Electric power was commercially available to American manufacturers in the 1880s. Productivity did not move for roughly forty years. The dynamo was not the problem. The factory was.
Early adopters bolted a single large motor onto the existing steam layout: one shaft, belts everywhere, the whole floor designed around a central power source. Electricity made that layout slightly cheaper to run. It did not make it better.
The gains arrived when engineers rebuilt the floor around the new power: a small motor on every machine, workstations arranged for the flow of materials rather than the flow of belts, buildings with windows instead of shafts. Same electricity. Different organization. That is when output doubled.
The AI version of the central shaft
Most enterprises are running AI the way 1890s factories ran electricity. One large capability, bolted on to the existing process. A chatbot in front of the same forms. A copilot beside the same approval chain. The workflow that existed before the model exists after it, slightly faster at the margins.
The forty-year gap was not a technology gap. It was an operating-model gap. The people who understood electricity and the people who understood the factory were different people, and for a generation nobody put them in the same room.
What closes the gap faster this time
Decide the workflow, not the tool. The question is not "where can we use AI" but "which end-to-end process would we design differently if agents could do part of it." Start there.
Rebuild the floor in one place first. One workflow, redesigned around agents and human approval, running in production. Then the next inherits the wiring.
Put both kinds of people in the room. The strategist who understands the business and the engineer who understands the model, embedded together inside the organization. That is the whole reason Current exists as one firm rather than two.
The dynamo took forty years to reach the factory floor because nobody owned the distance between the power and the work. Someone can own it now.