I spent last week in Rome. One afternoon, touring the Colosseum, I left thinking about something I hadn’t expected: artificial intelligence.
Standing inside a two-thousand-year-old arena, what struck me wasn’t the spectacle; it was the engineering and where the engineering came from.
The Romans didn’t dominate the Western world because they were the greatest inventors. They weren’t. They borrowed the arch from the Etruscans and much of their science from the Greeks. What they did better than anyone was take technology and apply it at scale, usually because the state, and especially the military, needed them to.
That pattern is worth paying attention to right now because it’s happening again with AI.
The companies that get this right won’t just adopt AI; they will succeed in building their colosseum. Like the merchants who turned military roads into trade routes, they will find uses no one planned for and build on them for years.
The roads were built for war. Civilization rode on them for centuries.
Consider the most famous Roman technology of all: the roads. We remember them as the arteries of trade and culture: “all roads lead to Rome.” But that’s not why they were built.
The Appian Way, begun in 312 BC, was a military project, built to move legions and supplies quickly during Rome’s wars in the south. Speed of troops, not commerce, was the point. Rome eventually paved an estimated 50,000 miles of roads, a network so durable that parts still carry traffic today. The military paid for it, but the merchants, messengers, tax collectors, and ordinary citizens used it for the next four hundred years. The infrastructure far outlived the war that justified it.
The Colosseum tells the same story: built with Roman concrete and funded largely by the spoils of Rome’s war in Judea.
This is exactly how our most important technologies happened.
If that sounds familiar, it should:
- The internet began as ARPANET, a U.S. defense project.
- GPS was built by the military before it ever guided a phone.
- The interstate highway system was passed in 1956 as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The name reveals its dual purpose.
In each case, a government need, often a defense need, funded infrastructure that then quietly powered decades of private enterprise.
Artificial intelligence is the newest entry in that lineage. Much of the research, the chips, and the national investment now flowing into AI is shaped by geopolitical competition. But just like the roads, the lasting value won’t be in the conflict. It will be in what the rest of us build on top of the infrastructure once it exists.
The lesson for companies isn’t “use AI.” It’s “treat it like infrastructure.”
Here I want to be both an optimist and a realist. The optimist sees that we’re living through the early years of a new infrastructure layer. Companies that build on it thoughtfully will compound advantages for years, the way a Roman town on a good road did.
The realist remembers Rome’s warning. Once the conquests stopped, Roman innovation largely stalled; an economy leaning on cheap labor had little reason to keep improving. Progress isn’t automatic. It depends on whether you keep investing once the initial pressure is gone.
For the mid-sized companies I work with, in transportation, logistics, manufacturing, distribution, and energy, the practical lesson is to treat AI as infrastructure, not as a gadget. That changes how you act:
- Build roads, not one-off trips. A clever demo that solves one problem and is then forgotten is a trip. A reusable capability: clean data, a documented process, a tool your team can rely on, is a road. Favor the roads.
- Invest where the traffic will be. The Romans put roads where armies and trade needed to move. Put your AI effort where your real operational volume is: dispatch, safety, maintenance, billing, customer service, not where it merely looks impressive.
- Build for durability. A road no one maintains becomes rubble; an AI tool no one owns, tests, or documents becomes a risk. Decide who maintains what before you scale it.
- Keep investing after the early win. Rome stalled when the pressure eased. Don’t let one success convince you the work is done.
Final Thought
The roads were built for legions, but it was the merchants, messengers, and missionaries who made them matter. Trade, law, language, and even Christianity, a new religion, all rode on infrastructure originally built for war. Its lasting value came not from its original purpose, but from what people later built on top of it.
AI is that kind of moment. The technology is arriving, pushed forward by forces far larger than any one company. The question for the rest of us is the one a Roman engineer would have asked: now that the road exists, what are we going to build on it?
The road is being built. The question is whether your organization will be among those who shape what rises along it — or watch others build.
About the Author
Katrina Montinola is the fractional CIO and AI Practice Lead Partner at 2Go Advisory Group, where she works with mid-sized companies on the practical side of AI adoption: helping leadership teams treat AI as durable infrastructure rather than one-off experiments. She helps them build the data, processes, and operating models that turn early wins into lasting business value.
Her clients span industries as varied as transportation, distribution, specialty testing, and nonprofit services — organizations with strong operators and deep domain expertise that are navigating what AI makes possible in their specific businesses.
If the road metaphor in this article resonates and you want to make sure you are building roads rather than taking one-off trips, she is available for an initial conversation.
Reach Katrina at kmontinola@cios2go.com or +1 (650) 346-3880. Learn more at https://www.2goadvisorygroup.com/artificial-intelligence.
For your Talent needs in direct hire, full-time or part-time contract staffing, contact Executive Recruiter, Leesa Meintzer, at leesa@2gorecruiting.com.
Leesa Meintzer is an executive recruiter with more than 20 years of experience in talent acquisition. She excels in partnering across various business functions and brings a comprehensive perspective to talent acquisition. She works with Engineering, Healthcare, Product, Finance, Accounting, Business Operations, Sales, Legal, Human Resources, Learning & Development, and Talent Acquisition for corporate and high-growth start-ups.
2GO Advisory Group™ is a San Francisco Bay Area-based pioneer of fractional C-suite services. For 35 years our flagship CFOs2GO® lineage has grown to COOs2GO™, CHROs2GO™, CIOs2GO™, and Talent2GO™, pairing consulting partners with recruiting to deliver tailored executive solutions. We help organizations navigate change and execute strategy across industries in the U.S. and internationally, with local representation in most metros. Copyright.
