Who has a future ahead of them – and who does not. The Case of InPost.

What prompted me to write this short article was a recent InPost presentation. The company unveiled a new feature in its mobile app: an AI-powered shopping assistant designed to guide users through offers from more than 4,000 retail partners (for now), with no seller commission (the same caveat applies here), and delivery via its parcel locker network. In doing so, InPost is announcing its move into e-commerce – and it is doing so in a bold way. The concept itself, a new natural-language product search engine, is genuinely interesting. During the presentation, someone from the audience suggested: “Let’s look for a romance novel where there’s a big age gap between the main characters.”

This new direction, presented by Rafał Brzoska in a distinctly Jobs-like style, naturally sparked excitement in the market and opened up all sorts of discussions: is Von Halsky better than Allegro’s search engine, could InPost threaten marketplaces, and so on. I do not know the answer to that, and I do not want to try to answer it here. But it does lead me to a very different thought, one that comes from my own professional perspective. What impressed me about InPost is that despite its intensive growth in Poland and abroad within its core business, it still has something new ahead of it. It is still exploring, still experimenting with new directions. And contrary to what one might think, this is not just uncommon – in my view, it is genuinely rare.

I think many observers, including leaders and business owners, do not envy InPost only for its scale, ambition, or success, but for the fact that it has managed to create entirely new business horizons for itself – it still has something ahead of it, something it is building toward.

One caveat here: I have not spent hours in rooms where InPost discusses its strategy. Nor am I inside Rafał Brzoska’s head. What I am writing below is my own subjective reflection – the view of an observer who has spent years working with companies on new business models and innovation culture. Still, what I am noticing seems consistent with the many posts and comments from employees and partners involved in the implementation, who speak about the excitement of being part of such a pioneering project. That, too, says a great deal about the organization’s culture.

I am bringing up InPost today because, in my opinion, it illustrates something I discuss with companies regularly: why some organizations are able to develop what they have today while also building what could become their next source of advantage – while others are not.

What did InPost actually do?

Of course, the move can be read at the product level: an interesting AI experiment, a new shopping interface, an attempt to simplify the customer journey. Especially since InPost had already been involved in AI before, including supporting Bielik in its mobile app.

On the surface, it looks like the rollout of a new feature. In practice, it is something far more significant. For years, InPost has primarily been a logistics partner for e-commerce. A very good one – with a convenient product, a strong brand, efficient operations, and a network that has changed the shopping habits of millions of customers. But still, a logistics partner. Now it is moving further up the value chain. It no longer wants to be just the company that delivers a purchase decision made somewhere else. It is starting to move closer to the very moment of choice: product discovery, offer comparison, decision-making, and purchase completion. This is no longer just logistics. It is an attempt to build its own point of contact with the customer, to accompany them in their shopping plans and purchasing decisions.

And that is exactly why this move is so interesting. Because the real advantage here does not lie in the AI agent itself. The real advantage lies in the fact that behind that agent stands a logistics moat that most companies simply do not have. A network of parcel lockers, infrastructure, daily contact with users, operational scale, the habit of using the app, brand recognition, and trust – all of this means that InPost can experiment with a new model under conditions that are fundamentally different from those of a startup or a traditional marketplace. It can afford a no-commission model for sellers not because it has suddenly discovered a better economic model for e-commerce. It can do so because it already has its own monetization engine in logistics and parcel flow. In other words: explore – the search for new models – is being built on top of a very solid exploit – continuously improved logistics.

Does it have to do this? Probably not. Will it work? We do not know yet. We do not know whether customers will actually want to shop this way. We do not know whether this kind of interface will feel natural to them, or whether the search results will truly be better. But none of that changes the most important point: despite its excellent position in logistics, InPost is still looking for new growth areas that could offer opportunities on a scale comparable to its core business – and that in itself is already an advantage. I read this as the ability to move beyond a strategic dilemma I see regularly – the innovator’s dilemma, or more broadly the tension between exploit (optimizing and extracting value from products, services, and business models that already work) and explore (searching for new sources of growth).

What is more, the InPost case also brings to mind another pattern I often see when working with companies on innovation strategy, new growth areas, or intrapreneurship programs – two recurring patterns around the combination of leadership and culture:

• Type 1: exploit-only companies – these are organizations fully focused on what they have now. They improve processes, raise margins, deliver results, and as long as the market is growing or there is still someone to catch up with, everything looks fine. The problem begins when the company becomes so attached to its current model that it stops asking what its next game might be. It thinks only about how to do what it already does even better. It does not ask what it should be doing three years from now. These companies, even when they deliver excellent results, are often managed too narrowly. They grow as long as the market within their current business allows them to. Then they lose momentum and often genuinely do not know how to break out of the impasse.
• Type 2: companies with vision, but without the culture to carry it – here the problem is the opposite. Leaders and owners – often highly charismatic – can see the future and think several steps ahead. They talk about transformation, new business models, innovation, AI, market change. They are usually very good at reading the market and spotting trends, and they have big ambitions. There is one sentence that often appears very early in these conversations: “Our CEO has loads of ideas, but we just can’t keep up with him.” And often that is true. The CEO’s ideas are not fantasies – they may well have real potential – but the organization cannot keep pace. The processes, structures, work rhythms, and culture are built for exploitation: repeatability, control, predictability, minimizing mistakes. There is no space for experimentation, and no tolerance for uncertainty. There are not enough resources for development, but there is also no system capable of carrying new initiatives from idea to real-world validation. And then something very typical happens: ideas do not die because they are bad. They die because the company is not built to realize them. This is one of the most common patterns I see – a visionary leader and an organization that does not know how to operationalize that vision.

Why is this so difficult? Because explore and exploit require different kinds of organizations

In innovation management theory, people talk about organizational ambidexterity – the ability to exploit what works today while also exploring what does not yet exist. It sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the hardest challenges companies face. These are two different operating systems.

Most companies try to do explore using an exploit system. And then they wonder why nothing comes of it. New initiatives are assessed too quickly, too harshly, and against the wrong metrics. Or the opposite happens: the company throws itself into innovation without a strong operational foundation, and explore turns into chaos – without resources and without patience.

That is why this kind of ambidexterity is so rare. You could say it requires two things at once: a locomotive and a system. On the one hand, leaders who set the direction and give permission to explore. On the other, an organization that can carry that effort without breaking what already works.

And that is exactly why InPost is so interesting today

Not because it has launched yet another feature. Not because it has an AI dog-assistant. InPost is worth watching because it seems to show – disclaimer repeated – what it looks like to build an organization that can both deliver in the present and design its own future.

On the one hand, we have a company that is very strong on exploit. It is scaling its network, improving operations, increasing volumes, growing internationally, and building its position beyond Poland. On the other hand, we have an organization that clearly does not want to remain just an excellent executor within someone else’s ecosystem. It wants to test where else it can play. It wants to build its own customer touchpoint. It wants to use technology not as a gimmick, but as a tool for pushing the boundaries of its business model. And importantly, these two worlds do not seem separate from one another. This does not look like a situation where one small team “does innovation” while the rest of the company focuses on the “real business.”

In closing

The most interesting thing about InPost today is not whether Von Halsky will prove successful. The most interesting thing is that InPost has the space, the resources, and the organizational courage to make a move like this at all. Companies do not usually lose because they lack ideas. They lose because they cannot simultaneously deliver what works today and build what will work tomorrow. That is why, in my view, InPost is worth watching today: because it shows what an organization trying to do both at once can actually look like.