Still think of the organizations you work for as structures built from people, roles, org charts, and company culture? Hate to break it to you — you’re deluding yourselves.
In reality, the day-to-day functioning of any company is already, for the most part, a system of algorithms: a sequence of decisions, operating rules, approval chains, exceptions, and automations — some explicit, most not.
This is precisely why you should have a healthy fear of AI. It is making this algorithmic nature impossible to ignore, and it won’t be long before business itself gets redesigned as a dynamic graph of processes and decisions continuously orchestrated by intelligent systems — in which you might have a role, but more likely won’t.
Don’t believe it? Feel free to reject it as fact. Go right ahead — head in the sand, backside cheerfully exposed to the wind. 😈
The Hidden Complexity
Here’s the truth: companies already survive today thanks to the tacit knowledge of one or two people who quietly hoard undocumented exceptions, invisible dependencies, and decision flows that have calcified over the years. They’ve memorised all of it — deliberately — to make themselves hard to replace and keep the paycheques coming.
Not for long, my friends.
As long as the market stays stable, this hidden complexity can be tolerated and left alone. But wait for the next market shock. If adaptability becomes the primary competitive advantage, that same complexity becomes a deadweight — and you’re all out picking daisies.
The New Organisational Scale
I believe this will also reshape the ideal size of companies.
If an increasing number of operational functions can be coordinated by AI agents and intelligent workflows, then small, high-density teams can compete with organisations that are vastly larger and slower.
After all, most management layers exist solely to coordinate inefficiencies that AI will eliminate.
Middle manager? Oops — sorry, make that unemployed. 😈
Where Human Value Goes Next
AI won’t simply replace certain tasks. It will call into question the very reason so many organisational structures exist in their current form.
Human value won’t disappear — but it will migrate toward what systems still can’t do well: reading context, navigating ambiguity, building vision, making decisions under incomplete information, earning trust.
The Question You Should Be Asking
So ask yourself this: how structured and legible is the company you work for — to an AI system? How much of its data, processes, and decisions does it expose and consume in an explicit, rules-based, deterministic way?
Think of a post office. Or the back-office of a large corporate.
If the system can be redesigned as an algorithm, you’re already a dead man floating — run while you still can.
Let me know in the comments whether you’ve read between the lines, and what your company looks like — if you’re not too much of a coward. 😈