Prices plummeted, and ordinary people could afford their own cars. When he doubled wages to five dollars a day, he created a loyal workforce and helped establish the industrial middle class. Industrial innovation wasn’t just about steel and engines, but about productivity, profitability, and social mobility.

A century later, Jeff Bezos and Amazon Web Services did something similar in the digital realm. AWS transformed computing power into a service anyone could buy. With the cloud, a developer could start a company with a credit card instead of millions in venture capital. Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb became possible because computing power became as accessible as electricity. The assembly line went digital.

Steve Jobs and the iPhone amplified this development. The App Store enabled millions of developers to build new services on a common platform. The phone became the gateway to banking, healthcare, and transportation. Digital services became part of everyday life, and innovation was distributed worldwide.

Now we’re seeing the contours of the next leap: artificial intelligence, large language models, and AI agents. Where Ford standardized production and Bezos standardized infrastructure, AI is standardizing intelligence in service delivery. LLMs can write, analyze, and adapt in real-time. Agentic AI can act on our behalf in complex ecosystems – ordering, comparing, negotiating – thereby changing how we experience and create services.

The difference is that AI doesn’t just lower costs or open new platforms. It changes the very boundary between what humans do and what systems can do. This makes the question more fundamental: How do we build trust, regulation, and skills so that this wave creates broad value – the way Ford’s assembly line lifted the middle class and AWS lifted digital entrepreneurs?

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