Not pure unpredictability in general, but unpredictability about how much and when progress will be made in a positive direction, eg. what you'd tend to get in applied AI. A few ideas:
- in a highly competitive market your actions can be unpredictable by competitors: evolution shows this can work even in the most primitive ways - it's so damn hard to swat a fly because it changes direction randomly, being smarter than it doesn't help... you could get supercharged versions of this advantage with random-AI-progress as long as you don't constrain business direction, eg. if your AI research suddenly produces breakthroughs that shows you can have an advantage on smart adult toys by applying you aerospace technology capabilities, then be willing to get in that space and play to win regardless of how much that makes sense (tip: you'll probably want to stay privately owned, markets will likely hate this "random pivoting" as it would look from outside) -- as business you'd be "the fly that no one can swat"
- use what's knows to be good at turning positive unpredictability into overall profits (markets), but internally - have multiple projects & people competing against each other inside a company, cheating antifragility / resilience, and really allow projects to fail (as in make it clear that you could be promoted even if the project/team you lead fails, so encourage the king of risk that would be too high even for a startup) etc. - you'll average out the unpredictibility and be left with the progress + antifragility -- as a business you'll be "the cockroach that survives after radiation, eg. unpredictability, has killed everything else"
Hint: all these are already happening, since before AI... and what you'll see now will be that AI/ML will bring most benefits to large corporations with multiple lines of business and multiple independent departments/subsidiaries competing agains each other, and startups-inside-corporations that until now were "pale fakes"... and probably investors already groked this too, there's a lot of growth in AI/ML applied deep inside the guts of big Cos... when this plays out to real wins, result will probably be pretty dystopic: SMBs will be wiped out, lots independent startups too probably (as a small/lone player you can't turn unpredictable progress into profits), you'll get even more centralization, and more mass-surveilance bc now it will not offer only national security advantages but also massive immediate business advantages with AI feeding on the data...
EDIT+: That's I think the problem we need to solve is how to de-centralize and spread the benefits of applying AI to business... bc it will naturally promote centralization and closed gardens, unpredictable progress is mostly toxic to each individual player alone... we need some business-version-of-democracy++, pure capitalism will result in a marriage of mega-corps + pseudo-totalitarian-govs since these will be the entities naturally thriving in the new landscape.