Business | Schumpeter

A Lego-lover’s guide to preparing for the AI age

How to transform companies for the digital era, brick by pixel

A Lego head held by someone ascending Lego steps with electronic contacts
Image: Brett Ryder

In London’s Design Museum, an exhibition currently on display by Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist, includes a 15-metre-long work called “Water Lilies #1” based on the triptych by Claude Monet. Look closely and it is made of 650,000 Lego bricks—which integrates Monet’s impressionism into what Mr Ai calls a “digitised and pixelated language”. That is a good analogy for Lego itself. The Danish toymaker is on a long-term mission to digitise and pixelate its own fount of human creativity: the plastic brick.

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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “A Lego-lover’s guide to AI”

From the July 8th 2023 edition

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