I’ve had a realization about the modern workforce. Humans have always existed in two main camps, though most of us sit somewhere on a spectrum between them.
On one end: the completely disorganized. Spontaneous, going with the flow.
On the other end: the organized. Every dollar accounted for. Every appointment booked in a calendar, a notebook they carry around, or their phone. Every thought and to-do written down in a diary or journal.
Outsourcing the overhead
Many high achievers I’ve known find the overhead of maintaining that much organization suffocating.
Senior leadership in corporate often resolves this by spending money on executive assistants and secretaries. Essentially, it’s outsourcing the organization to someone whose time is cheaper, so the person can focus on making solid decisions.
I even had an ex-boss who told me that investing in a remote personal assistant from a developing country, one who assists you virtually, would be quite a life-changing investment. Having worked in corporate for six years, I can see the tremendous value in it. Someone managing your schedule and correspondence. A first filter before anything gets your attention.
The forward-oriented excuse
I’ve always been on the side of people who never managed to establish the habit or discipline to organize like that.
One observation I’ve made about myself is that I’m quite a forward-oriented person. I prefer building momentum and charting my way into the future, rather than organizing the future meticulously and reflecting too much on the past.
Another way to view it is that I’m just lazy. But I don’t actually think so.
The price just changed
The reason I say that is because AI tools have now lowered the cost of bringing organization into my life.
My current suite looks like this. A Telegram assistant that captures any learnings, pointers, and notes into my Obsidian vault, my second brain. A project management portal where designers work and clients sign off: creating quotations, managing variation orders, uploading documents, tracking project timelines, with an AI system layered across all of it. A personal assistant that manages my calendar, reads my emails, and helps me draft things. And more importantly, all of it is voice-to-text enabled.
Why I never hired a human for this
The biggest thing that had prevented me from doing this with a human being was the fear of the running cost: committing to managing somebody, in both time and money.
I’ll admit I’m doing the same with AI. I pay for subscriptions. I manage these systems and upgrade them. But I can channel a lot more of myself into them without running into the limitations of human physiology and personal lives: the number of hours someone works, their career goals, and so on. Having another human being to manage also means taking on their personality, their habits, their fatigue. All of which are part of being human, and none of which are bad. But it explains why I hadn’t done this earlier, the traditional way.
What about everyone else?
That said, I’m highly curious whether my peers are doing the same.
From the limited networking I’ve been doing with other business owners, it seems so, mostly driven by cost and the desire to grow their businesses further.
But I wonder about my peers who are still employees. There’s a lack of impetus to pick up these new tools, because a salaried employee has very different incentives from a self-employed one. If the day ever comes that they’re displaced by AI, can they quickly become orchestrators? Or do they fall behind the curve of the people already doing it?
Hiring the director, not the individual
I also wonder whether the hiring landscape will eventually shift toward the suite of AI tools someone brings along with them.
It would be almost like hiring the director of an agency: the brand, the capabilities, the whole organization under this person comes along. Just like when insurance or real estate companies buy out a branch of their competitor. Except instead of human agents, it will be AI agents, tools, and skill sets.
Companies will be looking for ten-x and hundred-x employees, and I can imagine the incentives will look very different. With an army of agents behind each person, it no longer makes sense to incentivize purely on salary packages. Hard KPIs suddenly seem realistic in this space.
But would they even want a job?
The corollary remains, though. Would these people even want to be employees?
If you can produce that much value, why subject yourself to being tied into an organization, instead of existing under an independent entity, your own company, and offering out your services?
This is what I see many business owners doing already. They brand themselves as AI consultants, or AI-enabled technology solutions companies. They scaffold several standardized solutions with AI, use AI to quickly customize them at a much more affordable rate, and do some skills transfer so the client’s employees can take the customization forward.
So in many ways, I feel that AI talent, AI-enabled workers, will continue to elude companies unless they get the incentives right. Young people will always have a reason to stay current, and employment is a way to make mistakes and learn on the go. But another part of me knows that the bureaucracy and the maintenance of business-as-usual will distract from any sustained, serious long-term building of these skills inside an organization, unless the role explicitly calls for it.
Confirming the hypothesis
Perhaps I’m influenced too much by listening to certain thinkers: Naval Ravikant, Chris Williamson, Tim Ferriss, David Senra, and the people they interview, alongside peers who are jumping on the same bandwagon.
But it’s been many months now. I think I’ve confirmed and strengthened some of these hypotheses with my own observations in the business world, and in my own life as well.
Overall I remain very excited to be part of this change, and to have embraced it myself. I’m glad we deliberately took a bit of a slowdown to focus more effort on building these capabilities, within the company and in myself as an individual. God knows if it will pay off. But I am more optimistic than not.
Enough rambling for now.