I recently had a deeper conversation with a 2nd-generation owner preparing to take over his family’s manufacturing business. The previous generation never really bought into cloud or digital transformation. They stayed focused on the core business, preferred people talking to people, and never built a large technology team. Now he wants to change that In Chinese, there’s a phrase I kept thinking about after our conversation: 彎道超車 It means overtaking on a curve. You may have entered the turn behind, but when the road changes, you suddenly get a chance to take a better line. I started wondering whether AI could be exactly that kind of moment for companies that missed parts of the last wave. 3 reasons: 1) They can "build for AI agents" from day one They still need to digitize manual workflows, clean up data, and build the right infrastructure. But they don’t necessarily need to recreate the exact enterprise stack built over the last 10 years. A lot of BI tools and enterprise software were designed around people reading dashboards, downloading data, learning interfaces, and operating software themselves. Now the question can also be: How should this data be structured so an AI agent can understand it and help solve the actual business problem? That is a different starting point 2) Lean teams may actually be an advantage Traditional digital transformation often required multiple layers between the business problem and the data. Business analysts. Data analysts. Data scientists. Technology teams. Those roles won’t disappear, but the distance can get much shorter. A manufacturing expert may not need to become a data scientist just to investigate a production problem. Less translation. Fewer handoffs. Faster time to action. 3) There is less “learning the software” A lot of enterprise software required people to learn how the system wanted them to work. Learn the dashboard. Learn the query. Learn the interface. AI changes some of that. A manufacturing expert can increasingly describe a problem in the language they already use. The technology has to understand the business, not just the other way around. That doesn’t mean no upskilling is needed. But the adoption barrier can be much lower. If a company missed part of the cloud and digital transformation era, is that always a disadvantage? Or could AI give some of them a chance to take a better line through the next turn?
Maybe AI is that curve.