A decade ago, I started mapping the economics of AI on a blog called FourWeekMBA. Back then, the map was small, and the cycle was slow. Three years ago, when ChatGPT crossed into the consumer mainstream, the map became a quarterly artifact. This year, the map redraws itself every time a four-billion-dollar lease closes. Earlier this month, it had seven layers. Today it has nine.
Two new layers earned their place. The first is the agentic harness — everything that surrounds a foundation model and makes it usable in production. The second is governance — the deliberate, paced release of frontier capability. Both layers were dormant a year ago. Both are now structural.
This is the workshop, compressed into a written piece. Four layers of analysis, in the Business Engineer format: the abstraction, the market map, the playbook, and what’s coming next.
The mistake most analysts make is treating AI as a continuation of the web. It is not. The web was a distribution revolution layered on top of an existing computer. AI is the computer being rebuilt.
