AI Workforce Notes
Six stops on the future of work.
Six short essays across three lines of inquiry: governance, operating systems, and the changing mix of humans, AI-augmented humans, and managed AI agents.
Latest first
The Frontier Firm Still Needs Judgment
AI can expand capacity, but it cannot own the consequences. That is still leadership work.
Governance Is Not a Brake
Good AI governance does not slow the business down. It creates the trust required to move faster.
The Performance Review Is Becoming a System Review
When work is shaped by workflows, incentives, managers, data, and AI, individual performance is only part of the story.
Three Workforces, Three Scorecards
The next operating model has to compare humans alone, humans with AI, and governed AI capacity without pretending they are the same.
AI Agents Need Managers, Too
Treating agents like software misses the operating problem. Treating them like unmanaged workers creates risk.
The CHRO Is Becoming the COO of Work
AI transformation will not stick because a company bought better tools. It will stick when someone redesigns the work.
Blogs
Broader notes on agentic work and executive leadership.
Which AI Platform Should We Standardize On?
The better question may be how leaders orchestrate the right AI capabilities for the right work.
Culture Is Sunday Night
The real test of culture is how employees feel when they think about Monday morning.
Talent Cannot Overcome a Misaligned System
Organizations often try to solve systemic business problems by pulling only the people lever. The operating model has to align.
AI Fluency Is a Leadership Skill
Executives do not need to become engineers, but they do need enough fluency to set strategy, ask better questions, and govern the work.
Junior Work Is Not Waste
Before automating entry-level work, leaders should ask what learning system they may be dismantling.
Trust Is the Scaling Constraint
AI can expand output quickly, but trust determines whether that output can be used, delegated, and scaled.
The Agentic Workforce, Part 2: Put the Agents on the Scorecard
If agents are doing work, leaders need a scorecard for ownership, quality, risk, escalation, and value creation.
The Agentic Workforce, Part 1: Do Not Start With the Org Chart
The first agentic workforce question is not who reports to whom. It is what work should move, pause, escalate, or stay human.
The Manager Is Becoming a System Designer
If AI changes how work is done, managers need to design workflows, judgment points, and escalation paths instead of only supervising tasks.
Strategy Is Capacity Management Now
A Wharton-style view of AI strategy: the question is not what the tool can do, but what capacity the business is actually trying to create.