Do companies have souls?
What AI can't replicate, but can amplify.
What is the essence of an organization? Is it its culture? Or does culture merely reflect its essence?
Soul is a subject that can lead to many discussions about spirituality and eventually religious interpretation. That’s not quite where I want to go, nor where my explorations have taken me. It’s more about essence. What is essentially mine and transcends profession and labels? Something that gets filtered through masks and shows up in behavior, but exists before all of that.
This concept of essence, however intangible, doesn’t apply only to individuals. It can be a lens for looking at groups. A family, a sect, or even a company.
As a group forms and matures, each member brings contributions from their own essence, combined in varying proportions. The result gradually becomes the organization’s essence, which also tends to express itself through masks and behaviors. Over time, this system becomes antifragile and resistant to change. Beliefs take the form of rituals, behaviors, and jargon that crystallize and end up shaping new members far more than being shaped by them.
When companies come together through mergers and acquisitions, this combination is complex, and the outcome depends heavily on which essence prevails and who leads the process.
When a company lays off people en masse to replace them with AI, what is it saying about its own essence? But what has really got me thinking about this is how easy it has become to build product.
For tech entrepreneurs, it’s easy to fall into the mental trap that the product defines the company. If that were true, any clever founder vibe coding their product could genuinely take your company down. Except they can’t.
When I founded my last startup, Pannacotta, we started by translating our essence into a culture manifesto. The product also reflected our essence, through illustrations, colors, tone of voice, and other characteristics that go far beyond functionality.
When vibe coding a product alone, you rarely think about any of that. AI takes over the process and reflects an essence shaped by the training of large language models. Just look at any site or product built purely by AI to see how pasteurized that base essence is. That doesn’t mean your company can’t use AI to help express its essence across product, communications, and brand. The question is differentiation and intention. I don’t believe a pasteurized vibe-coded product can beat a company with a strong essence. But the speed at which AI can help a great founder, or group of founders, embed their essence into a standout product and bring it to market is not something to ignore.
I’m turning this into a personal experiment, which I’ll be sharing here soon. Stay tuned.