Picture Roy and Moss (from the IT Crowd) in the basement. Funny, familiar, and painfully recognisable. We have all been there. The reality is years of treating technology as a cost to manage rather than a capability to compound. Help desks, ticket queues, CRs, eighteen-month roadmaps, clicking next on someone else’s installer.

That model is finished. Systems integrators built entire business models on this posture, and internal IT functions organised themselves around it. Both served their era well. AI is the accelerant of what comes next, but the cause is way deeper: The companies winning their categories no longer have a technology function in the traditional sense. They are product organisations.

Technology is not a service the business consumes. It is the business. The product they build re-invents the way business is done. It generates revenue, shapes customer behaviour, and feeds the next wave of capability with data.

Three things made this shift unavoidable.

First, public cloud turned infrastructure into building blocks. Work that once required a quarter can now happen in an afternoon. “We can stand up servers” is no longer a strategic differentiator.

Second, product thinking replaced project thinking. Thoughtworks and others have spent two decades arguing this point. Software is eating the world, as Andreessen put it. More precisely, software products are eating the businesses that fail to build them.

Projects deliver and disband. Products evolve, learn, and compound. Organizations that internalised this are the ones still standing and growing. It is not accidental that İş Bankası is led by a CEO with a technology background.

Third, and most recently, data and AI closed the feedback loop. Products no longer wait for a release cycle to get better. They learn from use, instrument themselves, and improve continuously. The same shift is reshaping how products are built in the first place. Code, tests, and iterations now move at a pace that would have looked reckless three years ago. This is where AI matters, not as a feature to tick the AI hype box, but as the metabolism of a product that refuses to sit still.

If those three things are true, the org chart that produced the IT Crowd cannot survive unchanged. Cost-centre governance cannot run revenue-generating products. Procurement-led vendor relationships cannot sustain platforms that change weekly. The basement is not a location, it is a posture, and the posture has stopped working.

This is the shift we worked through with our partner “WAT Mobilite”, and what their technology leader will walk through in the session that follows. Together, we transformed the EV charging platform into a product to serve the entire market, including the competition. The architectural decisions are interesting and tricky, but the operating model decisions are the real story.

The question for the rest of us is simpler. Cost centre, or product organisation? There is no third option.