This year marks SYZYGY’s 30th anniversary. Our foundation coincided with the advent of the digital economy. From the start, we helped many big-name companies to enter the Internet era; we built the first configurators for car manufacturers, online stores and transactional banking portals.
We continued to grow and came of age alongside the wider digital economy. We support some companies since our earliest days. That says something not only about the quality of our services, but also the quality of our client relationships.
We have always leveraged step changes in innovation – such as the mobile Internet, the rise of social media and the cloud – to better serve our clients and advance our own growth. The solutions we are now developing and operating together with our clients are mission critical.
The next innovation surge
The exponential progress in artificial intelligence, particularly around large language models (LLMs), is ushering in the Age of AI Agents. These highly sophisticated systems are capable of logical thinking and have a memory. They can make decisions on their own, carry out complex tasks and deliver results in real-time.
This enormous AI-driven leap forward is not just a technological feat, it also has economic and social implications and will change the way we think about knowledge work.
At present, there are more than 1.25 billion knowledge workers worldwide. The total factor productivity of knowledge work – a macroeconomic metric used to determine the extent to which technological progress enables greater output to be achieved with the same input of labour and capital – only grew 0.5 per cent in the US between 2019 and 2023. The picture looks much the same in most other OECD countries. Attempts to increase the productivity of knowledge work by automating tasks have so far met with only limited success.
In our 30th anniversary year, we are on the cusp of a new innovation surge that is comparable with the Internet breakthrough
30 years ago.
Software is becoming an autonomous worker
AI agentic systems could deliver a disruptive productivity boost to worldwide knowledge work and thus to the entire professional services sector by providing “Service as Software”. To date, software has only been a tool for supporting people when performing repetitive and rule-based tasks but is now set to become an autonomous worker.
There is huge market potential for “Service as Software”:
The global market for professional services being worth almost USD 6.5 trillion.
Businesses have long outsourced many back-office tasks such as bookkeeping, invoicing and tax returns to specialist providers, who usually charge companies based on their staff labour input. “Service as Software” could lead to a results-based pricing model. It is also conceivable that companies could use AI agentic systems to perform previously outsourced tasks themselves.
The transition to “Service as Software” – the use of AI agentic systems in knowledge work – will not only revolutionise the way services are provided, it will also permanently change economic fundamentals and the structure of the employment market. The “Service as Software” disruption will also have an impact on the often lamented shortage of skilled workers, which is set to become more acute over the coming years due to demographic change.
Our vision is to become a leading agentic system builder and to develop client-specific applications for the “Service as Software” era.
AI will become a base technology, with value being created in its application
Tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce are investing massively in the infrastructure needed to develop and operate AI agentic systems. This will provide the foundation for an eco-system of start-ups, open-source software and service providers that will enable businesses to make the transition to “Service as Software”. AI will become a base technology much like the Internet, while value is created by the way it is applied.
SYZYGY has the necessary skills to be part of this development and intends to actively shape and drive it. To do this we will leverage our visionary capabilities, our in-depth technological expertise and our long experience of crafting the digital interface between companies and their customers. In fact, we are already developing AI agents for knowledge management and to optimise internal company workflows.
Roll on the next 30 years!
