How AI and automation are changing the future of work

I ran a 49-person agency in my early twenties. If I started it today I think it would be nine people, and I think it would do more. That is not a prediction about layoffs. It is a description of what a company is made of, and how much of it was always scaffolding.

What a company actually is

Strip away the org chart and a company is a set of promises and the work needed to keep them. Most of that work is coordination: moving information from the person who has it to the person who needs it, in the right shape, at the right time. Meetings, status updates, handoffs, reports, approvals. The people doing the real work were always a minority. The rest kept the machine running.

Automation eats coordination first. It has been doing so since the spreadsheet, but models change the rate. A system can now read a messy email, understand what it means for a project, update the plan, and tell the one person who needs to know. The middle of the company, the part that existed to pass things along, gets thin.

What is left is better

I know how that sounds, so let me be concrete about what I see on the other side.

• Smaller teams with bigger scope. One person with good tools runs what used to be a department. They are not busier. They are more responsible, and the work is more interesting, because the repetitive part is gone.
• Judgment becomes the job. Deciding what to build, what to say, what a customer actually needs, when a rule should bend. These were always the valuable things. They were buried under the scaffolding.
• Companies form faster and die faster. When the cost of operating is low, the cost of trying is low. More experiments. Shorter lives. That is healthy for an economy and hard on the people inside it, and both of those are true at once.

The uncomfortable part

The transition is not fair by default. The person whose job was the scaffolding does not automatically get the judgment job. That has to be built: training, time, and a company culture that moves people toward the work instead of out the door. I coach founders, and this is the thing I push on hardest. Automate the work, not the people. Then give the people the hours back and a harder problem.

Why I am still optimistic

I have been a drummer, a ballplayer, a founder, an officer, a CIO, and now the captain of a ship that has to reach a billion people. None of those were jobs that existed a century ago in the form I did them. Work changes shape. The people who do it change with it. What stays is the thing I actually care about: that it is possible for someone with an idea and no permission to build something that matters. Automation makes that more possible, not less. That is the future of work I am building toward.