The Future: Smaller Companies, Expert Strategists and Deep Automation
About a year ago, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, predicted there would eventually be a "one-person billion dollar company," with the help of AI. The speed at which AI has been adopted and the immediate impact it’s having on our work and personal lives, is unprecedented. At this pace we may be closer than we think to realizing Mr Altman’s prophecy. So, where are we now?
In 2020 we saw the beginning of a trend of companies downsizing due to COVID, which picked up speed from 2021 to 2023, accelerated in 2024, and is still going. Though COVID and its aftermath created the initial push, subsequent events such as economic uncertainty, lower workforce demand, inflation and now the emergence of accessible Artificial Intelligence has forced companies to look inward. The result isn’t leaner companies, but flat organizational structures with a mixture of employees, consultants, contract workers and wide adoption of AI productivity tools.
Over the past 5 years focus on the employee has been amplified. Large initiatives to quickly create productive remote work environments happened in 2020 and 2021. And though the tech sector has spent the last thirty years refining remote work, many industries have not. The repercussions from this have provided several lessons on how companies are organized and more importantly how it affects their revenue. Primarily the majority of businesses are not set up correctly to engage in productive remote work. Even if their core business lends itself to being decentralized, remote working is fundamentally different than working in an office. Once disorganized companies realized their remote work experiment had failed, another epiphany also came into view. Due to their lack of organization, a significant number of their employees were “high-touch” and needed more direction. This was exacerbated by the excessive number of managers needed to facilitate those employees. These broken layers were starting to reveal themselves and businesses everywhere were searching for a solution.
On November 30, 2022 OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. By January 2023, ChatGPT had reached 100 million active users. The natural language chatbot created the opportunity for even the greenest team member to have access to expert information. What took career employees decades to learn, a new hire could pick up in seconds, without any training at all. Word spread like wildfire and leadership took notice. It’s no secret that one of the most time intensive components of onboarding a new employee is learning the industry that they’re in. New businesses typically hire their first employees with little or no knowledge of their industry and then later hire more experienced people when they can afford it. Many companies start like this, but the problem happens when they scale. They hire more people who don’t have the needed skill sets and relax on the training which creates more and more facilitators, who are in charge of getting the data ready or executing the tasks based upon the data that someone else gathered. With ChatGPT and now other AI tools, training is severely shortened if not completely unneeded. New hires can learn quickly on the job, while expert strategists create the plans for where the company is headed. It’s becoming apparent that work is changing…again. What seems even more obvious is the erosion of the middle. Elevated and experienced task executors are on notice, you’re about to go extinct.
The New Flat
Traditional flat organizations would have minimal management levels. The New Flat organizations will have none at all. Domain expertise will come from the top with additional strategy or targeted skills provided by outside consultants. Coordinators will use AI tools to prepare and format data according to directives disseminated from automated reports that have analyzed the latest KPI’s and provided any necessary adjustments from the previous forecasts. Down the line, contractors will customize assets to uniquely fit the brand and target established customer personas.
Erosion of the Middle
"And when everyone is super, then no one is" -Syndrome (The Incredibles)
The road to middle management had gotten ridiculous. The logic for why people wanted to become managers was sound, more money, extra perks and of course power, but many businesses suffered from the same issues when promoting people to management:
Everyone wants to be promoted. To feel like they are moving forward. It ended up being used as a way to reward people, to prevent people from leaving the company.
Employees may have been good enough at their job to get promoted, but then company training stopped there and they didn’t train them on how to be managers.
Eventually you had more managers than you had employees.
When we look at a manager's responsibilities, their plight becomes a little more understood. Their responsibilities include:
Achieving the organization's goals - Come up with a plan to manage your team to accomplish the goals. (This plan can now be created by AI.)
Employee development - Being a resource of expertise for your team. (This information can now be accessed via AI.)
Effective communication - Relaying tasks, updating information and providing feedback. (AI Automation will now enable this information to be updated in real time.)
Decision-making - Evaluating data and making decisions based upon available options. (AI is fantastic at making educated decisions.)
Resource allocation - Working with your team to put the best person on the job to get work done. (AI always has resources available to get work done.)
A manager's role is a bottoms up approach to push the work up to the top by using their required skills and experience. When there are quicker, more accurate and cheaper ways to achieve the same effect, with limited or no loss of quality, businesses will choose the cheaper option every single time.
Middle management has long been a target of cuts for businesses to reduce expenses. With the advent of AI however, this layer of a business is now on its way out forever.
Real AI Automation
If the organization will be flat and managers will be gone, how will we use AI in the workplace on a typical day?
Morning
Days Agenda - When you start your day, your AI Assistant will have your tasks ready for you that are due that day and will adjust your schedule to accommodate any needed extra time to fulfill those tasks. Tips and guidance will also be provided as to ways to complete those tasks in the most efficient way, with additional notifications about your schedule and any reminders or insights you need to be aware of for the day ahead.
Email and Messages - All of your messages and attachments will be read, compared with your task list and future initiatives. AI will prepare summaries for you to read and all your responses and have them queued for you to review, modify and approve.
Reporting - Viewing your Dashboard you will see the progress you are making on your KPI’s, with insights on how your Actions are contributing to your KPI success, and suggestions on how to stay focused and consistent.
Encouragement - Sensing your current mood, your AI Assistant will highlight areas of potential time conflict that you should be aware of and additional words of inspiration to help you get the most out of your day.
Afternoon
Collaboration and Delegation - As you work through your tasks, collaborating, discussing and strategizing with your AI team, you will identify tasks that need further thought and consideration and delegate those to your AI Assistant to work on in the background while you continue to work though the additional tasks at hand.
Learning - Part of your day will be dedicated to upgrading your skills as part of your personal goals. You can follow the curriculum your AI Assistant has prepared for you with discussions, videos and verbal quizzes. You will be notified how you are doing compared to others with similar experience.
Decision Feedback - As you strategize and work through roadblocks and potential unknowns, you’ll voice your challenges to your AI Assistant. As part of your discussion reasoning you can suggest possible outcomes or scenarios to allow the AI Assistant to help you navigate your options. This feedback is instrumental and will help guide you similarly as a manager or mentor would.
End of Day Review - Your AI Assistant can inform you not only of your own productivity, but that of the rest of the team and how their progress is affecting the group's timelines and project status. If there are any final messages or last minute tasks you need to perform, you can finish those off with your AI Assistant asking to update your team or anyone else as needed.
Chaos Ahead
This is happening now. Major enterprises are escalating layoffs with intentions of intertwining AI into their daily operations, but that progress will be slow as they try to shed old processes for new ones and expensive initiatives, some recently implemented, will need to be sunsetted for the new, more powerful and faster, AI ones. Real exponential growth will be seen at the start up level where businesses that needed access to cost prohibitive experiential data can now get answers with a click of a button. Like the road to digital transformation in years past, the slow adopters and AI deniers will descend slowly at first and then torpedo to the bottom. Employment will be volatile in several sectors as there will be fewer jobs and too many people to fill them (this is also happening now) until industries invent new ones that can fill out the top and bottom of the org charts more completely than I have outlined here. Eventually, you will be hired with the expectation that you have experience working with your AI team and the prompts needed to keep them productive and cash flow positive. Some of us will embrace this fully and some not at all as interface buttons give way to microphones and speakers as our primary tools for communication. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen this movie before, some of us a few times. The storm has arrived and in its wake will be a clean slate to build again. We will marvel at the shiny new things while our children go on with business as usual.