Make room for AI on the org chart. Kinda.
AI as a peer to people? No. But leaders do need to build for Capability in an AI+Human Organization.
Work is a combination of knowledge, competency, and execution.
Know what needs to be done
What?
Why?
With what information & resources?
Do the doing
Deliver an outcome
That someone might be a person. It might be a system. In most companies, it’s already both.
Most planning still starts with people or tools but rarely both.
That’s the blind spot. Capability is shared but planning, management and selection are not.
Work no longer flows only through people. AI contributes knowledge, delivers execution and increasingly makes decisions. But it doesn't create context. It doesn’t own outcomes. People still shape what matters, catch what’s missing and decide what moves forward.
If you're only planning around people, you're underutilizing what AI already does. If you're only planning around AI, you're ignoring the humans who shape, challenge and escalate it.
Either way, you're working off of two different plans even when they create tension or risk instead of results.
Some critical work sits with top talent. Some sits inside systems that no one is managing. Both can fail. Both can drift. Both need ownership.
It’s not just who does the work or where a title sits on an org chart anymore. It’s who sees the problem first. Who is allowed to act. What gets prioritized. If your people plan and your tech plan aren't connected they won’t just miss each other. They’ll undermine each other.
Today, people use AI like an army of interns. It handles research, drafts, summaries, forecasts. Quietly and constantly. But what happens next year when it performs like a midlevel contributor?
This isn’t about roles. It’s about capabilities. Where they live. How they perform. Who or what holds the judgment and the information.
The winning orgs won’t have the best tools or the best people.
They’ll have the strongest system for combining them.
The Strategic Flow
Mission → Strategy → Capability Planning → Execution → Refinement
Mission: Why you exist
Strategy & Objectives: What you need to achieve
Capability Planning: What knowledge, skill, and ownership are required
Execution: The work gets done though people, systems or some combination
Refinement: Measuring and correcting performance
