I’ve spent much of my career helping leaders design high performing teams and organizations. There are a lot of frameworks out there that help you design org charts, processes, and employee networks.
But what happens when AI becomes part of the team? The answer: you need to create a completely new organizational model.
Recent field research published in Organization Science randomly assigned 791 Procter and Gamble professionals to tackle real product innovation challenges alone or in teams, with and without AI. The result: One person using AI produced work equal in quality to a two-person team without it.
The researchers from Harvard Business School and Wharton also found that AI erased functional silos between R&D and Sales. And people working alone with AI reported greater motivation and less anxiety.
The existential question is this: Does your current organizational structure still match the way work gets done when AI can both augment team performance while breaking down silos?
Most Org Charts are Remnants of the Past
I’ve seen it time and time again across my Fortune 1000 clients. Their structures and processes evolved organically over time. And they’ve become inefficient, bureaucratic, and based on old ways of doing business – definintely not optimized for today’s digitized AI-powered world.
The P&G experiment showed that AI could overcome these typical organizational challenges. For example, companies have long been structured around human expertise based on “functions.” R&D specialists hold knowledge that sales people lack. Marketing has customer insights that finance people never get. That’s not necessarily true anymore.
AI reduces organizational silos by expanding what each person can discover, understand, and do. In the P&G study, people who knew little about product development reached the same level of experienced teams when they used AI. As individuals gain access to knowledge across functions, certain structures built to coordinate functional expertise simply aren’t needed. A product innovation team, for example, might be able to create a business case without finance. Or conduct a competitive analysis coupled with market insights research without dedicated strategists and researchers.
Most organizations have yet to redesign for this shift.
Where to Start
Wholesale organizational transformation is tough. And it’s hard to bite off a redesign when AI keeps changing and shifting the nature of work.
But based on what I’m seeing lately, I recommend doing these three things now:
- Build teams based on goals. Organize people around a specific customer outcome, business problem, or measurable result instead of traditional cross-functional teams using functional titles. Define the team’s composition based on resource needs and goals, ensuring you’re not duplicating human and AI capabilities.
- Staff teams with human judgment. Use AI for research, analysis, idea generation, and work that once required functional specialists. Put people in roles where experience matters most: evaluating options, weighing tradeoffs, understanding context, and making final decisions.
- Move beyond functional silos. Stop treating expertise as something that belongs inside one department. Turn functions into flexible networks of specialists who share their strategic judgment across the organization. Assign them to join goal-based teams when their experience are truly needed.
The P&G research leaves leaders with a difficult question: how do we structure our organization to optimize the intersection of humans and machines?
The org chart that built your competitive advantage for the last decade may be the limiting factor on the next one.
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