I had a previous post on the problem of security in an agentic world. But there are more derivatives of moving into a hybrid workforce of human and AI.
Imagine for a moment that AI agents evolve into perfect rational agents. Every economists dream, agents that execute by maximizing benefit at every turn. No more failures, no ambiguity, just clean and flawless execution. I am not saying we get there, but just entertain the thought for a moment.
In human systems we have meh – that is mediocrity, not up to standards, errors, misspellings, misunderstandings of deliverables, etc. To always deliver a close to perfect product we have put a ton of paper shuffling processes in place. Review boards, editorial processes, stage gates, governance boards, and a host of employees that are there to ensure we all live up to the standards set out.
But what happens when all of that is no longer needed? If meh disappears, the entire justification for bureaucratic control structures collapses.
If we look at the organizational chart, a large part of middle management is there to ensure process compliance, information brokering, meeting facilitation, and administrative overhead (budget, timelines etc.). A lot of this work would disappear with the disappearance of meh.
Once execution become reliable, information flows freely and coordination happens automatically – middle management is largely obsolete.
That means wiping out an entire section in your org chart. These people are likely too far removed from daily operations to move down, and there are too few positions higher up to promote them. These seemingly powerful and useful employees have nowhere to go. Except for those few that truly develop talent, handle interpersonal conflict and translate strategy into concrete operations. And I think we all can name a few that don’t do this.
If we take it in raw numbers, for most of the Western world some 10-18% of workforce is purely administrative. If we look in organizations there is likely a middle manager or team lead for every 10-50 employees. For most people doing white collar jobs, around 20-40% of their time is alignment meetings, revision, etc. All of this could disappear and leave us with what?
What would organizations then start to look like? No more alignment meetings, no more rewrites of the same document, no more move from one system to another system.
This is a very different world. A world of enormous empowerment, strong demand for clear strategy, where direct access to the source can create radical transparency. A heavy burden for those that game the current system of political play, make pretend busy work and rely on the organizational scaffolding to promote their own career.
It is a world where it is more about who cares to get something done, than who is placed to get something done.