Why Digitalization Will Kill Your Company Too

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Digitalization is perhaps the primary and most impactful development affecting industry and society. Digitalization is enabled by the digital technologies, i.e., software, data, and artificial intelligence (AI). Many companies digitalize in a slow, iterative fashion by incrementally adding new digital capabilities for individual activities and tasks in an ad-hoc and opportunistic fashion. This increases the risk of disruption. In this paper, we discuss the key challenges companies experience as part of their digital transformation and present the Radical paradigm that can play the role of a North Star for companies to align their change initiatives with. Radical is concerned with being responsive, architecture and data driven, continuous and driven by highly autonomous cross-functional teams and based on three principles, i.e., the three circles model, AI at the core and quantitative outcomes.