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Until recently business AI transformation encompassed handing every employee an LLM. AI helped create our emails, recap our meetings, and handle tier 1 requests. But we’ve quickly matured past this level of AI competency. Now businesses are focused on rebuilding; meaning recreating their processes and systems with AI as the foundation. Inevitably this also means rearchitecting the human capital around these processes and systems. And CEOs are putting forward bold ideas and practices for the AI-centric workforce. If you haven’t kept up here are the most important predictions gaining traction of how AI will transform human capital:
Middle management is dead A human that purely manages other humans is no longer of value in the AI-fied business world. All workers will need to produce outputs to earn a place in the AI org chart. And the management of people and relaying of information from one org level to another; e.g. from ICs to execs, is not considered one of those outputs. This conclusion, along with a history of military strategy beginning with the Roman army, can be found in Jack Dorsey’s essay, which also doubled as a lay-off announcement.
A purely human workforce is a thing of the past Naturally, if businesses are building workflows and agents to reduce human work, it will reduce human workers. The new org structure is staffed with a combination of humans and agents. The ratio of humans to agents, therefore the employability of white collar workers, remains the open question. Diverging viewpoints are emerging and there are two schools of thought:
AI, the human worker slayer– this is what we read about weekly (daily?) in the news and LinkedIn feeds. These posts gain traction because layoffs affect our friends, family and sometimes even ourselves (ahem, me!). This type of news is worrisome, click-baity, and propagated by many LinkedIn influencers who break down the layoff notices one sentence at a time to marinate in the futility of it all. The message across this group of CEOs is the same: we have AI, productivity and output has gone through the roof, and we don’t need as many humans employees. Whether that's true, or whether they are just redirecting salary budget to AI spend, is a conversation for another post. But this the argument basically states that AI = fewer humans = job-pocalypse.
AI as a cornucopia of human-work – countering the job-pocalyse argument is an emerging public conversation of why AI will actually create more work for humans. One thing to note is that this counter argument is not coming from CEOs who are in the middle of laying off thousands of workers. The thesis comes from AI-native businesses like Anthropic (Avasare's bet on the Product Manager role) and Every. In Dan Shipper’s essay, the premise is that AI will vastly increase the level of work needed to manage agents, frame problems and exercise judgement. This increase will result in more human work. As AI hits 100% proficiency on current job benchmarks, those specific tasks become cheap, which stimulates demand for bigger, more complex projects.
….did you just hear that collective sigh of relief?? :)
The super IC is born If you land in #teamcornucopia and believe that work for humans will prevail, and may even be abundant, the next question is who will perform this work? The answer, the super IC. This is the org chart’s newest rockstar. They are an AI-enabled IC who is autonomous and whose output and productivity is extreme and equivalent to that of a team of non AI-enabled humans. The flattening of the org chart is essential to their success as it gives them more room to grow and operate independently. The super IC will manage AI agents, who are our newest class of colleagues, which means they effectively become the middle management layer AI eliminated. Their label is still evolving but phrases like high-value IC, mega IC, intrapreneur (my least favorite), and 100x engineer have entered the lexicon.
Paybands are out, output based comp is in If the super IC fills every role that previously made up a full team of functional resources, inclusive of middle management, logic goes that they would be compensated accordingly. To paraphrase Notion’s CEO, Ivan Zhao, paybands and peanut-butter-spread-raises were a thing of the peaceful SaaS era, and in the era of wartime AI, paybands are not it. Super ICs that outperform their peers, will receive commensurate monetary rewards that could be exponentially higher than that of their peers. In ClickUp’s layoff announcement, CEO Zeb Evan introduced the idea of $1M salary bands for super ICs. A new compensation model could even include earning a percentage of recurring revenue from a product or feature super ICs have shipped. This sounds generous, and exactly how this play out is still TBD.
I’m sure many more ideas will be added to this list in the days to come, and if/when there are more layoffs in tech, these arguments will be made again and again. And while the viewpoints on the future of work sound definitive, it’s important to remember that the theses are mostly being written by people whose companies are in the middle of the experiment, not out the other side. No one has the 30,000 foot view yet, but one thing these CEOs agree on is that to wait and see, without action, is not an option.
What camp are you in, job-pocalypse or cornucopia? I'd genuinely like to know
