“Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared,” Bill Gates said in 1999, the year OpenAI CEO Sam Altman turned 14. “A company’s values and reward system should reflect that idea.” Proud MBA holders the world over are well aware of the predilection for the opposite—what the academics Catherine Connelly and David Zweig christened “knowledge hiding”. In a business, what you know that others don’t can still confer advantages and hoarding information can be seen as a skill. Will such behaviors survive contact with the AI era?
Not according to Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder of the digital media agency, S4 Capital. Before that, as founder of the media giant, WPP, he became the longest serving CEO of a FTSE100 company, clocking in at a total of 33 years. Being in the ninth decade of life, Sorrell (81) confers a certain calmness and long-term view when it comes to technological change and its effects on business. Sorrell remembers a time when faxes seemed pretty neat.
“I think the most fascinating area [in the development of AI] is what I call democratization of knowledge,” Sorrell tells me. “AI flattens the organization. In a multi-branded, multi-vertical, multi-siloed company, people develop power bases by controlling information. If information is available to everybody, if you give them access, it changes the dynamics. Good people who share will be the real kings and queens.”
