July 2026
Our AI implementation has me reconsidering the team composition. I’ve generally viewed the team through two lenses.
Teammate Lens - title, comp, experience, skill, expertise, etc.
Company Lens - each one of those teammates within a particular department
But AI is breaking down a lot of the traditional divisions of labor. Those entry level, repetitive tasks that newbies cut their teeth on have been replaced by AI.
Frankly, AI is better at a lot of those tasks because those teammates are so new.
The dividing line between what our teammates do vs what AI does is now largely about judgement.
I think most of us have considered this and have a natural concern about that 18-27 year old demographic. With five kids in that range, I am very concerned. But that’s a different newsletter.
What had not really occurred to me until the last few months was the impact that AI would have on the concept of specialization.
Departments were never about expertise. They were about coordination.
A department is a container, not a capability. We put the backoffice people in a room together not because backoffice requires a room, but because when humans do repetitive work at volume, batching similar work minimizes handoffs and lets one supervisor watch ten people. The org chart was never a map of expertise. It was a map of handoffs.
That connects straight back to last week: if headcount is a function of exceptions, then departments are a function of handoffs. AI is eating both. When AI does the routing, drafting, reconciling, and status-tracking, the walls between the departments stop earning their rent. But the judgement inside them never lived in the box. It lived in the people.
Departments dissolve, disciplines don't. The hedging expertise, the KYC expertise, the eco expertise all survive. Specialization by task only pays when the tasks repeat at volume. AI just absorbed the repetition.
So I stripped away all the coordination scaffolding and asked a simple question: what do these companies actually do?
Two things. We build the thing, and we own the relationships. That's it. Everything else - the routing, the reconciling, the status meetings, the eight boxes on the org chart - was plumbing.
I think that’s the new structure. Two teams: Build and Relationships. I'm not removing the judgement, I'm tearing down the walls that divided them.
Last week I said AI changed what headcount measures. This week it changed the org chart.
It used to be a map of handoffs. Now it's a map of judgement.
