About
An inflection point worth spending a career on.
Simon Grice is a business futurist and innovation thought leader working inside ServiceNow's Futures Office, where he leads the Story Studio team.
We are at a rare inflection point — the kind that comes along once in a career, if you're lucky. Most people are treating agentic AI as a productivity upgrade, a way to do the same work faster. That framing massively undersells what's happening.
When agentic AI is combined with digital twins, quantum computing and physical AI, we aren't looking at a tools upgrade. We are looking at the possibility of a new kind of organisation altogether — one that can sense and respond to the world in something closer to real time.
That's not a technology story. It's a leadership story. And leadership stories are the ones worth spending a career on.
Running the Story Studio team inside ServiceNow's Futures Office has put Simon in conversations with executives wrestling with what AI means for how companies are structured, not simply how they are staffed. Those conversations revealed a pattern: the technical questions were rarely the hardest ones.
- What happens to judgment?
- What happens to accountability?
- What happens to culture?
- What happens when a system can act on your behalf?
That thinking led Simon toward the Actualized Enterprise as a leadership challenge first and a technology challenge second.
The lesson
The biggest risk isn't moving too fast. It's mistaking automation for actualization.
Many organisations are bolting AI onto existing processes and calling it transformation, when what they have really built is a faster version of the same old machine. The organisations that pull ahead will redesign around a different question.
The difference
Most commentary falls into two camps. Simon occupies a third.
Technologists
Excited about capability. Focused on what the system can now do.
Skeptics
Worried about control. Focused on what the system might take away.
Simon's position
What happens to human work and human purpose once rote work is absorbed by the system. Humans become the legislators, governors and creatives who give it direction.
Experience
Credibility built on work, not adjectives.
- Futures Office
- senior leader running the Story Studio team at the company building the platform for the Actualized Enterprise.
- C-suite access
- the ideas here were shaped in the room with executive leadership, not just observed from a distance.
- Global stages
- a catalogue of work built for executive audiences, curated and shaped under his leadership through the Story Studio team.
- An architect of influence
- Has personally built the systems and infrastructure that turn scattered thought leadership into a coordinated institutional voice.
- Two decades
- in enterprise software, not from the sidelines, but with the operational scars to prove it.