Blog · Measure
The future of business relationships: technology and authentic relationships
January 2025: this page tried to guess what would happen. Eighteen months later there's something more useful to do than guess — say which prediction came true, and what follows from it.
Published 23 January 2025 · rewritten 16 August 2026
The prediction that held up
In-person meetings are back, and not out of nostalgia
After years of digital dominance, value has shifted toward what is hard to replicate. A message can be copied; a person introducing you to someone across a table cannot.
The economic reason is simple and worth spelling out: when the cost of producing a contact collapses — and with automatic text generation it has collapsed to zero — value shifts to what still costs something to whoever does it. Introducing someone costs reputation. That's why it holds up.
This is the Sixth Law read in reverse: the easier it becomes to fake attention, the more valuable the attention of someone who really puts themselves on the line becomes.
What changes in practice
Not "going back to events". Going back knowing beforehand who to meet.
At Forum Connections the tables are composed by the algorithm before anyone walks into the room: it's the same evening, with the variable that matters decided upstream instead of by chance.
Where the line sits
What gets automated, and what doesn't
The question "technology or relationships" is the wrong one. The right one is: which part of the process is worth handing to a machine.
| Stage | Who does it better | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Choosing who to meet | The machine | It's a matter of scale: in a network of two thousand people nobody keeps track of who knows whom. |
| Remembering who to follow up with | The machine | This is the stage where almost every network dies, and it dies from forgetting, not from choice. |
| Introducing someone | The person | The value of a referral lies in the reputation put on the line. Software has none, so it puts none on the line. |
| Writing the message | The person | A personalised message from a machine is recognisable, and from that moment everything you send becomes noise. |
| Counting what happened | The machine | Because a count done from memory is, systematically, an optimistic count. |
What to do now
The future starts with an inventory, not with a tool
Faced with change, the temptation is to buy software. The move that actually pays off is more boring, and it costs nothing.
Before any tool, a business should know what it already has: happy customers, suppliers, collaborators, everyone orbiting around it. That's its Relational Capital, and it's almost always bigger than whoever runs the company imagines — in the Ital Tetti case, 88% of partners were already customers of the company.
Then comes the rest, in this order: someone with a mandate, a routine inside working hours, and three numbers. Tools exist to make this sequence sustainable, not to replace it — and whoever skips it to buy software first ends up with an empty piece of management software.
The future doesn't reward whoever has the most tools. It rewards whoever knows what they have.
The first step
Where your company stands, in one number
AIRA-SCAN© measures the Relational Capital your company already has: ten questions, three minutes, no registration required. Your browser calculates the score and it appears immediately, along with the dimensions where you're losing the most points.
The extended report then arrives by email, and within one working day someone calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis makes sense for your company. It's free and limited to twelve a week, so it isn't owed to whoever takes the check-up: it's decided together.
Would you rather just talk it through? The number is 0549 888808.