How AI agents rewire the organization

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the impact of goal-seeking AI technologies on organizations, particularly how they can unbundle and rebundle organizational roles and teams, leading to changes in power dynamics and mobility within the organization.

🙋 Q&A

[01] The unbundling and rebundling of organizations

1. How are goal-seeking technologies different from previous technologies?

• Goal-seeking technologies like autonomous AI agents can substitute not just tasks, but entire goals within an organization. This is different from previous technologies that mainly substituted or augmented specific tasks.
• Autonomous AI agents are able to learn and adapt continuously, allowing them to take over planning and resource allocation capabilities that were previously the domain of human workers.

2. How do goal-seeking AI agents impact the scope of roles and teams within an organization?

• AI agents can unbundle goals from individual roles, reducing the scope of those roles. This can lead to the rebundling of roles as smaller roles get combined.
• AI agents can also displace a role's position within a team if the team can now achieve the same goal using an AI agent instead of the human worker.

3. How do goal-seeking technologies impact power dynamics and mobility within an organization?

• As AI agents take over key goals that contributed to a role's power and visibility across teams, that role loses organizational power and mobility, both vertically and laterally.
• Roles that lose contributions to multiple teams with high voting power see their negotiating power within the organization diminish.

[02] Reimagining the AI-led organization

1. What are some of the key changes we can expect in future AI-led organizations?

• Future organizations will be structured as hierarchies of specialized AI agents that interact to achieve complex organizational goals.
• New protocols will emerge to enable effective communication and coordination between these AI agents.
• Marketplaces for hiring AI agents will develop, similar to hiring freelancers today.
• Compliance and liability management for AI agents will become an important opportunity.