There are two big things I’m thinking about from listening to that podcast. First is the call to action, which is to just start using the tools. In one interview with a business coach, she said there are still many CEOs that haven’t even written a prompt yet, let alone designed an agent.  I’m honestly not that surprised about this. On our own team of 11, we’re getting better at using Copilot instead of searching, but we’re not all developing agents, yet. So yeah, get on it. It’s not going away.

The second thing is that the org chart is changing. We, as humans, developed the idea of an organization chart back in the industrial age. You have workers at the bottom who run the machines. Then you have management to help move information up the pyramid until it gets to the C-Suite. The executives make the decisions and then the orders flow back down the pyramid. The bigger the organization, the longer it takes for the information to move, which slows down business. We have introduced some bends to the whole system like Toyota’s Jidoka philosophy to empower workers to stop a broken process, but the system remains.

Inside of the pyramid, you have organizational silos where you end up isolating team members who do a similar task. The sales team, for example, stays mostly isolated from marketing. Customer service agents have never met a developer in most organizations. We rely on that flow of information from the bottom up to the boardroom to get information shared between groups. It’s like a recent issue we had with a client where they were going to lose their domain that Spectrum had sold them because they cancelled their cable modem. They were still a Spectrum client, but they moved from a standard business account to an enterprise one. There was no path between the business team and the enterprise team to get that moved over. And when the enterprise sales team tried to get the authorization code to move the domain, there was no one to talk to. There is absolutely a guy in a room who can make that happen, but there is no way for the two teams to communicate.

I don’t pretend to know exactly how AI will change our org charts. I’m sure that the CEO will still CEO, but I can see how things are changing a bit in our organization. I created Huginn to help us get sales opportunities into our CRM. This empowers our technicians and engineers to identify devices that need to be replaced and get that information to the sales team. When a support case comes into the queue, if the device is outdated, they can tell Huginn. He’ll let them know if we’re already working to replace it or if it is something that we missed. He’s giving everyone access to the sales queue without pulling them out of their work environment. He is helping everyone become a salesperson.

I think this is one example of how the walls between our teams will begin to break down. I’m also hopeful to see the agents our team creates as they begin to experiment in Copilot Studio. Being able to create complicated agents so easily means anyone can do it, so creativity and entrepreneurship can really shine. You don’t need to understand markdown language, nor do you need to know how to write code. You really just need to have an idea and ask Copilot how to build it.

-Nate