Leveraging his experience at Trimble, Jonah takes us behind the scenes of corporate tech deployment, shifting the narrative away from AGI hype to the raw operational realities of modern enterprise. He draws parallels between the losses that we see today to pharmaceutical R&D, unpacking how giants like Anthropic and OpenAI use high margins tokens to fuel their next bleeding edge models.
From there, we dive into Jonah’s recent writings on Substack. The duo explored why Jonah believes single-threading is the right way to organise people in the age of AI. And as a result, traditional middle management is evaporating in AI-enabled organisations as their role shifts from management to venture capitalist. And why experienced, specialised talents are naturally inclined to use their political capital to block AI transformation within organisations and how he is trying to solve for this.
Lastly we move into a fascinating breakdown of the current state of robotics in China. The pair discussed “Big brains” and “small brains”. They explain why flexible, high quality and small-batch manufacturing makes Shenzhen the king of electronics manufacturing and why this would be the perfect use case for humanoids driven automation.
Key Topics Covered:
✅ The Token Margin Myth: Why foundation model companies operate more like a Pfizer rather than an Uber with unsustainable unit economics.
✅ The Rise of “Trios”: How 3-person teams of highly aligned generalists are outperforming traditional cross-functional teams.
✅ Overcoming Change Resistance: The psychology behind why deep career specialization breeds AI resistance, and how forward-thinking leaders can lead this change.
01:08 – Welcome Jonah!
02:40 – Are AI-tokens a subsidized drug for society?
12:17 – Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
21:28 – Single-Threaded Organizations
33:50 – The Trio of Generalists: Is 3 The Ideal Team Size?
49:18 – New Rule for Pay: How Do We Compensate a 100x IC with Claude Code ?
50:13 – The Evolving Role of Management: Shifting to VCs
1:02:50 – Change Resistance – “Your Most Senior People are Most Likely to Resist AI”
1:18:18 – Inside China’s Robotics Cluster
1:27:50 – Material Science: Why the Physical World is making a come back in the Next Decade?
#ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #ProductManagement #logisticstech
Andrew Petrisin, CEO of Laneway.io sat down with us to talk about howaIn this episode of Schelling Point, we welcome back Jonah McIntire, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Trimble Technology, to dissect how artificial intelligence is fundamentally reconfiguring organizational architecture, team dynamics and how compensation should be changed in the dawn of AI. Allocation Equivalent Units are designed to end the never-ending cycle of rolled cargo.