A Strategic Conversation on Velocity and Survival with Aditya Nair
The assumption that organizations have the luxury of changing gradually will likely the biggest casualty of the Age of AI. Organizations moving at incremental speed: careful, deliberate, and focused on preserving stability and continuity are on the verge of becoming obsolete. They just don’t know it yet.
Aditya Nair delivered this verdict during our conversation in Mumbai, not as provocation but as mechanical observation.
Based between India and the UK, with a background spanning journalism, communication, marketing, and enterprise AI deployment, Nair watches organizations face a simple equation: transformation velocity versus replacement velocity.
Can you change faster than your competitors can scale?
Can you abandon linear progression for discontinuous leaps before the market moves past you?
Can you shed status quo assumptions—about pace, about continuity, about having time to deliberate—before paralysis becomes fatal?
Most can’t.
Most won’t.
And the timeline for discovering which category you’re in has compressed to six to eighteen months.
Three forces are colliding—AI’s acceleration, demographic workforce shifts, and mounting pressure on hierarchical decision-making—and their convergence doesn’t modify existing paradigms.
It overthrows them.
Leadership models built on careful consensus. Business models built on predictable linear growth. Communication strategies built on incremental improvements in engagement scores and long-term retention. Organizational structures built on preserving what worked before.
All of that gets sorted: transform at velocity or disappear.
Our conversation kept returning to one question that defines this moment: Do the people inside organizations understand that gradualism is over? That transformation at this scale doesn’t reward the cautious, the incremental, or those who believe they’re entitled to adapt slowly?
The diagnosis Nair offers isn’t comfortable. But survival never is.
The Velocity Question
“Can the incumbent change before the startup gets velocity?” Nair asked. This isn’t rhetorical. It’s the defining question for every established organization is confronting at this moment, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The answer depends on whether you can manage internal change quickly enough before you get overrun by competitors unburdened by legacy structures, embedded cultural resistance, and decades of optimizing for predictability rather than transformation.
Satya Nadella’s success at Microsoft provides the template, according to Aditya.
“‘Hit Refresh’ wasn’t just a book—it was a massive internal communication exercise focused on breaking silos and political dynamics that had calcified during previous years. It worked because Nadella had a clear viewpoint about where Microsoft needed to go and drove alignment around it at velocity”
Most organizations lack both the viewpoint and the speed.
Which brings us to the first of several system failures Nair identifies: the leadership problem.
System Failure One: The Leadership Vacuum
“I am surprised at the number of people that just don’t have a viewpoint,” Nair observed, “or aren’t at least able to articulate their view of how the world changes.”
This matters because you need a viewpoint to set direction. You need perspective to iterate from. Nobody gets everything right during genuine transformation—but paralysis is guaranteed failure. “You’re going to be wrong,” Nair acknowledged, “but you need a viewpoint to be able to set a direction and then you iterate as you go forward.”
What we’ve optimized for in leadership selection—especially in large incumbents—is the opposite of what we need now. We’ve selected for people who don’t rock the boat, who maintain predictability, who appeal to everyone. That worked when you had a business model that grew at steady rates and investors valued certainty.
It doesn’t work when the game changes.
The leaders succeeding now, Nair observes, “are people who are open to being controversial, who are open to speaking their mind. And if it doesn’t sit well with a certain group of people, then that’s just the way the chips land.”
But there’s a critical distinction here that Nair emphasized: this isn’t tech bro doomerism.
The leaders who navigate this transformation aren’t catastrophizing or paralyzed by apocalyptic scenarios. They’re optimistic. They have a viewpoint about where things are going and believe they can get there. They iterate forward rather than freezing in the face of complexity.
“The optimism piece is a good point,” Nair said. You need courage and viewpoint, yes—but you also need optimism to keep moving when you know you’ll be wrong about parts of it.
System Failure Two: The Polarization Illusion
What’s stopping leaders from taking positions? Nair points to a fundamental misreading of the landscape: the polarization illusion created by social media.
“On the polarization front, very realistically, yes, the percentage of population who’s going to be offended is going to be 50% if you’re on Twitter. In the real world, it’s going to be 2%.”
The mathematics are stark: one percent of people post on social media, ninety-nine percent lurk. Many have left these platforms entirely. Of that one percent posting, only a fraction represents your actual stakeholder base. And of that fraction, only a portion will react negatively to any given position.
“You’re looking at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction,” Nair explained. “It’s just that that fraction is loud enough that it can be intimidating, and that fraction gets picked up by channels and media that are incentivized to promote a reactionary outlook.”
The median—the vast majority—will follow wherever leadership genuinely leads. But we’ve let the loudest voices on the least representative platforms paralyze decision-making. We’ve mistaken noise for magnitude.
The Collapsing Architecture
The conversation turned to AI, inevitably, but not in the way most such discussions unfold. Nair’s insight cuts deeper than automation anxiety or productivity gains.
“AI gives generalists the ability to be domain experts and domain experts the ability to be generalists,” he told me. “And the consequences of that are much bigger in a positive way than we are giving it credit.”
This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about collapsing the silos that have defined knowledge work for decades. When Nair was at business school and ChatGPT launched, he found himself able to master finance, supply chain, operations—domains where he had no background. “I can feed a paper to it and say create a table that translates—give me line by line the paper on the left-hand side and give me something that an intelligent non-domain expert would understand.”
The implications ripple through every organizational structure built on specialized expertise guarded by professional boundaries. “We’ve moved over a period of time into this space where there’s fewer people doing and more people criticizing, supervising,” Nair observed. “I’ll be on a call with like 20 people and 80% of the work is done by one person, 19 people are there just to go like change this, change that.”
What happens when those nineteen people can translate their thoughts into productive work directly? What happens when the doing and the supervising collapse into single roles? Every organizational structure built on the assumption of specialized expertise guarded by professional boundaries faces obsolescence.
The Six to Eighteen Month Window
This is where the timeline becomes critical. I floated a hypothesis to Nair: the next six to eighteen months will be brutal for communicators—full of upheaval, resistance, arbitrary executive decisions about offices and headcount and restructuring. Organizations will thrash. Many professionals won’t survive.
But on the other side of that window, something fundamentally different emerges.
Communication doesn’t remain a support function. It becomes the organizational core.
Why?
Because when AI drives production and creates largely modular products and services, differentiation collapses to three things: story, positioning, and alignment.
All of which sit in the communication bucket. None of which sit anywhere else.
Nair’s response validated the direction:
“That’s a consequence of the way society has evolved. We’ve siloed ourselves and we siloed our identities. And I think what AI does is it gives generalists the ability to be domain experts and domain experts the ability to be generalists.”
But this isn’t inevitable. It requires surviving the shakeout. It requires organizations recognizing what matters when production commoditizes. It requires leaders willing to stake out positions and communicate them clearly at velocity.
Which returns us to the fundamental question: Can incumbents change their cultures, their decision-making processes, their leadership styles fast enough?
The Sorting Mechanism
If Nair is right—and his combination of journalism training, marketing experience, and enterprise AI deployment gives him an unusual perspective on what’s actually happening rather than what’s being discussed—we’re not watching incremental evolution. We’re watching a sorting.
Organizations that can articulate direction and drive alignment at velocity versus organizations that optimize for consensus and predictability.
Leaders who stake out positions versus leaders who wait for safe ground that never arrives.
Communicators who can help organizations differentiate through story when products commoditize versus communicators who keep running engagement surveys.
Professionals who can translate AI capability into actual organizational value versus professionals who treat it as a productivity hack.
The next eighteen months aren’t just turbulent. They’re eliminatory.
Multiple paradigms—leadership, business models, communication strategies, organizational structures—are being overthrown simultaneously.
The collision of AI acceleration, demographic workforce transformation, and pressure on traditional hierarchies creates conditions where incremental adaptation doesn’t work.
You either transform fast enough or you discover that your experience optimizing for the old game is worthless in the new one.
For communicators specifically, this means the profession splits.
Those who can help leaders find and articulate viewpoints, who can drive aligned decisions across businesses with velocity, who can position organizations when differentiation moves from product features to brand story—they emerge on the other side as strategically central, perhaps for the first time since the industrial era.
Those who can’t survive won’t get another window. The next cohort won’t be hired to fill the same roles because those roles won’t exist.
The question Nair left me with isn’t about whether transformation is coming—that’s already underway.
It’s mucy more about whether the people currently inside organizations understand that the clock is running. Whether they recognize that eighteen months is both longer than it feels and shorter than most organizations can move.
Whether they grasp that this isn’t about adapting to disruption. It’s about being sorted.
And the sorting is already underway.
Editor’s Note: Reprinted with permission from Strategic Magazine.
