AI-enabled org charts - from pyramids to diamonds
Here's a visual to help you think through how AI might change your organisational structure.
Today most companies have a pyramid structure:
- fewer senior executives up at the top
- more managers and high value contributors in the middle
- lots of lower value contributors at the bottom
In the (not very distant) future, much of the low value, repetitive work being done at the bottom of the pyramid will be picked up by AI,
Instead, work will be delivered with a combination of experienced humans supported by AI agents, creating a diamond shaped org chart.
CxOs then have a decision to make:
a) convert the efficiency gains they have uncovered by reducing the overall cost of people in the company
b) grow the business faster by redistributing the cost of people to scale the high value human work, supported by even more AI agents
In his book “Co-Intelligence” Ethan Mollick imagines the scenario in the industrial age when breweries discovered a way of brewing their beer in a much more efficient way.
They had two options:
Decide to capture those efficiencies are run the same brewery at higher margins.
Or use those efficiencies to be able to scale up and sell in markets they couldn’t have previously.
For the companies that chose to scale, the efficiencies didn’t result in loss of workers, they actually created massive increase in demand for workers - just in different roles.
With AI we will see the same transformation.
Firstly, the current workforce will work alongside AI to become vastly more efficient,
Then leaders will decide how to use that new efficiency to grow the business faster and in markets they could not access before.
Two examples:
Selling in countries where there is no human language support - AI will provide that.
Selling in customer segments where it was not profitable to sell before - AI will support the lower costs
How to think about this in your own business
Firstly consider drawing up your org chart as a simple pyramid, then converting it to a diamond and assessing which roles are most likely to be augmented or replaced with AI.
Secondly, consider how you can transfer or cross-train those employees into new areas that allow you to expand the size of your diamond and the growth of the business.