This post focuses on organizations and specifically on the role full-time employees play in our understanding of organizations and how they function. It is not an argument that AI is taking over, and humans will not have an important role in the future of organizations. Of course they will, but human involvement will be much less dependent on the role of full-time employees.
Employees have been one of many elements that define an organization. Today’s organizations are made up of many elements. We all know the list: mission, vision, values, and strategy; financial, physical, and human resources; technology and artificial intelligence; processes, projects, and operating systems; and vendors, supply chains, and customers. These resources come together in unique ways to form the millions of organizations that define our economic and social fabric.
Employees are the one element not required to have an organization today. What is not so obvious is that while human resources make the list, employees and particularly full-time employees do not. In the near term, however, rather than no employees, organizations are more likely to have a small core of full-time employees who provide leadership, cast the vision, develop the strategy, and are the owners of the culture. In fact, in an early 2024 post on X, Sam Altman can be seen on video predicting that soon there will be 10-person billion-dollar companies and noting that there is a betting pool with his CEO friends on when the first one-person billion-dollar company will be created.
The transformation to organizations without employees is being driven by two powerful forces. The first, rapid advances in AI, was driving Altman’s prediction and dominates the headlines. There is no longer a question of whether AI will replace jobs. The only question is whether it will, as has been the case with most technological advances in the past, create more jobs than it replaces. The second driver is almost completely overlooked but is just as powerful. It is the hyper speed at which knowledge is advancing. In an information economy, organizations hire employees for their mastery of knowledge or expertise. If an organization hires an employee today for a specific set of expertise, in six months or a year that may not be the expertise needed. This is driving organizations to a much more efficient expertise-on-demand model.
The emerging workforce will be made up of advisors, consultants, freelancers, project teams, and fractional leadership. This human intelligence or expertise will work alongside artificial intelligence in the form of AI agents and robots. Accessing this workforce on demand will create a nimble organization with variable expertise and variable cost as opposed to the fixed cost and fixed expertise associated with full-time employees. This will result in a fluid organization capable of continually morphing to match the speed of change that characterizes today’s world of work, whether it is a ten-person or one-person organization.