Is your organization designed to win with AI?

It was next-gen technology—the telegraph—that triggered the creation of modern organizational structure back in 1855. Today, AI is forcing the same sort of rethink of how best to align teams with responsibilities, with one big caveat: Technology isn’t providing data but rather handling parts of the work alongside everyone else.

A decade after Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message in 1844, Daniel McCallum, head of the New York and Erie Railroad, had to reconfigure the organization to account for the new complexities that telegraphed data about the status of trains and tracks to hundreds of teams and more than 5,000 employees.

Mapping change

The result was a first-of-its-kind, large-scale organizational chart—resembling an intricate cluster of grapevines—that showed the number of employees assigned to each class of work and railroad, and “the powers and duties of each individual and to whom subject.” The distribution of new hourly, daily, and monthly reports from telegraph data helped McCallum manage critical metrics, like average loads per car and cost per ton-mile, and lower costs.

Flash forward to 2024, with generative AI capable of handling organizational roles itself and leaders starting to sort out where AI fits into org structures, not just the tech stack. As Dennis Woodside, CEO and president of Freshworks, explains in Dan Tynan’s new report for The Works, “having people and teams that are informed and adaptable is crucial for success in today's workplace.That means being as innovative with your organization design as you are with the technology.”

While there is no single next-gen org structure to emerge in a neat infographic for the AI era, companies are exploring new ways to adapt and pair teams and machines.

One clear trend is deploying LLMs in such a way that they naturally break down human silos—something that humans have been stubbornly resistant to for decades. As longtime HR technology advisor and consultant Josh Bersin notes in our story, “AI will break down functional silos better than any other technology.”

Check out the full story on The Works.

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