AI Holds the Potential to Lead Organizations Into an Era of Abundance

In this article we discuss:

• Reimagining the Organization With a Beginner’s Mind 
• The New Variable: Why AI Is Transformational
• The Hope and Challenge
• Where Do We Go From Here?

AI is a transformational technology that can unlock a wealth of positive opportunities for organizations and people, and it will require people to balance its power with the potential disruption it might cause.

Now, every business leader must be thoughtful about how to approach an abundance of digital labor to mitigate the risks to human society. This will require a multi-stakeholder dialogue—between industry, government, educational institutions, and society—on roles and responsibilities, programs and practices, and incentives. We must start to rethink our organizations and embrace the transformative opportunity but prepare for the disruption.

A new global study from Workday finds optimism in how business leaders are thinking about AI in the workplace. And the roll-out of autonomous AI agents promises to change the basis upon which we’ve built and operated our businesses. The textbooks on organizational psychology, management, and operations will all have to be rewritten as technology supercharges organizational productivity, revolutionizes customer interactions, and disrupts many aspects of business as we know it.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, characterized artificial general intelligence (AGI) as “a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.”

While some might argue we are far from artificial general intelligence (AGI), the reality is that you don’t have to roll out AGI to fundamentally transform organizations. Existing AI tools are already bringing new opportunities to envision and enact a totally new future of the organization.

This is will impact organizations in three ways:

1. Reimagination of roles and responsibilities: Organizations and management practices are developed to mitigate the limitations of human beings, but AI agents don’t have those same limitations. AI agents’ abilities can be deployed in abundance, so how we choose to organize roles and responsibilities will need to be rethought.
2. Focus on agility: This transformation is going to be disruptive. It’s unlike any previous technology transformation because it’s not only replacing old tools with new tools to do the same processes, it’s introducing to the equation a whole new variable—AI that can take action on its own. We need to prepare our organizations and workforce to be agile, as the changes will happen quickly.
3. Creating stakeholder buy-in: Abundant access to most of human knowledge and tools that can reason and take action based on that knowledge will impact our understanding and evaluation of human talent, expertise, and education. Without thoughtful multi-stakeholder dialogue and engagement across industry, government, academia, and society, the value that could be realized from that abundance could be significantly skewed and create unforeseen negative reactions.
   

Reimagining the Organization With a Beginner’s Mind

Why are organizations designed the way they are today? Why is it so shocking to HR professionals that the CEO of one of the most successful organizations in the world, Nvidia, has 60 direct reports? Why is the rule of three a key communication principle? Why is the first response to an organizational challenge to simplify and remove complexity?

Much of the research in cognitive psychology has established that:

• Humans have limited processing power. Miller’s Law states that humans can only hold seven things (plus or minus two) in working memory at one time. Csikszentmihalyi found that under most conditions the quality of attention and productivity diminishes over time. And Kahneman’s duel process theory holds that human processing of complex ideas tends to be linear/slow versus parallel/fast processing.
• Human recall of information is imperfect. Human memory is subject to many different kinds of cognitive bias like recency bias, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, anchoring bias, etc. Humans have limited recall and imperfect memory, as Loftus has shown in her work on false memories.

These limitations on how humans process information impact how we make sense of the world around us, which impacts how we behave and organize life around us. Everything we do, all the systems and tools we create, are to help us manage these human limitations.

Four examples illustrate common organizational limitations.

1. Organizations are limited by employees’ time. Humans need rest to recharge and keep their attention sharp. As a result, if an organization needs to do more, they add more headcount. In the past, scaling was perfectly correlated with headcount. If one person could produce 30 widgets a day, and you needed to increase your daily widget production by 300, you’d have to hire 10 more people. If one of those 10 doesn’t show up, you’re only going to be able to produce 270 widgets.
2. Organizations are limited by employees’ ability to manage and understand complexity. Humans can hold relatively few concepts in working memory at the same time. Humans seek patterns, but that pattern matching is limited by the number of data points they can process together to find a pattern.
3. Organizations are limited by the human ability to collaborate across time, space and understanding. If processes require multiple stakeholders across multiple time zones, departments, etc., ensuring the task that needs to be done is prioritized appropriately across all stakeholders is critical. If one stakeholder doesn’t share the same urgency to complete the request as the other stakeholders, the process gets stalled and timelines get elongated due to dependencies. Something that might actually take one day of work ends up taking three to five days.
4. Organizations are limited by the ability of managers to manage a certain number of employees. Management layers are created, all types of biases are introduced into evaluations due to imperfect recall, trade-offs are made between speed, cost, and scope on quality of interactions. Layers, diffusion of responsibility, micro management or no management results in organizations creating new processes, standards, etc., but those are also limited by the human’s ability to manage those processes and standards.

Today, overcoming these limitations to create a high-performing organization requires every employee to expend their most precious resource—their time and attention—aligned to a goal. The field of organizational culture and decades of studies on employee engagement represent an effort to drive and harness employee discretionary effort. The more discretionary effort you can get out of your employees is what money cannot buy. It’s an organization's competitive advantage.

How would we reimagine our organizations if we were not bound by the limitations of human attention? Would we still organize by functional silos to get economies of scale around scarce expertise? What would we expect from our employees and leaders? Could we prioritize employees’ engagement toward unique human tasks that create competitive advantages like building relationships with customers instead of getting workers to work a bit harder on mundane and rote tasks? Who could we hire if expertise could be easily transferred across individuals? We all need to start thinking deeply about these questions to prepare and plan our organizations to capitalize on the transformation in front of us.

The New Variable: Why AI Is Transformational

AI can help humans overcome our information processing limitations. We can shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. AI does not get tired, it performs a task in the same way whether it’s the first time or the 10,000th time, it has near-perfect recall of information, and isn’t subject to the same types of biases as humans (and for the biases that it can be prone to there are techniques to mitigate those biases). As a result, we have the opportunity to build our organizations around AI’s capabilities to process information and manage complexity.

How would you design your organization and your business processes if you had an abundance of digital labor at your disposal? For many leaders, this is a challenging question because of the implication it has on workers.

The recent Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) forecasts significant declines in clerical, customer service, accounting, audit, graphic designers, legal, insurance adjuster, and recruiting jobs due to AI and other technologies. Scale, productivity, and efficiency for many of these roles is possible, but the challenges with displacement and disruption are significant, as the same report cites that much of the work displacement will be due to automation, not augmentation of human workers. The challenges to workers are real, but the opportunities for business transformation are equally as significant.

Could your programs, products, and services be more individualized because AI is handling all the complexity of multiple SKUs, enrollment, and customer service? For many leaders, this is a liberating question to explore. The opportunity to differentiate, be creative, and create competitive advantage increases. AI significantly mitigates the triple constraints of speed, cost, and scope that tie up business projects.

The WEF report also notes that the largest growing jobs are ones that interact with other humans like shop salespeople, nursing professionals, trade workers, teachers, and service workers. Services and products delivered by humans for humans will see the largest growth this coming decade. This is a great opportunity to leverage human strengths and uniqueness and build organizations that capitalize on our diversity to drive business value instead of starching it all out for the sake of efficiency.

The New Hope and New Challenge

What’s unique about human behavior versus machine behavior (with the technology we have today)? As behavioral economists like Richard Thaler have shown, humans are rationally irrational, not everything humans do makes rational economic sense, and as a result, it creates variability and opportunity to be creative and generate novelty and community. Why do we root for the underdog? Why is a rags-to-riches story so compelling? Because it’s so improbable, it’s a story of creativity, grit, and the triumph of the human spirit.
   
As my graduate advisor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted in his seminal book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, creativity is defined by risk taking, novelty, emotional connectedness, and community. Creativity that adds new knowledge to a domain is inherently uncommon, and creativity is inherently community-based. AI trained on billions of examples of what typically occurs just doesn’t have enough examples of what doesn’t typically occur. Can AI generate something novel? Yes, but can it generate something truly creative? That’s yet to be determined. The community decides if something is creative and should be incorporated into that domain of knowledge or not. For example, street art, once dismissed as vandalism, is now a legitimate art form, largely due to public demand. This highlights the community’s power to redefine value.  

The hope of AI is that we can now break free of the tactical, process-focused, and transactional metrics like GDP to measure human contribution to society and truly value the things that make us uniquely human. Perhaps we learn from Bhutan and also start maximizing happiness?

While freeing up more time and space for humans to be creative sounds amazing, it does create a new challenge. The development of expertise, judgement, and wisdom becomes short-circuited when younger generations no longer have the opportunities to learn through experiences of performing increasingly challenging tasks at work.

How do you support human development, judgement, and wisdom when frequent tasks and progressively more complicated tasks will be done by AI? How do you know how to be creative when you haven’t developed any expertise in a particular domain? How will you be able to distinguish between factual information and information based on non-expert opinion?

The creation of and access to information has never been easier with AI, yet the opportunities to leverage the rewards of AI have never been more challenging. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20% of people in developed countries believe the next generation will be better off, resulting in a greater sense of grievance and a lack of optimism.

This increased grievance and continued erosion of trust in institutions is a recipe for societal unrest as it instills a zero-sum mindset and greater suspicion of AI, business, government, and each other. If the opportunities to gain experience continue to narrow due to AI taking those opportunities and the rise in grievance and erosion of trust accelerates, the hope from AI will never manifest.

This is the challenge. It’s great to say that AI will lead to a renaissance of human creativity because it will free us from the mundane and bureaucratic tasks imposed on us to mitigate human limitations, but this does not happen without hard work, planning, and critical thought in how we build back trust with all stakeholders.

Where Do We Go From Here?

There are many possible scenarios ahead of us as we start to deploy AI more broadly within our organizations. As consumers of this technology, it’s within our control to determine how the future plays out. Do we focus solely on value maximization, or find ways to pay it forward to ensure a thriving society?

According to the World Economic Forum survey, 89% of employers expect to fund their own worker training programs to fill in the skills gaps, but how long until the AI that can also perform those tasks and the economic demands take precedence? Edelman finds that businesses have the license and expectation to act, so we must start this dialogue now with all stakeholders to create a sense of shared responsibility.

We have time, but not as much as we think. We should face the fact that human society is about to change significantly and rapidly. AI has the ability to usher us into an era of abundance, and while it might free us from the existing limitations in how we run our organizations, it might just expose other areas of human limitations.

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