AI-first in their strategies and operations, autonomous businesses focus on maximizing value, minimizing time-to-value, and exploiting the inherent advantages of artificial intelligence to deliver extraordinary results to their customers. But getting from limited, one-off AI implementations to a holistic future-oriented approach that emphasizes autonomy is neither easy nor obvious. In Autonomous: Why the Fittest Businesses Embrace AI-First Strategies and Digital Labor, experienced AI executives Vala Afshar and Henry King build on the timeless design principles they introduced in the widely read Boundless to offer business leaders, strategists, and designers a path to success in the AI economy. The book explains how to overcome dated myths, ineffective conventions, and standard operating procedures that don't fit with new realities to build a digital labor force that scales nonlinearly. Afshar and King show you how to enable 24x7x365 continuity and responsiveness, remove blockages and waste, and manage the critical relationships between digital and human intelligent resources. You'll learn how to design for AI control and show your human employees how to feel comfortable letting go of the steering wheel. Autonomous demonstrates the importance of rethinking old orthodoxies and explains how to train, condition, and reward your teams in new ways that acknowledge the impact of digital technologies, including agentic AI. Perfect for managers, executives, strategists, designers, and technology leaders, Autonomous will also equip a new generation of entrepreneurs and founders to capture unheard of amounts of value in new and exciting ways. It's an AI-native guide to steering through uncharted waters in a transformed market that puts digital innovation at the forefront of every strategy and every company.