The Morning Download: AI Rewires the Corporation

What's up: Stop worrying about AI ROI; AI turns corporate org charts upside down; AI buzz fuels Chinese tech rally; U.S. tech firms invest in U.K.

Good morning. I came away from the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Technology Council Summit this week with a deeper appreciation of how AI adoption is evolving, and how companies must adapt with it.

During a session with about 30 senior technology leaders, nearly half of the people in the room said their companies were employing AI agents, something that their organizations didn’t do last year. And everyone else in the room said they expected their organizations to begin the adoption of agents in the coming year.

It was a very different tone from our summit in February in Silicon Valley when the discussion of AI agents was more speculative. Now the question is how people and their organizations are going to evolve along with the technology. For business leaders, it’s the question, as complex and consequential as it gets.

See below for highlights from CIO Journal’s coverage.

She puts people and processes before technology, and the Japanese principle of kaizen—or continuous improvement—is driving much of her work to transform the decades-old organization into one that’s AI-first.

AI is turning traditional corporate org charts upside down.“We’re going to have to rewire the whole company,” said Sastry Durvasula, chief operating, information and digital officer at financial services organization TIAA. “Every role, what do they do? What’s the workforce of the future?” He added, “I believe that 80% of the jobs will change at least 20% by AI. And 20% of the jobs will change as much as 80%.”

Core to much reorganization is a refocus on individual contributors or staff who focus on getting actual work done rather than overseeing other people. The result will be fewer middle managers and a small cadre of leaders at the top managing a much larger number of employees than they had in the past. Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, has said he oversees more than 50 people. Cross-disciplinary teams including engineers and business people will come together on an ad hoc basis, attack a problem, and move on to the next project.

Stop worrying about AI’s return on investment. Tech leaders said it’s nearly impossible to measure the impact of AI on business productivity. And when we try, we’re measuring it wrong.

“For the most impactful business opportunity or products, you have to use AI to really double down on innovation versus productivity,” said Sophia Velastegui, board director of BlackLine and former chief AI technology officer at Microsoft.

“Everything you can measure is kind of a proxy, but not the real thing, and anything you actually care about you can’t measure,” said Severin Hacker, co-founder and chief technology officer of language-learning app Duolingo said.

“It’s really important to balance the focus on a few key areas with experimentation and learning, and even taking some risks at times,” said Bryan Goodman, Ford’s director of AI. “At the end of the day, that’s where value is created.”

How is your organization evolving in step with AI? Use the links at the end of this email and let us know.