Keynotes For Companies Facing Faster Competitors And New Technology

Science fiction is where our culture argues about technology before the technology exists. Greg takes stories most of the room can already quote and puts them against decisions those same executives have open right now, beginning with a captain who commits on partial information because waiting would cost more than being wrong, a crew that improvises well because someone gave it standing permission to improvise long before the emergency, and an economy without scarcity that turns out to describe a productivity gain fairly well. He spends as much time on where the genre misleads, since decades of films taught audiences that machine autonomy announces itself as an enemy, which is why executives do not recognize automation when it arrives as a line item in a logistics budget. Greg draws on Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, I Robot, For All Mankind and Project Hail Mary, and he keeps the hopeful films in the mix on purpose, because a session that followed the apocalyptic ones to their endings would leave an operations audience with nothing to do on Monday. The keynote comes from his forthcoming book of the same name and runs as one session or as twenty minute segments across a multi day program.

Incumbents lose the low end of their market because they treat a cheaper entrant as an engineering problem. Greg watched that from inside AirMap, an aerospace company that sold into a market held by established aviation and defense suppliers, where he also raised money from the corporate investors who were watching that market change. He is now chairman of the board of Exyn Technologies (Nasdaq: EXYN). Greg has watched boards answer a cheaper competitor with a feature roadmap when that competitor’s real advantage came from its pricing model and from the cost base it never had to carry. He walks a room through what is still available once the entrant has paying customers, including buying it, funding it, partnering with it, or giving up the low end on purpose to protect margin.

Greg predicts that humanoid robots reach commercial use between 2027 and 2029, the way generative AI reached it in 2022, and that most companies will be no readier the second time. He covers what these machines can and cannot do today, which jobs and workflows change first, and which procurement and retraining decisions an operations leader can make this year instead of in the middle of the shift. Behind the robots he puts a second prediction, that cybernetic enhancement of people follows on a longer timeline, raising questions about consent and competitive pressure that reach HR and operations leaders inside this decade.

Greg wrote this session for the managers and senior individual contributors who have been telling themselves for years that they will start something. He co-founded AirMap, raised venture capital from corporate and institutional investors, and went through an acquisition. He opens with what the first year costs, in money and in the habits that got them promoted and then stop working at a company small enough that there is nobody to delegate to. Greg spends the rest of the session comparing the risks they keep weighing against the ones that actually end early companies, which are usually a different list.

Greg has asked boards for decisions as an operator and now gives them as a public company chairman, and he opens on the price an organization pays while it waits. He describes a delay that surfaces two years later as a product behind a competitor who committed earlier, and as the departure of the people who were told to wait. He shows audiences how to put a number on the delay itself, so a request for another quarter of study gets defended in the room the same way a spending request does.

Greg named the static market fallacy for the assumption buried in a revenue forecast or a build or buy decision, which is that the market and the vendor capability described at diligence will still be there when the plan is executed. He traces where that assumption enters a plan and what it costs when the plan runs against capability that improved several times over while the plan was still in review. Greg’s examples come from the drone airspace market he built AirMap into and from the autonomy work he oversees now as chairman of Exyn Technologies.