Most AI workplace commentary asks one question: which jobs disappear? A new essay on OpenAI’s Intelligence Age platform asks a different one — where does AI sit in the org chart? The authors answer with three topologies, and argue that all three are already visible in subtle form.
Beneath: Everyone Becomes a Manager
The first scenario keeps the human chart intact and grows a basement of AI labor underneath each individual contributor. You start with one or two agents per person — “eager interns” you supervise and forgive — and eventually your operation looks like a small firm with its own internal org chart, with you as board of directors.
The key claim is that this is automation without pink slips. If AI does 90% of what you did, you don’t get 10% of a job, you get a job with ten times the objective. The accounting team doesn’t shrink because the rest of the company grew more productive and demands more accounting than ever.
Beside: The Interleaving
Here AI joins the chart as a colleague, delegated to by existing human managers. It has to be competent enough to be a full team member, which pushes capability upward through an escalator of scope: task, then job, then team, then firm. Each rung is harder to build but easier to adopt — an executive can adopt an end-to-end automated function directly, while a narrow tool needs workforce-wide retraining.
The asymmetry the essay hammers on: firms learn technology; labor learns the firm. Tools force the buyer to reorganize. Labor onboards itself. The more AI behaves like labor, the less retraining the firm must absorb.
Between: The Automation Sandwich
The strangest case puts AI above people. An AI consultancy reads Slack threads, spots that sales promised a feature engineering never built, recommends delaying a launch — and notices that one engineer quietly built useful infrastructure nobody asked for, ensuring her contribution is credited.
The authors argue management may automate before the work it manages, since a manager’s job already lives on a computer and in the mind, while ground-level work tangles with atoms and tools.
Why It Matters
The payoff is a set of concrete predictions rather than slogans: more firms at lower headcount, entry-level apprenticeship gutted (junior humans start at a higher rung, learning judgment rather than grunt work), a reduction in red tape, and persistent pay disparity if AI capability concentrates. It’s also a warning about adoption strategy — narrow, tool-shaped AI needs the whole workforce on board, while agentic systems that arrive with their own org chart can be adopted from the top down.
Related: OpenAI — The future of the firm