Don sits silently in his office, contemplatively smoking a cigarette, wearing, of course, a marvelous suit, staring at the untouched bookshelves. He takes a slow, deep breath as the ash on his cigarette grows.
Roger walks in (without knocking, in his signature style), looks at Don, and asks “What are you doing?” Don responds, incredulous: “Working.” Like duh.
It’s a perfect, absurdly self-serious moment from Mad Men, the most delicious and dead-on show ever made about marketing—which my late grandmother (who would know) referred to as “the most realistic show ever about the ‘50s.”
Today’s go-to-market reality isn’t a smoky room with a muse and a martini. It’s an ever-evolving dance between human expertise, artificial intelligence, and partner ecosystems moving at warp speed.
BridgeIQ, our newly announced operating model at Bridge Partners, is designed precisely for that dance. It brings together three high-functioning elements into symphonic, responsive solution teams:
This isn’t legacy consulting. It’s not solo genius. It’s scalable delivery excellence, fueled by insight and orchestrated for velocity. The complexity of today’s technology ecosystem demands teams that are exponentially more than the sum of parts. And today’s teams aren’t just made of people.
But people are the linchpin. BridgeIQ is built on the idea that AI technology should, must, and can elevate uniquely-human contributions through speed and scale, making possible GTM innovation requiring broad synthesis of data, automated production processes that overcome the scale barrier, and instantaneous acceleration of historically soul-killing manual tasks.
AI can greatly improve efficiency and make services work cheaper. But today’s all-consuming race to efficiency will, projecting forward from the current pace of acceleration, be over relatively soon. And it will end in a tie.
In a technology marketplace where theoretically-infinite efficiency is table stakes, it’s the effective deployment of human expertise that will enable competitive advantage.
And for our clients, it already does.
The “I” in BridgeIQ nods to intelligence, of course. But also:
It’s that constellation of human capabilities, which I’ll broadly label “expertise,” not application of AI or technology tools, that will separate the winners once the industry overall comes up to speed on AI adoption.
The future of work is for people to become what Microsoft recently labeled “Agent Bosses”—humans who lead, not simply operate, machines.
This is what separates a high-output operation from a high-impact one. It’s the difference between simply using AI and meaningfully integrating it. Between automation and orchestration. Between doing more and doing what matters.
At Bridge Partners, we don’t just offer access to AI or strategy frameworks. We offer discernment. The ability to separate information from insight. To design GTM strategies rooted in customer reality and partner opportunity. To make bold moves in the fog.
At Bridge Partners, our expertise is deepest where the emerging opportunities to drive market acceleration and increase revenue are greatest: In Product and Partner go to market motions, where success depends not on speed alone, but on resonance, on understanding customers, culture, and context. And knowing what not to do.
Without human expertise, AI offers many capabilities, many paths forward all converging in a single, inevitable outcome: A deadlock. Parity. Mediocrity at scale.
Not to ignore the value of speed to market. On the contrary: We’re moving fast because there’s an opportunity and a need to accelerate AI adoption, right now. But it takes a thoughtfully constructed, human-led, AI-enabled, partnership-equipped team to deliver sustainable competitive advantage in the emerging technology landscape.
The future isn’t just faster: it’s smarter.
BridgeIQ isn’t just our answer to the question “How should we work now?” It’s our platform for showing—repeatedly, measurably, brilliantly—that human intelligence, strategically deployed, remains the most valuable asset in any organization.
But we humans no longer work alone. The best work is still magical, but it’s the product of tightly orchestrated human / AI / technology teams that produce more than the sum of their parts.
Let Don Draper roll over in what I imagine is the Palm Springs chaise lounge of his retirement. Begone, Don! Your services, the heroic ones, are no longer needed.