The four sectors we work in are each mid-way through a structural change that rewards those who move before the movement is obvious. These are working notes on how we read it.
Technology The constraint has moved from capacity to judgment. +
The cost of building software has fallen further in the past three years than in the two decades before them. Work that once required departments is now undertaken by small, well-directed teams — and the scarcity in the market has shifted accordingly, from the ability to build to knowing what is worth building.
AI sits at the centre of this, though not in the way the headlines suggest. The durable advantage is not in adopting the tools — everyone has them — but in the discipline of applying them where they change the economics of a product rather than the appearance of one.
Organisations that recognise this early will compound quietly. Those that continue to measure themselves by the size of their engineering effort will find the metric working against them.
Tech Investment When information advantages compress, judgment is what remains. +
Research across technology markets and the tech investment landscape is being restructured. Work that once occupied analysts for weeks — collation, comparison, first-draft synthesis — is increasingly completed in hours, and the informational edge that justified entire teams is compressing toward zero.
AI-driven research automation is the proximate cause, and it is arriving unevenly: the same instruments are available to a two-person fund and to a bank. What differentiates outcomes is no longer access to analysis, but the willingness to reorganise around it.
What does not compress is judgment: knowing which questions matter, and acting before the answer is obvious. Firms that reorganise around this distinction will look unusually decisive to everyone who has not.
Market Research From periodic study to continuous sensing. +
Market research is moving from the periodic report to the continuous instrument. A study commissioned quarterly describes a world that has already changed; the organisations pulling ahead treat sensing as infrastructure rather than as a project.
The tooling shift behind this is familiar — automated collection, synthesis at scale — but the organisational shift is not. Research stops being a function that is commissioned and becomes a capability that is inhabited.
This changes what good research looks like — narrower questions, asked more often, answered faster. It rewards those who build the habit early.
Healthcare Patients have begun to behave as consumers. +
Cost pressure and capacity constraints are pushing patients to look beyond their own systems — across regions and across borders — for care that is faster, more affordable, or simply available. The demand has existed for years; what has changed is that patients now act on it.
The barrier has never been demand; it is follow-through — records that do not travel, pricing that conceals, aftercare that ends at the airport. Each of these frictions is now solvable at a cost that was not possible five years ago.
The organisations that matter in this shift will be those that make cross-border care coherent — coordinating providers, logistics, and trust — rather than those that merely advertise destinations.