Of Termites & Tokens
TOM CRITCHLOW
TOM CRITCHLOW
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June 8, 2026
Of Termites & Tokens
Notes on the company as colony
Maybe the future of work is… termites? Let me explain.
Right now a lot of companies are trying to use AI to automate low-throughput workflows - essentially replacing human tasks with AI workflows (or “agents” if you want to get all fancy). The story goes that AI can make it faster to build a landing page, or faster to respond to each customer support ticket. This is an efficiency story “let’s replace our expensive humans with cheap tokens!”
But I think this is boring and mundane. The more interesting question is what happens when AI changes the throughput of the workflow itself? Don’t make one landing page. Make 1,000. Don’t summarize one customer interview. Summarize every customer interaction continuously. Don’t run one competitor analysis. Monitor the market in real time.
This is where “workflow automation” feels too small and unimaginative. The opportunity is not to build faster, smaller machines - but to become a colony: a mixed population of humans, agents, bots, scripts, dashboards, workflows, alerts, memories and permissions, all sensing and acting through local signals.
In the colony company - where are the pheromone trails?
The Margin Trap
Fundamentally a lot of the AI transformation discussion is still stuck inside the old unit economics of work. The process remains the same shape, but one step gets cheaper. A human used to draft the thing, now AI drafts the thing. A human used to analyze the thing, now AI analyzes the thing.
But this is unimaginative - and actually not what a lot of companies need or want. It’s been possible to make workflows more efficient long before AI: outsourcing and automation have been around forever. But instead of making workflows more efficient, most of the time companies chose to invest in growth.
Making an existing process more efficient is a margin play: same output, cheaper. But a lot (most?) of businesses I’ve been involved with would far rather keep margin consistent and drive top line growth.
I think workflow automation is a margin trap: AI makes cost reduction so legible that we miss the weirder growth move. We ask how to do the existing workflow with fewer people, fewer steps and less time. The better question might be: what happens when this workflow is no longer scarce?
A landing page used to be a project. A customer research synthesis used to be a deck. A competitive scan used to be a quarterly exercise. But if these things become cheap enough, they stop being discrete projects and start becoming continuous organizational senses. The company doesn’t “do research.” It has research metabolism. The company doesn’t “make campaigns.” It has a campaign ecology.
AI doesn’t just reduce the cost of work. It changes the carrying capacity of the organization.
Termites and Tokens
Colonies like ants and termites and bees operate with a radically different coordination cost structure. They don’t plan and operate like a typical organization but rather operate through distributed local action. The intelligence is in the relationship between actors and environment.
Maybe this is a better image for agentic work - not AI replacing existing workflows but rather agents swarming across the organization expanding the throughput of every single workflow - every task becomes 1000 variations, judged, evaluated and tested through a mixture of computers and humans. But happening at a frequency and volume that changes the organization’s shape.
The question becomes less “which jobs can AI replace?” and more “what kinds of collective behavior become possible when small acts of cognition become cheap?”
James March’s exploration/exploitation frame is useful here.
A central concern of studies of adaptive processes is the relation between the<br>exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties. Exploration includes things captured by terms such<br>as search, variation, risk taking, experimentation, play, flexibility, discovery, innovation. Exploitation includes such things as refinement, choice, production, efficiency,<br>selection, implementation, execution.
Adaptive systems that engage in exploration to<br>the exclusion of exploitation are likely to find that they suffer the costs of experimentation without gaining many of its benefits. They exhibit too many undeveloped new<br>ideas and too little distinctive competence. Conversely, systems that engage in<br>exploitation to the exclusion of exploration are likely to find themselves trapped in<br>suboptimal stable equilibria.
As a result, maintaining an appropriate balance between<br>exploration and exploitation is a primary factor in system survival and prosperity.
There are tradeoffs between efficiency and growth. Replacing humans with tokens is mostly exploitation:...