When electric motors arrived, factories installed them in place of the steam engine and changed nothing else. The motor turned the same central shaft, the same belts drove the same machines, laid out in the same rows.
Accounting has already been through what most professions are about to face. In the late 1970s the spreadsheet arrived, and within a few years the work that had filled accountants' days, posting entries and…
Most discussions of AI and jobs treat the company as one block. In practice AI changes three layers of the organisation in three different ways, and a plan that addresses only one of them leaves the other two to…
In most companies a small group of people do the judgment-heavy work and will do even better with AI. Another small group do routine tasks that software takes over first.
Your finance director was once a junior analyst who spent years building spreadsheets and checking figures. Your best project manager started by taking minutes and chasing suppliers.
In every company that adopts AI, a gap opens quickly. A few people use the tools intensively, produce much more, and get noticed. Others use them little or not at all, fall behind, and start to be seen as a cost.
Companies have always kept people partly because leaving was hard. A new job meant a new office, new colleagues, new systems, months to become effective again. AI is removing that friction.
AI makes coordination cheap, so the obvious move is to remove the layer of managers whose job looked like coordination. Several large companies have done it. The risk is that the damage does not show at once.
Public debate about AI and employment counts the jobs that are lost. The larger effect may be invisible: the jobs that would normally have been created and never were.
Most companies apply the same approval process to every decision of a given size. A discount, a supplier change and a contract termination all go through the same chain.
The organisation chart answers one question: who reports to whom. It says little about who can actually do what, how well, and with what limits. As AI systems take on real work beside people, that gap becomes a problem.
An AI agent that reads a price list, a contract or a customer file will act on it without hesitation. It does not know that the price list expired last month, that the contract forbids sharing, or that the customer…