AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

AI is completely redrawing the standard org chart, and I want to share with you the three biggest changes I’m seeing and how to manage your own career through this shift. And if you’re a leader, you’ll get a better sense of what frontier companies are doing and how to copy them.

How you structure your workforce is one of the most powerful levers in business. Hiring great people gets you their best work. Fitting them together right gets you the work that none of them could do alone.

Henry Ford cut car build time by 88% by redesigning car assembly lines into contained steps after realizing it takes years for a human to master the build of a whole car, but only days to master one step. Jeff Bezos (my old mega boss) capped teams at “two pizzas” because past a certain size, coordinating people costs more than each new person adds. And Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA with ~60 direct reports and zero 1-on-1s, because information leaks at every layer it passes through. All three structures are designed to get the most out of what their people could do.

AI agents have rewritten what a person, and a team, can now get done. Each one of these limits has moved: the hours in a working day (agents can work while you sleep), the years it takes to learn a specialty (GPT-4 passed the Bar Exam 3 years ago), and the amount of coordination a group can survive before it slows down (my team runs a bunch of AI loops to try and make sure nothing falls through the cracks).

I built a product entirely by myself, from first idea to finished code, and it’s launching publicly next week (watch this space). As someone who used to run a team of 30 on AI product development at one of the largest companies in the world, it feels like the ceiling on what I'm capable of has skyrocketed. The scarcity mindset is melting. And when human capacity changes, everything designed around it changes too. Roles, titles, team sizes, the whole org chart - in short, an AI-first company has a completely different shape. 

THE 3 BIG SHIFTS IN ORG STRUCTURES

Here are the three massive changes I keep seeing, and what each one means for how you organize people. Share this with your executives and people leaders to make sure you all stay in the know.

1. Teams are getting smaller

Work that used to take a pod - a whole crew of engineers, 3 product managers, and a designer or two - is getting done by two or three code-friendly people (note that I didn’t say Software Engineer!) working with agents. Instagram, for example, is testing ‘Product Staff’ - generalist operators doing the job of a researcher, a designer, and product manager, all in one. Like the veg-o-matic of people.

What it means: The coordination layer between people (standups, handoffs, the "just circling back" emails) shrinks with the headcount, and output per person technically goes up. Workforce planning now means designing small teams-plus-agents rather than headcount alone. Prioritize finding ways of sharing agents amongst the smaller team. And remember that an AI-first team of two can now outperform an AI-last team of 20.

2. Roles are getting wider

Role depth used to cost you breadth. The best product specialists often didn’t have time to learn to code and design on the side. But now anyone can “code” (I prefer saying anyone can “build”) by describing what they want to AI. Non-technical marketers can get AI to SQL their data or build lead-flow automations. Non-technical operations specialists can build their compensation tracking tool instead of filing a ticket and waiting a quarter for engineering resources.

What it means: Roles start being defined by the workflow and outcome a person owns and less by narrow titles. Clara Shih, former Meta and Salesforce exec, said she believes that job categories will collapse into 3 buckets: building products, selling products, and running the company. And existing job architectures (role descriptions, ladders, comp bands) which were built for pigeon-holed roles, not workflows or outcomes, will be shifted to match.

3. Hierarchy is getting flatter

A lot of the middle of the org chart exists to move information up and down, to create buffer, and to increase quality and verification of outputs. Agents do both now, so those middle management layers are likely to thin out first. ElevenLabs, for example, removed job titles entirely (their titles now are just team names like ‘Operations’ and ‘Go-To-Market’) so people could more easily focus on impact delivered instead of title chasing. And Andy Jassy (the now mega boss of Amazon) has ordered Amazon to raise its ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%.

What it means: More ownership per person, which raises how much trust every hire requires, shifts where liability sits, and puts agents on the chart itself as teammates, watchdogs, and judges. Each employee now likely manages over higher risk, more outputs, and faster change. B players get sniffed out in days rather than years.

THIS IS THE CHRO’S MOMENT 

Every one of these changes lands in HR's lap. Smaller teams rewrite workforce planning, more fluid roles impact hiring and career paths, and flatter reporting lines change what management even means. We will be discussing this in our CHRO roundtable in two weeks, and you can apply to join us here.

The AI-first companies are already moving. Uber paired ~30 of the company's most AI-fluent engineers with domain experts across HR, finance, legal, marketing, and support in two-week sprints where they built and shipped together. 16 pods across 16 business functions in two months. And workflows changed within weeks: capital allocation across 150 cities went from taking 15 hours to 30 minutes, financial pacing reports went from 2 days to 10 minutes, and support workflow creation went from 9,000 manual workflows to self-service automation. This is workforce redesign at its finest.

WHAT MOST TECH TRANSFORMATIONS MISS

The stakes cut both ways, and your company is worse-off with a tech-only approach. Hand people the superhuman AI tools without redesigning the people’s work around them, and your employees end up feeling like mindless productivity drones. Sure, they’re running ten agent workflows a day, but they leave work unfulfilled and feeling like they contributed nothing. Is that the company you want to work at? Is that the impact you want to own?

Redesign the work properly and you get almost the complete opposite: people breaking out of limitations and hamster wheels they've been stuck in for years, and teams delivering outcomes none of them could do alone without AI. You get an elevated workforce with results you never thought were possible. The gap between those two outcomes is change management, and change management is your home turf.

HOW CHROs CAN HELP AND LEAD

One of my clients, the CHRO of a Fortune 50 company, took her entire team through a 4-week AI transformation with us through our Mastermind, and they all built fully working agents that prioritized quality, reliability, and impact. The team had never opened a terminal before. They now can use agents to improve their work every day.

Another Fortune 500 CHRO I work with took our 1:1 advising sessions to heart, and recognized that, because of AI, roles and responsibilities in her company were shifting underneath them. To get ahead of the change and mobilize tens of thousands of employees, she championed a reskilling effort and launched a company-wide AI reskilling survey to match people's capabilities to the new work needed with AI (ex: knowledge management) and both new and existing job categories growing because of AI (ex: FDEs, AI operations).

I want to hand you the exact same playbook so that you can lead your company through the noise and build a stronger, more resilient workforce in the AI age.

On Monday, August 3rd at 1:00PM ET, I'm hosting a virtual roundtable with Jacqui Canney, ServiceNow's Chief People and AI Enablement Officer.

If you’re a senior people leader looking to finally understand the role of CHROs in the AI age and shorten your learning curve, I want you there.

The roundtable will be 60 minutes, completely free, and is largely built for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Heads of L&D. 

You'll leave with:

• A plan for updating your workflows and people management in the AI age

• What new and lasting skills to hire for and how to interview for these skills

• The inside scoop from one of the world's leading people and AI executives on how she enabled AI across a workforce - and key mistakes and learnings

• Actionable next steps for your own org, and exclusive AI resources (HR-specific prompts and trained AI skills) from our team

• Access to the AI-First Academy for FREE (normally $397), so you have the AI foundations you need to redesign the workforce around what AI can actually do.

We’re keeping the room small so you can point your questions to Jacqui and me directly. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Jump in today.

If you're reading this as a director or an IC, forward this to your CHRO or HR lead.

Stay curious, stay informed,

Allie

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