Work, Reimagined

What you will take away

For HR and people leaders who own AI adoption and enablement, and for AI and technology leaders who set how their organization will work with agents. By the end of the session, you will be able to:

• Explain why adoption stalls after the tools arrive. Hierarchical, divisional structures are at odds with modern capabilities, and agents and people now share work that no division owns. The chart was designed to preserve itself, and three beliefs hold it in place.
• Put your people in the structure the work now needs. Connectors inside each business unit with a line to the enterprise core, decision authority with the people who know the work inside guardrails set in advance, and roles rebuilt from skills so a team forms around a project and disbands when it is done.
• Run agentic systems in an operating model built for them. Why a hierarchy cannot govern work that moves through a network, and what a hospital system’s $70 million model, failing in six weeks while every function did its job, teaches about governance.
• Lead the change from your own seat. From directing the system to cultivating and sustaining it: collaboration instead of turf protection, transparency instead of political maneuvering, distributed authority instead of centralized control.

Most companies are adopting AI with the same operating models and leadership playbooks that created yesterday’s success. McKinsey finds 88% of organizations use AI in at least one function, and only 6% generate 5% or more of EBIT from it. The talk draws on The Intelligence Organization, which takes the way living systems sense, decide, and adapt and turns it into an operating model for the AI era.

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