I recently stood on stage at Portugal’s national entrepreneurship awards and stated that in less than ten years an entrepreneur would stand on that same stage with a completely automated company. AI has the power to completely change how businesses are built and I believe the greatest opportunity lies in empowering the individual. 

A truly automated business should be seamless to run; tasks that were once manual should disappear entirely and the human role should evolve to one of a controller. At NOAN we believe this future can and will become a reality - surprisingly soon. It’s a future that relies upon what we're building a Cognitive Operating System. They will shrink the necessary technology stack to run a business, and in turn shrink the necessary business operating structure. But what’s a Cognitive Operating System?

In Iron Man, Tony Stark builds his suit in his basement while chatting to JARVIS, his voice-controlled AI assistant. JARVIS pro-actively digests intel, offers updates, suggests options and carries out commands. It's the future we're building and we’re not quite there yet, but JARVIS offers a nice way to understand Cognitive Operating Systems.

To support an autonomous business future we propose a new platform will emerge that will act as a command center for AI, whilst at the same time completely revolutionizing the entire business tech stack. That’s what we’re building with NOAN. The current business tech stack is relatively linear, at best there is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) at the core, but that only connects certain aspects of business knowledge around customer interactions and not the entirety of the business. In the near future the core of the business ecosystem will be what we are calling the Cognitive Operating System (COS) for business. 

A COS will have 5 distinct elements of functionality. 

Single source of truth

A COS can only function if it can see a single source of truth at any point in time to every aspect of a business. This single source of truth will be based on a distinct ontology for each business. This single source of truth is what enables AI to make accurate decisions and output and it will power an ecosystem of agents - so they all operate as one. 

Connected knowledge system

The knowledge stored in this single source of truth will be connected within the COS as an organic system, a change to one area will impact another - rippling across the business. This is vital to automation at scale. 

AI-led control 

A COS will be able to control any business knowledge itself, making updates to the knowledge system in real time based on inputs - either from humans or text, audio or visual data. It will also be able to deploy agents to act on those inputs, those agents will have distinct roles, always have access to the single source of truth and be able to carry out actions as a result. 

AI-led deployment

A COS will include an ecosystem of Agentic APIs, connections to third party systems such as CMS, CRM with the ability to make decisions and updates based on the single source of truth and knowledge system - changes there will impact the rest of the business ecosystem immediately. These updates may be text, visual, audio or code. 

Voice-based interface

A COS will be completely controllable by voice, it will be like talking to your business in real time - with the ability to tell you what is happening now, what to do in future scenarios but also capable of making changes via simple voice command. 

So how do we implement Cognitive Operating Systems?

I’ve previously written why a fully automated company will never occur if you focus on enterprise:  the mess of those organizations (FUBAR mode) is a barrier that even AI can not overcome. We’re seeing the results of that mess in the output from enterprise-based AI applications currently – garbage in, garbage out. 

To create a true revolution in business we need to rethink two things; the traditional business operating structure and the business technology stack. 

Every single business globally is currently structured with human-led knowledge and technology support. The knowledge of what the business is (or, at least, should be) doing at any particular point in time is determined, stored and communicated by humans via meetings, emails, slack messages, strategic documents and presentations. Humans own, store, remember and interpret the knowledge of what the business does in ‘real time’, and its interpretation is varied and subjective.

"Adding a COS to a business will not just revolutionize how business is done, it will also disrupt entire industries within the business tech stack"

Technology is then used to support this system, with that human-filtered information stored in google docs, PDFs, notion templates etc. In many businesses, AI is now used to interrogate this information, but the output is poor and the AI struggles to take action due to a lack of a single source of truth on which to base any decisions.  

We need to fundamentally rethink this business structure. That means flipping it completely: the co-pilot in the future will be the human, offering support and guidance as to the right decisions to make, whilst the AI owns the single source of business knowledge as to what is happening with the business in real time. 

To enable this change to occur in operations, the business technology stack needs to be completely reinvented. For the most part it has not changed for nearly three decades; business knowledge is stored in repositories, then two-way interfaces such as Content Management Systems (CMS) and Customer Relationship Management platforms (CRM) are used to connect and publish that information to engage customers. Data from interactions with those platforms are then sent back into more two-way interfaces, such as business analytics, that are more often than not disconnected from the original publishing platforms. Information is manually stored in the knowledge repository and on it goes, an ongoing cycle of disconnection.

Adding a COS to a business will not just revolutionize how business is done, it will also disrupt entire industries within the business tech stack. What were once two-way interfaces for humans such as CRM and CMS platforms will become gateways for Agentic API deployment, operating behind the scenes, more like how Zapier runs. People will never visit those platforms manually, and in the long run they may even disappear entirely. 

COS will not be implemented first in enterprise businesses. As it stands now enterprise businesses are such a mess of information and dysfunction that no COS could ever reliably be deployed or used. The enterprise businesses of the future will have COS but they will be small teams with global companies. The first companies to take advantage of COS will be individuals or small teams. 

The first thing they do in the morning will be talk to their own business, or businesses, for an update and work will be conversational updates throughout the day - just as it is for Tony Stark in Iron Man. We’ll all be running our own versions of Stark Enterprises in the future and that future is not that far away.

If you want to build it with us, reach out.