From e-commerce to autonomous commerce
Bjarke Ruse Sejersen spent a decade trying to digitize B2B commerce the traditional way — building e-commerce platforms at Saint-Gobain and Airbus — before realizing the channel he was trying to move buyers to captured only 5–9% of manufacturer revenue. The other 90%+ still ran through email inboxes: quotes, orders, RFQs, confirmations, EDI files, PDFs, all interpreted by humans. Six years ago, he founded Go Autonomous to run that traffic end-to-end. Today the platform processed 20 million customer requests last year, and Danfoss, Velux, Grundfos, Nilfisk, and NEFAB run production workloads on it. Danfoss' CIO said publicly it paid for itself in one year.
The deeper shift is philosophical. Old software assisted humans through a process. This one owns the process, and brings people onto the loop only when a decision requires them. What emerges is a new metric Bjarke calls friction debt — every micro-decision still stuck in someone's head — and a Human Dependency Index for measuring it down. The moat, he argues, is no longer the software. It's the expertise to embed it deeply enough that the value shows up on the P&L. In his 2030 boardroom, a new C-level role owns revenue flow across functions, and the question is which processes still depend on humans and how fast you can bring that number down.
