AI Shifts from Answering to Executing as Workflow Control Becomes Key Competitive Advantage

A new era is emerging in AI as it transitions from answering questions to executing tasks. According to Goldman Sachs' latest report, industrial competition is shifting towards workflow control, where the ability to integrate into enterprise production environments and understand business context becomes crucial.

The report highlights that enterprises are not lacking in AI capability but rather controllability. As AI agents accelerate their deployment, workflows with clear decision boundaries, verifiable results, and error rollback capabilities will be prioritized for automation. For instance, invoice processing is a typical example where AI handles field extraction and verification checks.

Goldman Sachs also notes that the model market is moving towards specialization, with frontier models dominating high-value tasks and open-source models handling large-scale inference. World models are driving AI into the physical world, potentially creating a new growth curve for computing power, with demand projected to increase 24-fold over the next five years.

The report suggests that the future AI model market may develop a clearer division of labor: frontier models will handle complex tasks requiring high value and high reliability, while open-source models will undertake larger-scale standardized tasks. Cloud computing companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and CoreWeave stand to benefit directly from this shift.