Insights

AI agents change the work. The organisation stays as it was

Most AI programmes fail as organisation problems, not as technology problems. The tools work. The structure around them was designed for a company where people did every step.

Decision rights still sit where they sat. Spans are still sized for supervising people. Nobody has decided who is answerable when an AI agent produces the output, so in practice nobody is.

Two colleagues in conversation across the corner of a table.

Four questions this actually raises, and where we land on them

Where does accountability sit when an AI agent produces the output?Never with the AI agent, and it cannot sit with whoever bought the tool. It has to sit with a named person who can be asked why, and who has the authority to stop it. In a regulated company it is usually the first thing an auditor asks.

What is a span of control when half the team is not human?Supervising AI agents is a different job from managing people, and the two do not add up. A manager with 6 people and 12 agents does not have a span of 18. Layers usually do come out, but rarely where the slide says they will.

Which roles change shape, which get faster, and which stop being roles?Most roles change shape rather than disappear, and the ones that do disappear are seldom the ones everybody expects. The way to answer it is to look at tasks rather than job titles.

When does headcount stop being the unit of design?Once AI agents do a large share of the work, the number of full-time employees no longer tells you how much capacity you have. Then you design around the volume of work and the decisions in it, and the number of people follows from that.

65 quotes a week

is where one commercial team runs out of people to check and sign, while the AI agents that draft the quotes never do. The test below puts your own numbers on that crossing.

Writing scales. Checking does not

An AI agent takes work off the people who write the thing. It takes nothing off the people who have to check it and put their name to it.

This is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it has a crossing point you can put a number on. Four steps below, one commercial team, and a slider each. Move them to your own numbers and the last step works out where it breaks.

How much work comes in

Quotes that go out in a week today 40 quotes a week

40 quotes a week. Every one of them is written by somebody, checked by somebody else, and signed by a person who carries it.

Who does the work on one quote

Share of one quote an AI agent drafts 70% by AI

An AI agent drafts 70% of a quote. The employee still does the other 30%, which is the part that has to be right for this customer.

AI agent 70% employee 30%

How long one quote used to take

Minutes an employee spent on a whole quote before AI 60 minutes

A quote used to cost an employee 60 minutes. Their share now costs 18 minutes. Nobody goes home earlier, so the same team turns out 133 quotes a week instead of 40.

60 min before

18 min now

What it takes to check it and sign it

Minutes for a second pair of eyes, plus the signature 15 minutes

People who check and sign 2 Hours a week each of them has for it 8 h

15 minutes each, and 2 people with 8 hours a week for it. That is 16 hours of checking, and it does not grow when the writing speeds up.

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What that adds up to

Your checkers run out at about 65 quotes a week. The AI takes this team to 133.

The writing never became a problem. That team spends about 40 hours a week either way. Checking goes from 10 hours to 33 against the 16 they have, and that lands on 2 people. There are three ways out, and all three are organisation design choices.

01 Put more people on itYou would need about 5 people checking and signing, up from 2. That is roughly the management layer that was taken out.

02 Check a sampleThey can properly get through about 50% of what comes out. Approved then means sampled, and someone has to say so out loud.

03 Need fewer signaturesMove the threshold so roughly 50% of quotes never need a second pair of eyes, because they were never the kind that warranted one.

This is a simple calculation, not a measurement, and it is on the generous side. It assumes checking an AI-written quote takes exactly as long as checking a colleague’s, which is optimistic: a person’s mistake tends to look wrong and a machine’s tends to look right. It also takes one kind of work. Run it on the kind an AI can help with least, a tender or a claim, and the crossing arrives sooner.

Options 2 and 3 give the same numbers but are very different decisions. With sampling, people keep signing for work they did not fully check. With a threshold, you decide on purpose that some quotes do not need a second check.

One thing this is not. We do not measure any of this for you, and there is no time and motion study waiting behind it. Half an hour with the person who signs gets these numbers close enough to argue about, which is all they need to be. What you need to decide is which of the three ways you take.

What we do about it

The same services, pointed at this question. An OD Verdict on a target operating model that assumes AI agents but was drawn as if it did not. An OD Blueprint that works out where the work should sit once part of it is produced rather than staffed. An OD Plan when there is an AI ambition, a board expectation and no project yet. It is the same work, with AI agents as one more thing to design for.

What we do not do

We do not implement AI, select tools, build AI agents or run your data programme. There are good firms for all of that and we will name them. We design the organisation the AI agents work in, and whether the investment pays back depends a lot on that.

We use it ourselves, and we know where it stops

We use AI to read, sort and write first drafts. It lets one senior person carry a question that used to need a team, it lets us read wider than a team would have managed by hand, and it is why a resolved design costs what it does and takes weeks rather than months.

A model will produce a fluent answer to a question it has no basis to settle, and organisation design is full of those, because what decides the answer is what people tell you and where the work actually breaks, not what the chart says. So the reading is fast and wide, and the judgement is formed by a person who signs it and carries the consequence.

What you send us stays yours. It is used for your engagement and for nothing else, and it is never used to train a model.

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