What Happens to Org Charts and Employment When Agents Run the Work?

Reimagining the Org Chart for the Intelligence Era

Origins of the Org Chart

In the 1850s, embarking on building cross-continental railroads in the US, Daniel McCallum drew up the first organization chart to help bring about clarity, structure, and definition to a multi-team challenge. Fast forward 175+ years later and the org chart remains largely unchanged: reporting structures mapped in a hierarchy with tiers of resources aligned by functions and/or offerings.

Rigid, inflexible, and largely linear - the org chart as we know it is finally about to change.

Enter the Intelligence Era

The past few years have seen an incredible transformation in how teams and individuals get work done. AI Assistants that can retrieve knowledge, generate content, and complete tasks opened the door to an entirely new way to unlock trapped time and expand every individual's capabilities (and confidence).

With the advent of AI Agents - systems of orchestrated agents that reason over and complete tasks with human oversight and direction - we're seeing an even greater shift: entire workflows reimagined to expedite outcomes, scale impact, and free humans to focus on strategic work rather than tactical work.

The challenge, however, remains how we organize around the task itself. In other words, the challenge remains the org chart.

Consider the Film Industry

The fixed rigidity that characterizes most organizational charts is in stark contrast to the more fluid organizational dynamics of the film industry: When a project begins, the right people - director, actors, sound designers, crew members, etc. - are brought together from various teams and companies to collaborate toward one outcome: making a great film. When and as their role is complete, individuals move on to the next project - which, often, is not the same next project for all.

This is highly fluid, dynamic, challenge-oriented organizing. And it's what I expect we'll see across industries as we advance further into the agentic AI era.

Most importantly, it's what I expect will finally remove the bottleneck for collaboration-at-scale potential with human-agent teams.

Agents as Collaboration Orchestrators

Agents, each specialized in their own domain expertise and abilities, orchestrate together in order to complete a task - looping in a human as needed for oversight, direction, and/or final confirmation.

Their productivity, however, remains limited by the organizational dynamics of the teams and organizations within which they operate. Mirroring these principles, humans, too, will need to reimagine how we self-organize around given outcomes: not around functions or products, but the very work of achieving a given goal/project/challenge.

Like the film industry, we can imagine that truly AI-first organizations will embrace a dynamic org chart wherein the right human resources and Agents are orchestrated together to collaboratively achieve a set goal, with agents and humans being "hired" in as needed. Once their role is complete, they're assigned (or hired) to the next challenge.

In this shift, we'll likely find Agents not only orchestrate themselves but human collaboration too in order to achieve shared outcomes.

What will Human Employment Look Like?

As I see it, three primary models are already taking shape, each with roots in how some people already work:

1. The Talent Pool Model
   Organizations will employ highly valuable people whose talents represent a competitive advantage. These folks stay employed even between active projects - partly to keep competitors from accessing them. This is similar to how agencies and consultancies operate today, and it will remain a meaningful mode of employment going forward - yet may no longer be the primary way organizations approach employment.
   
2. The Retainer Model
   Much like how certain lawyers are retained to be on call for clients, this model may take similar shape: valued workers retained by key companies for their services, but with the ability to fractionally work across multiple organizations so long as it doesn't conflict with contractual obligations. The retainer offers steady income in exchange for availability and potential non-compete clauses. Experts equipped to make key decisions for agents - lawyers, doctors, policy advisors - will likely find themselves in this category.
   
3. The Freelance Model
   The third model continues to grow in popularity and may become the most prevalent in the Agentic era: freelance. In this model, humans are hired as needed across one or multiple organizations, completing work for as long as their role is required before moving on to the next project. It's the least predictable in terms of income, but it may be the dominant model for most people - and could be supported by Universal Basic Income, a topic I'll cover in another post soon.

These three models represent just some of the ways human employment may shift as traditional org charts give way to fluid, dynamic "work charts" - a term Microsoft coined in their brilliant Frontier Firm paper.

The Organizational Shift Is Just Beginning

As more organizations lean into agent-supported and entirely agent-automated workflows, the question of how humans and teams are best organized becomes increasingly urgent.

Unlocking the full potential of human-agent collaboration requires more than better tools - it requires rethinking the structures around and implementing the right strategies to ensure you can attract, retain, and make the best use of increasingly high-value human talent. It also means doing so with the right operating models supporting true human-agent efficiency and impact at scale.

Fully reimagining classical organizational dynamics and employment models are just two piece of the puzzle.

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