As we enter a new era of technological innovation, we find ourselves tracing a familiar path. In the mid-2010s, businesses worldwide started to explore the potential of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), an innovation that, while not new, caught on and rapidly transformed many industries. Today, we're seeing a similar trajectory with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Just as RPA revolutionized operational efficiency in businesses, AI promises to disrupt and elevate productivity on an unprecedented scale.

During the RPA revolution, the earliest adopters were quick to see the potential of these new tools for automating repetitive tasks. The familiar adage "time is money" came into sharp focus, as businesses sought ways to streamline their operations, reducing manual and time-consuming tasks. What started with simple automation—such as form filling or data copying—evolved over time into more complex and comprehensive workflows, and with it the success of companies such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and dozens of other automation companies. The technology made it possible to create new ways of working, and pioneers in the field began to envision and execute workflows that had never been possible before.

Similar patterns are emerging in the current AI landscape. Just as we saw with RPA, the initial focus for many organizations adopting AI is to automate routine, mundane tasks. These tasks range from customer support via intelligent chatbots to automating complex data analysis using machine learning algorithms. By automating these tasks, businesses can drastically reduce their operational costs while increasing efficiency and accuracy. At the end of the day, this way of thinking still revolves around taking existing workflows that are manual and/or repetitive and essentially outsourcing them to an AI tool. 

But as we delve deeper into the potential of AI, a new realm of opportunities is starting to reveal itself—opportunities that extend far beyond simple task automation into new workflows that were never possible before. These are possibilities that can fundamentally transform the way we work, taking the shift from simple automation to complex workflows during the RPA era to an exponential level.

Today's forward-thinking businesses are not only automating tasks with AI but also utilizing its capabilities to redesign entire workflows, processes, and business models. They're using AI's predictive capabilities to foresee market changes, its pattern recognition to understand customer behavior, and its decision-making capabilities to make strategic choices.

As businesses incorporate AI into their operations, they’re discovering the exponential growth in productivity that comes with it. For instance, AI can process and analyze vast amounts of data far quicker and more accurately than a human could, thus enabling faster, data-driven decisions while leveraging orders of magnitude more data and data sources than previously possible. AI’s ability to generate hyper-personalized content means that not only can you have AI write you a well-worded email, it can now write 1000s of personalized emails tailored to individual recipients, a workflow that was previously not feasible. 

Moreover, AI's capability to learn and improve over time—the essence of machine learning—further amplifies this productivity. Each interaction, each data point, and each decision an AI system makes can be used as a learning opportunity, honing its skills and increasing its efficiency. Over time, this process of continuous learning and improvement can lead to productivity gains that were previously unimaginable.

The journey of AI is poised to follow the same transformative path that RPA took. It begins with automation but ultimately leads to the creation of innovative, previously impossible workflows. By embracing new AI products, businesses can look forward to not just incremental productivity improvements, but exponential growth and be able to achieve this without increasing their headcount or reliance on external parties. The era of AI, much like the era of RPA before it, offers tremendous potential to forward-thinking individuals and teams willing to adapt, innovate, and rethink their operational paradigms.

In the midst of this technological evolution, we are reminded of the words of philosopher and writer Alan Watts, "The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." It's clear that the dance of innovation continues, and AI is the newest partner to join. It's a dance that offers the promise of extraordinary productivity and transformative workflows— a dance that, if we have the foresight to embrace it, will change the way we work, play, and live for the better. In the near future, we’ll start to see executives and companies that truly take the plunge quickly start to set themselves apart from the pack.