Agentic Organizations
Rethinking the Org Chart in the Age of AI
AI isn’t just reshaping what startups build — it’s reshaping how they’re built. Sam Altman said in a recent interview:
We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon…in my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.
Instagram famously built a billion-dollar company with just 13 employees. In hindsight, its success was as much about smart leverage — of cloud infrastructure, mobile trends, and social graphs — as it was about product. The new generation of founders will leverage AI agents the same way: to ship faster, explore ideas at scale, and make better decisions — without necessarily expanding the headcount.
Already the AI code editor Cursor has shot up to $100 million annual recurring revenue in an incredibly short amount of time and with only ~30 employees. And Cursor is already showing what this agentic future looks like. Their developer agent is not a sidekick — it’s central to the user experience. It reads your codebase, makes structural suggestions, tracks context, and evolves with your project.
This is the essence of agentic tooling: the agent isn’t a plugin. It’s a collaborator. It doesn’t just assist. It participates.
With agents already central to tools like Cursor, the question becomes: how do you structure a company that works with them?
Different Roles, Different Strengths — A Lesson from The E-Myth Revisited
In his foundational book The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber outlines a framework that’s still relevant today: anyone who starts a business is actually three people in one — the Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician.
The Entrepreneur lives in the future — the visionary, always dreaming.
The Manager lives in the past — the one who craves order, stability, and control.
The Technician lives in the present — the builder, the doer, the expert in the craft.
Most businesses struggle because they lean too hard into one personality. The best ones know when to tap into each mindset — and how to balance them.
This idea maps cleanly onto another timeless truth: great founders often come in pairs. Steve Jobs and Wozniak. Larry and Sergey. Gates and Allen. One visionary. One technologist. Or a planner and an evangelist. The strongest startups emerge when contrasting strengths combine.
Now imagine this: instead of a cofounder, what if you had an agent — or several — who filled those gaps?
From Infinite Interns to a Country of Geniuses
As we move into the era of AI-native companies, two metaphors help capture the radically different ways people are starting to think about AI agents in the workplace.
Tech analyst Benedict Evans has described AI as providing access to “infinite interns” — tireless, cheap, and mostly competent at basic tasks. These agents can write summaries, clean up spreadsheets, draft emails, generate mockups — all at superhuman scale. They’re fast, obedient, and always on — but require close supervision, like a massive digital back office.
On the other end of the spectrum is Dario Amodei's vision from his essay Machines of Loving Grace, where he describes AI as a "country of geniuses in a datacenter." In this framing, AI agents aren’t just executing. They’re reasoning. They’re inventing. They’re capable of deep insight and creative problem-solving — and the challenge is less about delegation and more about orchestration.
These metaphors imply radically different organizational designs:
Intern-style agents fit neatly into hierarchical workflows: you assign tasks, they report results.
Genius-style agents demand collaborative workflows: you prompt them with goals, and they surprise you with strategy.
Some founders will treat AI as a productivity boost. Others will treat it as a cognitive expansion. The latter mindset — designing not just for scale but for synthesis — is what defines an agentic company.
It’s not just about doing more work faster. It’s about reimagining who your organization thinks with.
The Rise of Agentic Orgs
An agentic company is one that doesn’t just use AI — it’s built around it. Agents aren’t an add-on to your workflow. They are the workflow. You don’t just ask them questions. You assign them roles.
For example, an agentic org might include:
A Vision Agent that continuously scans trends and generates speculative product directions.
A Risk Agent that red-teams decisions in real time.
A Manager Agent that structures workflows and ensures deadlines are met.
A Tech Agent that writes, tests, and deploys code autonomously.
Early-stage companies might start with one or two embedded agents. But as the company scales, this model evolves into something more structured — a kind of AI board of directors. Each agent takes on a strategic domain, offering real-time feedback, simulations, or dissenting views to guide the company’s direction. Much like a well-balanced founding team, these agents don’t all think alike — and that’s the point.
The org chart of the future isn’t just about reporting lines. It’s about a distributed system of minds, where both humans and agents bring judgment, specialization, and perspective to the table.
Creative Selection: Why Human Taste Still Matters
In the book Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, former Apple engineer Ken Kocienda gives a behind-the-scenes account of how products like the iPhone came to life. One of the central ideas from the book is the process of iteration and demo-driven development: teams would rapidly prototype ideas and constantly present them — to peers, to managers, and ultimately to Jobs himself.
What made Apple’s process special wasn’t just how many ideas were generated — it was the taste and judgment applied in selecting what to refine, pursue, or kill.
This principle — creative selection — is even more important in agentic companies. When AI agents can spin up hundreds of variations, strategies, or prototypes in minutes, the role of the human shifts. You're no longer just the maker. You’re the editor-in-chief, the one with the final say on what aligns with your vision, values, and instincts.
Just like Apple needed Jobs’ taste to cut through the noise, agentic organizations will need human taste to direct what the agents surface. Curation becomes leadership. This interplay of generation and selection doesn’t just affect product. It reshapes the company itself — including how it’s structured.
Rethinking the Org Chart
To close, let’s revisit a humorous but insightful visual that’s circulated for years — a sketch of how different tech companies structure their orgs:
Every major tech company has had an org structure that mirrors its strategy and culture.
Apple built around a centralized product vision — tight control, singular taste, and vertical integration. Amazon scaled with operational precision — clear ownership, fast decision-making, and ruthless optimization. Google embraced a more distributed model — overlapping initiatives, bottom-up exploration, and an emphasis on shared infrastructure. Meta (Facebook) fostered a kind of managed chaos — competition between teams, internal disruption, and rapid iteration.
Each structure enabled specific kinds of innovation and execution. Org design was product strategy.
Now, we’re entering an era where AI agents are native participants in the org — not just tools, but roles. And that opens up a new possibility: to invent entirely new organizational architectures, purpose-built for AI-human collaboration.
You might design an org where:
AI agents constantly generate ideas, and human teams filter and shape them — a structure optimized for creative scale.
Decision-making is distributed across persistent agent councils, each simulating future outcomes — a model built for strategic foresight.
Small human teams sit atop layered swarms of agents doing the actual execution — an org optimized for leverage and iteration.
We’re no longer constrained by the limits of human communication, coordination, or cognition. The org chart is now a design space — a place to express your company’s philosophy through a blend of human judgment and synthetic capability.
The question is no longer: How do we fit AI into our structure?
It’s: What new structures become possible — and powerful — because of AI?
Leadership Principles for Agentic Companies
Structure alone isn’t enough. For agentic orgs to stay aligned as they scale, they need something deeper: shared values, encoded as principles. In a company where AI agents aren’t just tools but active participants in decision-making, clarity of values becomes critical.
Amazon famously runs on a defined set of Leadership Principles — guidelines like “Customer Obsession,” “Think Big,” and “Disagree and Commit.” These aren’t just cultural signposts; they’re operational tools that help distributed teams stay aligned at scale.
Agentic companies need the same — but not just for people.
When AI agents are acting semi-autonomously, surfacing ideas, making trade-offs, and influencing direction, they need to be aligned not just with short-term goals, but with the company’s philosophy. Codified principles become the invisible scaffolding that keeps agents (and humans) pulling in the same direction.
Some guiding ideas for agentic leadership:
Codify values as input, not just culture – Make your principles explicit and structured so agents can reason with them. Don’t just expect alignment — design for it.
Design for leverage, not just scale – Use agents to amplify human creativity, not just reduce workload. Think in terms of idea velocity and decision bandwidth.
Balance autonomy with oversight – Give agents real responsibility, but build transparent loops for human review and correction.
Cultivate diversity of thought – Use agents with differing models, data scopes, or optimization goals to surface richer perspectives and challenge bias.
Optimize for exploration – Let agents propose directions you haven’t considered. Reward what they uncover, not just what they confirm.
Preserve human judgment for what matters – Use AI to expand the frontier of options — then apply taste, ethics, and strategy to choose wisely.
As more cognition happens outside the human mind, your company’s principles become its moral compass — a shared operating system for both people and machines.
Final Thought
Founders have always looked for leverage — capital, software, teams. AI agents are the next logical step. The companies that thrive won’t just bolt AI onto existing orgs. They’ll rethink the org chart entirely, using agents not just to assist, but to collaborate, challenge, and lead.
We’re not just building tools. We’re designing companies made of minds — human and machine, thinking side by side.