FOR THIRTY YEARS, THE FASTEST COMPANY WON.

Agentic AI has ended that era, because when every rival can build and deploy in an afternoon, speed is no longer an advantage.

What almost no one has noticed is that replacement: Your AI systems are all working exactly as designed, each one passing its own tests and improving its own metrics, while the organization around them becomes something nobody chose and nobody can see. Madhu Shashanka calls this complexity debt, and it compounds invisibly until it surfaces as a crisis.

Reasoning from economics, complex systems science, and two decades spent building AI inside large enterprises, he shows that the scarce resource of this era is coherence: whether the growing crowd of autonomous systems inside a company, and the humans accountable for them still pull in the same direction. It is the one advantage no vendor can sell you and no competitor can copy, and Coherence is the book for the executive whose job now depends on building it.