This post explores AI’s impact on organizational roles, processes, and decision-making, highlighting shifts in workflows, leadership, and human-AI collaboration.

Over the past few days, I’ve had two distinct streams of thought—one around organizational structures and another around process/workflows and decision-making. Here’s my attempt at blending them into a coherent narrative.

Currently, organizations structure work through clearly defined Roles, each consisting of specific Functions and associated Tasks. These roles range from C-level executives, VPs, Directors, Managers, down to Individual Contributors, with accountability primarily held by humans.

Processes and decision-making within organizations typically follow sequential flows or conditional workflows:

  • Deterministic: Clearly defined sequential processes with binary outcomes (yes/no) (performed by humans and computers)
  • Non-deterministic: Complex scenarios with multiple possible outcomes, often subjective, relying heavily on judgment, experience, and creativity (primarily performed by humans)

As AI agents increasingly enter the workforce, the dynamics of these organizational structures and processes are likely to change. The progressive integration of AI occurs across three primary areas:

  1. Assist: Humans perform primary tasks, supported by AI for efficiency or additional insights.
  2. Automate: AI independently handles repetitive, deterministic tasks within sequential and conditional workflows.
  3. Augment: AI enhances human decision-making, simulating outcomes and assisting in managing complex, subjective, non-deterministic scenarios (GPT is making this possible).

Thoughts, Questions, Discussions:

  1. With AI agents becoming common in the workforce, will exclusive human-centric titles such as HR Manager or Chief People Officer evolve into collaborative roles? (What will those titles be?)
  2. How might Leadership Principles, Culture, and Organizational Values need to evolve as AI integration becomes deeper?
  3. How do you map out what processes to assist and automate, and what non-deterministic scenarios to augment?

PS: These thoughts are outcomes of my reading, conversations, observations, and reflections, along with some enjoyable conversations with various LLMs—why not?