4 Mind-Bending Ideas from DPW Amsterdam That Will Reshape How You Think About AI and Business

The daily noise surrounding artificial intelligence is deafening. A relentless barrage of headlines promises world-changing breakthroughs, making it nearly impossible to distinguish genuine transformation from fleeting hype. This article cuts through that noise. We’ve distilled four genuinely transformative ideas from DPW Amsterdam 2025, the conference where leaders from companies like Google DeepMind, McKinsey, and Siemens are defining the future of business and technology. These aren’t just incremental updates; they are fundamental shifts in thinking that will reshape your entire approach to AI and business strategy.

1. Your AI Strategy Isn’t About Upgrading the Steam Engine—It’s About Redesigning the Factory.

Most companies are approaching AI as a better, faster calculator—a tool to optimize existing processes and incrementally improve efficiency. According to Karim Aayuk, VP of AI Technical Strategy at Google DeepMind, this is a monumental mistake, akin to the historical error made at the dawn of electrification. When electricity first replaced steam, companies that simply swapped their one big steam engine for one big electric motor saw almost no productivity gains. The real transformation—the thousand-percent productivity leaps—came from visionaries who understood that electricity’s true power was its distributability. They redesigned the entire factory floor with small, distributed motors, fundamentally changing manufacturing forever.

We stand at the exact same inflection point. AI is not just a replacement engine; it’s a new form of power. Aayuk frames it as a “scalable source of force multiplying ingenuity,” a capability that allows us to completely reimagine how value is created. This reframes the entire strategic challenge. It forces a CFO to ask not, “What is the ROI on this AI tool?” but, “What new business models are now possible that weren’t before?” It compels a CPO to move beyond optimizing the current supply chain to designing an entirely new, autonomous one. The core takeaway is that applying AI to an old process yields marginal returns; using it to design a new one unlocks exponential value. The question is no longer about optimization, but imagination.

Will you use the technology to simply optimize the factory that you already have or will you have the foresight and the courage to design a new one entirely?

— Karim Aayuk, VP of AI Technical Strategy, Google DeepMind

2. The Future of Procurement Isn’t Just Buying—It’s Trading, Investing, and Reshaping the Business.

For decades, procurement has been defined by cost control and risk mitigation. But in a new, volatile economic era, that mandate is being radically rewritten. In his closing keynote, Mauro Enriquez of McKinsey described a paradigm shift from traditional purchasing to “end-to-end value entrepreneurship,” where the goal is to directly influence not just cost, but the company’s margin and its total enterprise value.

This shatters the traditional mold of procurement, opening up surprising new “venues for value generation.” Enriquez outlined a future where a procurement team with superior, AI-driven market insight could buy more of a commodity than it needs and profitably resell the excess to competitors, turning a cost center into a trading desk. This is made possible by the very agentic capabilities described by Google DeepMind—AI that can navigate a “mind-bogglingly complex space of possibilities” to find optimal solutions, a perfect description of commodity trading. Beyond trading, this new model sees procurement professionals deploying capital, forming joint ventures, and using M&A to fundamentally reshape their company’s value chain. Enriquez drove the point home by noting the combined 20 trillion dollar enterprise value of the companies attending DPW, posing a sharp question to the leaders in the room: “How many of you are incentivized really by enterprise value?”

3. Stop Thinking of AI as a Tool. Start Thinking of It as a Colleague.

Across the conference, a consistent and powerful theme emerged: the shift from AI as a passive co-pilot to “agentic AI.” An AI agent is not a system you prompt; it’s an autonomous colleague you give a goal. Karim Aayuk contrasted a simple prompt like “draft an RFQ” with assigning an agent the goal of “buy laptops for my team in Lisbon.” The agent then handles the entire complex workflow—from requirements and budgets to sourcing and execution—on its own.

This leap from tool to autonomous agent demands a completely new organizational model. Klaus Staubitzer, CPO of Siemens, offered a novel and profound solution: treat AI agents not as software to be deployed, but as employees to be onboarded.

...why don’t we think about an onboarding of an AI agent like an onboarding of a real physical colleague?

— Klaus Staubitzer, Chief Procurement Officer & Head of Supply Chain, Siemens

The implications of this simple idea are staggering. It changes everything from management and trust-building to the very nature of teamwork. This forces leaders to grapple with unprecedented challenges: How do you performance-manage an agent that works 24/7? What does career progression look like for a human when their agent colleague’s capabilities are improving exponentially? It signals the dawn of a true hybrid workforce, where humans and autonomous agents must collaborate, learn from each other, and be managed as a cohesive team to achieve shared goals.

4. In an Age of AI, the Most Critical Leadership Trait is Courage.

Amid a sea of technological discussion, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman delivered a powerful, grounding message: in this age of massive disruption, our biggest challenges are not related to technology or money, but to human will and leadership. He argued that too many leaders are “playing not to lose versus playing to win,” setting ambitions too low when the moment demands systemic change.

This human-centric perspective provides the essential “why” to complement all the discussion of “how.” The courage Polman speaks of is precisely what’s needed to act on the other three ideas from the conference. It is the courage Aayuk demands to “design a new factory entirely” rather than just optimize the old one. It is the courage required to transform a procurement department into an entrepreneurial value engine. And it is the courage to trust, manage, and collaborate with an autonomous AI agent as a colleague. Technology is the enabler, but as Polman made clear, courage is the catalyst.

Don’t try to aim to be the best in the world try to aim to be the best for the world.

— Paul Polman, Former CEO, Unilever

Conclusion: The Real Question

The messages from DPW Amsterdam 2025 signal four major shifts for business leaders: from upgrading the engine to redesigning the factory; from being buyers to becoming value entrepreneurs; from using tools to working with agents as colleagues; and from leading with calculation to leading with courage.

These ideas push us beyond the tactical and into the strategic. They challenge us to think bigger. The real question isn’t what AI can do for your business, but what kind of business you have the courage to build with it.