What the automobile taught us about AI. A hundred years early.
- benjamin. brl
- 28 avr.
- 2 min de lecture
In 1894, the automobile is a joke.
Doctors publish papers warning that the human body was not designed to travel faster than 30 km/h. The French press calls the first vehicles “machines infernales.” Horse breeders lobby governments across Europe to block the whole thing before it gets out of hand. ¹
The best coachmakers in Europe : the ones dressing carriages for royal families for example, watch from a distance. Convinced it won’t last.
Most of them wait.
Some of them act.
My family were coachmakers in Orléans : the Delaugère frères, among the finest in France.
When the automobile arrived, they faced the same question every leader faces at an inflection point:
Do we protect what we’ve built, or do we bet on what’s coming?
Protecting what they had built made sense. Their reputation was impeccable. Their clients were loyal. Their craft was at its peak.
The Delaugère chose to bet.
Not blindly, but deliberately. They didn’t wait for the technology to prove itself to everyone else. They decided early, committed fully, and rebuilt their identity around the new paradigm.
In 1898, they present their first motorized tricycle at the Paris Automobile Exhibition.
In 1907, the King of Greece buys one of their cars. ³
In 1913, the press compares them to Rolls-Royce. ³
By 1906, they had tripled their capital and built a 22,000 m² factory in Orléans: one of the most modern in France at the time. ³
And the coachmakers who chose to protect what they had? Gone. Within a decade.
I tell this story to every executive who says: “We’re watching AI, waiting to see how it plays out.”
I understand the instinct. AI is noisy, unreliable in places, and the promises are sometimes overblown. The skepticism is legitimate.
But skepticism is not a strategy.
What the Delaugère understood in 1894 and what I see in the companies gaining ground today, is that this was never about adopting the technology. It was about deciding where you want to be when the dust settles.
That’s not a technical question. It’s a vision question.
What this means in practice
The executives moving well on AI are not the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones who answered one question early:
In 3 years, what role does AI play in the value I create for my clients?
Not “which tools do I use.” Not “what’s my budget.” The value question first.
Everything else: tools, teams, processes, gets built around that answer.
That’s what I mean by Vision before technology.
The coachmakers of 1900 had a choice.
Build the future. Or disappear with the past.
The question is the same today. Which coachmaker do you want to be?
Céline Delaugère coFounder, CELDEL & MyDataMachine
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