Three Revolutions

My grandmother was born in 1900. She lived to see horse-drawn carriages give way to automobiles, watched the first television broadcasts, and held a telephone that could reach anyone in the world. I think about her life sometimes when people talk about the pace of technological change as though it is something new. It is not new. What is new is how compressed the cycles have become.

I have had the fortune, or misfortune depending on how you count the investment returns, of living through three digital revolutions. Each one followed the same pattern, and I missed the obvious implications each time.

The first was the personal computer. In 1982, my father bought an IBM PC for his CPA practice. He was a small-town accountant in the coalfields of Virginia, and most of his peers thought he was wasting money on a toy. But my father saw something they did not. He saw that the machine could turn drudgery into profit. The hours he spent on manual calculations, the tedious reconciliations, the repetitive data entry, all of it could be compressed. He did not become less of an accountant. He became a faster, more accurate, more profitable one. His practice grew because he could serve more clients at a higher level while his competitors were still running adding machines.

The second revolution was the Internet. In the early 1990s, while serving in the Army, I built a dial-up reporting system that allowed units to submit their readiness data electronically instead of through paper forms and phone calls. It was crude by any modern standard, a modem and some custom software, but it worked well enough that it eventually went service-wide. I understood the technology. I understood the efficiency gains. And yet when the internet became commercially viable, I did not invest in Microsoft or Amazon. I watched those opportunities from the sidelines, knowing full well that the pattern I had already seen twice was repeating itself.

The third revolution is artificial intelligence. And here we are again. The long build happened mostly out of public view, decades of academic research, incremental improvements in processing power, and the slow accumulation of training data. Then the sudden leap. In the span of about eighteen months, AI went from a specialist concern to a boardroom priority. Every organization in the world is now asking what this means for them, and money, ideas, technology, and carpetbaggers are flying around like we're building the next railroad.

The pattern is always the same. A technology develops slowly, almost invisibly, over many years. Then something triggers the leap, a product, a breakthrough, a demonstration, or a use case that makes the abstract concrete. Early adopters capture disproportionate returns. Late adopters spend more to catch up and never quite do. And the organizations that dismiss the revolution entirely, the ones who see a toy instead of a tool, they become case studies in what not to do.

What my father understood in 1982 is the same thing that matters now. Technology is not a replacement for judgment. It is an accelerant for it. The accountant who uses AI is no less of an accountant. The attorney who uses AI is no less of an attorney. They are faster, more thorough, and more capable if they govern the tool properly and understand its limits.

My father didn't just buy a PC. He learned to use it. He changed his workflows. He trained his staff. The technology was the catalyst, but the organizational investment produced the returns. AI is no different. Capability without governance is just risk. Organizations that build modern governance alongside their AI deployments will move faster and more confidently than those that treat governance as a problem for later. Those who wait for the landscape to settle before acting will find that the landscape never settles. It just moves, and it rewards the prepared, the brave, and sometimes the cleanup crew.

Organizations that deploy AI successfully now will look, in five years, the way my father's practice looked in 1982. The headstart, the transformed workflows and operating structures will become the standard for the companies that adopt and those that replace the laggards.

At Striv, we believe that the foundation of transformation from AI and beyond hinges on Trust. By bringing a modern lens to governance across data, systems, people, and AI, we help companies lean into and grasp the future without losing their heads.