast vs the Super Bowl”.
“The comparison between MrBeast and the Super Bowl depends on how you measure “traffic”—whether it is a single video’s views, total monthly reach, or instantaneous viewership. [1]
While the Super Bowl remains the largest single-day televised event in the U.S., reaching roughly 124.9 million viewers in 2026, MrBeast generates significantly higher total monthly traffic, with his videos averaging 3 billion views per month across his entire catalog as of 2025. [1, 2]
Viewership Comparison
Single Video vs. Single Game: A new MrBeast video often racks up 50 to 100 million views within the first 48 to 72 hours. His “Squid Game” video has surpassed 354 million views, more than double the audience of any single Super Bowl telecast.
First-Day Traffic: MrBeast holds records for the most-viewed non-music video in 24 hours, reaching 52 million views in a single day.
Total Reach: The Super Bowl’s reach is almost entirely American. MrBeast, however, has a global audience, claiming a unique monthly reach of roughly 1 billion people across all platforms. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]”
Today individuals scale faster than most television networks using hyper connected platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Companies like Unilever have over 300,000 influencers aligned with their brand.
From a recent Forbes Article:
Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez recently disclosed that the company has scaled its direct creator network from 10,000 to 300,000 in just two years, with roughly half of its digital budget now flowing into social-first, creator-led content.
Most of the coverage framed it as a marketing milestone, perhaps the death knell for agencies. Actually, it is something bigger: a structural signal that the creator economy has crossed from a content industry into an acquirable asset class.
The underlying numbers support the shift. Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy will reach $480 billion by 2027, up from roughly $250 billion today. The 2026 Creator Economy M&A Report from Quartermast Advisors documented 81 closed transactions in 2025, a 17.4% year-over-year increase, led by landmark deals including Bending Spoons’ $1.38 billion acquisition of Vimeo,Later’s $250 million purchase of Mavely, and Publicis Groupe’s $175 million acquisition of Captiv8.
A case can be made that Influencers in addition to building their own personal brands and helping companies market their brands are also the true builders of new brands which they then sell to the larger marketers.
Increasingly large companies but have outsourced innovation and cultural resonance to the individual.
Here is a Anthropic Claude chart to the query: “I would like a chart to show the value of recent acquisitions by big companies of influencer brands”
3) New competitors leveraging asymmetry and connectedness to change the rules of the game on many established competitors.
Today, AI allows companies to plug into metered intelligence and capabilities irrespective of their size. While it takes billions to be a Hyper-scaler or a Foundational LLM model builder, it requires a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for any company or individual to leverage these amazing technologies. They then marry this technology with connection platforms such as Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, YouTube, Fiver, Upwork and others to access supply, demand, talent, expertise and capital globally and in real time.
There are some that believe we will one day have a one HUMAN person billion dollar company. ( These companies may have lots of lots of AGENTIC employees).
The chart below shows new companies are leveraging Asymmetric Interconnectedness to drive millions of dollars of revenue per employee. This is matching and exceeding the revenue per employee number of companies like Google and Meta ( in the advertising services business the number is less $200,000 in the US for comparison.)
Implications
Rethink Scale: Scale can still be an advantage in some areas but a disadvantage in others. Today most individuals have better AI capability at home than they have at work. A home they use multiple models and the latest versions of each versus being limited to one pre-approved sand boxed version in the office.
Look at the edge and look below: The next competitors will come from outside one’s categories such as Waymo, Tesla and Uber came from outside the Auto Industry or it will come from the slime which is below where most are looking. The future rarely comes from the heavens. It comes from the slime. Microsoft from MS-DOS when everyone was paying attention to IBM, Google from helping small advertisers who did not advertise to find customers when everyone was looking at the television networks and the Conde Nast and Time magazines of the world.
Question the status quo: First party data will continue to remain important it may matter less and be leveraged very differently in the future. This is because conversational interactions with AI agents and engines are better at revealing preferences and needs of people than todays interfaces of search, scrolling and streaming. Combine this depth of understanding with the ability to provide highly interactive and adaptive solutions or offers in real time and the entire interface of marketing is likely to change.
One Single Thing.
Howard Hawks once said that a good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.
Casablanca is a movie with at least 7 great scenes each resulting in a line that millions use every day including:
“Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By”.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
“ We will always have Paris”
“ Here’s looking at you kid”
“Round up the Usual Suspects”
“Louis, I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship”
“ Play the Marseille”
Casablanca is as relevant today as it was 85 years ago.
It is available globally on every platform ( usually with a subscription) or search for the quotes above and access some of the most famous scenes for free.
Casablanca remains my favorite movie and is ranked #63 in the BFI list of 250 best movies. Here is the BFI list…https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
Above is a trailer for Casablanca.
And here is “ Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By”