Abundance Game 2030: Which companies will win in the AI-Era?

We started the Human-Positive Company based on a belief about what the market will actually reward in the AI era. A playbook built on human value, discipline and constraint, that compounds into outsized success.

There are signals already in the wild. For example, Anthropic refused to let its models be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans, and lost a Pentagon contract worth up to $200M as a result. OpenAI stepped in and took the deal with the federal government, facing a “Cancel ChatGPT” backlash sharp enough that uninstalls surged 295% and one-star reviews spiked. One quarter later, Anthropic's revenue crossed OpenAI's for the first time: $11.5B vs $6.7B in Q2 2026. A hard call, made under real pressure, was rewarded by the market.

We wanted to test whether that pattern would hold when we put other operators in the same seat. So we created the Abundance Game.

The Abundance Game is a role-play simulation we first ran at Johns Hopkins University’s The Future of Our Realities: Work and Truth Summit. In our simulation, participants were transported to 2030. Each joined one of two hot companies with identical financials, headcount, and market position. One runs the extraction playbook. Their motto is "Darwin was right." An unrelenting beast, they'll do anything in the name of speed, growth, and winning. The other runs on a human-positive ethos for value creation — trust, pluralism, human agency, and do no harm. Then we introduced a series of crises.

Participants made choices to respond on behalf of their company. Decisions included who to employ and how, what to launch or kill, what to disclose, and what to defend. The apex predators had fun applying ruthless tactics with zero regret. The human-positive leaders got creative in their quest to find better solutions that fit within their organization’s constraints.

Then we put their maneuvers to the test. We released them from their respective companies, and asked the participants three simple questions: Which company do you want to work for? Which do you want to buy from? Which would you invest in?

You might think that each would favor their own team's strategic decisions, but that’s not what happened. 75% of all participants chose to work for and invest in the human-positive company and 68% chose to buy from the human-positive company. Most recently, we ran this simulation at the MIT AI-Powered Women Conference and the results were similar.

We built this game to see what would happen when leaders had to navigate unexpected challenges and make tough decisions, to feel the gravity of the situation and choose. They were not sideline pundits selecting some abstract option on a survey, but empowered operators creating the future in real-time.

One participant told us, “the extraction playbook may seem like the pragmatic choice until you actually have to defend it in a room full of people who have to live with the consequences.” People want to work for, buy from, and invest in companies they can defend. That's why human-positive companies will win the long game. Workforce ingenuity, positive-sum prosperity, and ethical and humane use of AI aren't constraints on growth. They're how it compounds.

The best part? Participants report that when they go back to their real companies and roles, they remember what they experienced and learned. And they're starting to put human-positive discipline into practice.

What will you choose? Come play with us. We’re continuing our game-based research at universities, conferences and inside organizations.

If you'd like to participate in The Abundance Game, or bring it to your organization, contact us.